I decided to delve into the weeds of PodcastRE for the Tutorial Assignment. This Digital Humanities project centers around providing users with a simplistic navigation and information tools to display data regarding the various podcasts and the culture surrounding them. PodcastRE contains hundreds of thousands of audio files from hundreds of podcast feeds dating back to the mid-2000s.
Most people who interact with the internet to some capacity have the knowledge of what a podcast is without the necessity of even listening to one. The idea of experiencing entertainment from listening to spoken word can be related to radio shows, which have been popular for decades. Podcasts are functionally the same thing but are now much more readily accessible. The audio files recorded with the podcast can be played back and stored and enjoyed later on, rather than live streaming of radio shows. This tool stores lots of pre-recorded podcast data and allows the user to interact with it in a textual format. The study of what is discussed in podcasts is a useful digital humanities tool if one wants to study other forms of entertainment that are isolated to auditory processes that are not music-specific.
The project provides ways to listen to these preserved audio files or view data visualization graphs regarding the contents of these audio files. The visualization graphs are extremely interesting and typically involve displaying the textual data gathered from podcast audio files.
For example, the Associated Word Cloud feature enables users to dynamically search and visualize word clouds dependent on their input to a search bar. You can follow the following steps to explore this feature on your own:
- Once on the home page, you can navigate to the header to find the Visualizations link.
- Next, you may navigate to the Associated Word Cloud link, directly above information regarding the link.
- After this, you will be presented with the tools available in the Word Cloud feature. The pre-existing word cloud is loaded with no query in the search bar. You can begin using the tool by entering a query and toggling the filters.
- The interface has three parameters that alter the output of the final word cloud: all keywords, podcast keywords, and episode keywords. These filters will change where the words that are queried pull from.
- The final product is a word cloud relating to their podcast database with the parameters of your choice with the associated query word that changes what associated words are presented.
Any information surrounding the documentation of PodcastRE can be found on their About Page.
