Concerned with accessibility & engagement, from design to development, the #PlainTxtPodcast fosters a multimodal experience. By pairing transparent documentation w/ attributable collaboration, plain.txt delivers a digital humanitarian approach to podcasting.
The Digital Humanities Master’s Program at Loyola University Chicago is unique in being one of the few Digital Humanities graduate programs in the world. Considering the glaring absence of Digital Humanities specific podcasts and Loyola’s unique DH MA status the 2017 DH cohort decided it would be worthwhile to launch a DH podcast run by the DH MA graduate students. The cohort meets regularly, almost every Wednesday, with the CTSDH faculty for #DebatingDH, a casual conversation led by one of the graduate students or faculty members on a specific Digital Humanities article/book chapter. The cohort will move forward with creating the podcast by utilizing these sessions to plan, record, and edit the podcast episodes. Each episode will be centered around a topic similar to how the #DebatingDH conversations have been centered around a particular reading. Our hope is that by starting this podcast as a part of the 2017-2018 Digital Humanities Graduate Student Initiative that we can instill a lasting hallmark related to receiving the DH MA at Loyola University Chicago.
Technical Aspects
The primary task that needs to be completed prior to launch (next to the actual recording of the podcast) and the focus of this project will be to create the podcast's website. We have determined it would be worthwhile to consider the possibilities of hosting the podcast out of GitHub Pages. The episodic nature of the podcast lends itself well to the use of a static HTML generator, like the Jekyll project, because while the content will change episode to episode we envision the episode pages to be technically identical. It will be ideal to come up with a system of updating the podcast website with a new episode and its content without having to hand-code the HTML/CSS/JavaScript every time. In addition to the convenience a static website would bring, we want to be sure we are conforming to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. We feel that if we spend enough time developing a static website using the principals of universal design and adhering to the WCAG AA standards, it will help ensure consistency in the podcast's accessibility.
In addition to creating an accessible, static website, we want to research and implement other ways we can incorporate programming into the regular functions of the podcast. An aspect of the podcast we are interested in harnessing to its fullest potential will be its social media promotion and engagement. In this regard, we are interested in mining Digital Humanities and Computer Science tweets for themes/topics that can be incorporated into the podcast's episodes. In addition to scraping other people's tweets/conversations, we are interested in creating a Twitter Bot that helps generate conversations that simultaneously engage the larger Twitter universe with the podcast's production and provides the DH cohort with relative, themed material to respond to in the podcast episodes.
Proposal
The Digital Humanities Master’s Program at Loyola University Chicago is unique in being one of the few Digital Humanities graduate programs in the world. Considering the glaring absence of Digital Humanities specific podcasts and Loyola’s unique DH MA status the 2017 DH cohort decided it would be worthwhile to launch a DH podcast run by the DH MA graduate students. The cohort meets regularly, almost every Wednesday, with the CTSDH faculty for #DebatingDH, a casual conversation led by one of the graduate students or faculty members on a specific Digital Humanities article/book chapter. The cohort will move forward with creating the podcast by utilizing these sessions to plan, record, and edit the podcast episodes. Each episode will be centered around a topic similar to how the #DebatingDH conversations have been centered around a particular reading. Our hope is that by starting this podcast as a part of the 2017-2018 Digital Humanities Graduate Student Initiative that we can instill a lasting hallmark related to receiving the DH MA at Loyola University Chicago.
Technical Aspects
The primary task that needs to be completed prior to launch (next to the actual recording of the podcast) and the focus of this project will be to create the podcast's website. We have determined it would be worthwhile to consider the possibilities of hosting the podcast out of GitHub Pages. The episodic nature of the podcast lends itself well to the use of a static HTML generator, like the Jekyll project, because while the content will change episode to episode we envision the episode pages to be technically identical. It will be ideal to come up with a system of updating the podcast website with a new episode and its content without having to hand-code the HTML/CSS/JavaScript every time. In addition to the convenience a static website would bring, we want to be sure we are conforming to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. We feel that if we spend enough time developing a static website using the principals of universal design and adhering to the WCAG AA standards, it will help ensure consistency in the podcast's accessibility.
In addition to creating an accessible, static website, we want to research and implement other ways we can incorporate programming into the regular functions of the podcast. An aspect of the podcast we are interested in harnessing to its fullest potential will be its social media promotion and engagement. In this regard, we are interested in mining Digital Humanities and Computer Science tweets for themes/topics that can be incorporated into the podcast's episodes. In addition to scraping other people's tweets/conversations, we are interested in creating a Twitter Bot that helps generate conversations that simultaneously engage the larger Twitter universe with the podcast's production and provides the DH cohort with relative, themed material to respond to in the podcast episodes.