Photo by: Megan White

Elizabethtown College held a podcasting information session in the Digital Humanities Hub Wednesday, Jan. 29 at 11:00 a.m.

The Hub, located in the basement of Wenger Hall, is a place on campus where students and faculty can work on digital projects and share resources.

The session had a conversational tone in which the audience was encouraged to be part of the discussion.

According to Program Coordinator of Academic Affairs Carol Costa-Ouimet, the session was meant to gauge student and faculty interest in podcasting and to start “building a community” within the college campus.

To start off the session, each person shared their reason for attending the session. Some of the faculty members want to use digital projects for class instruction.
Dean for Curriculum and Professor of History Dr. Brian Newsome talked about how he wants to allow students in his first-year seminar classes to do a multi-media project, like podcasting, instead of giving an oral presentation.

Others have worked with podcasts in their personal or professional experiences. Associate Professor of Biology David Bowne is currently working on writing a nonfiction book he wants to turn into a podcast.

Professor of Religion and Asian Studies Dr. Jeffery Long has been a guest on many podcasts, and he shared interest in making his own.

The next part of the session focused on how the Hub could provide support to the community and who could help provide resources for the Hub.

Costa-Ouimet introduced senior David Varner, who is completing an internship for the Hub.

According to Varner, his role is to teach people about podcasting and to help build up the Hub space to increase student and faculty engagement.

He also creates how-to tutorials on podcasting processes.

“By having these audio or video tutorials people will have a reference to go back to, and my legacy will live on,” Varner said.

“The overall goal of the project is to create an Etown podcast channel,” Costa-Ouimet said.

To do this, the plan is to come up with a webpage either on Etown’s home page or on an external website where students and faculty can publish their podcasts.

One thing Varner is working on is creating a Canvas classroom to teach students and faculty about making podcasts and certify them to be able to post on the website.

“The class will teach students and faculty how to record podcasts along with a code of ethics,” Varner said.

They will then need to pass the test before their podcast can be put up.

The discussion also focused on ways to promote the project. One way is to have Etown faculty be guests on other reputable podcasts or through external advertising.

The idea of creating a direct tag line was brought up by Associate Professor of Communications Dr. Colin Helb. Another idea mentioned by Archivist Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh was to build a library of resources on the Hub website.

“I like to pick one topic at a time and run with it,” Costa-Ouimet said. Costa-Ouimet also mentioned that the current Digital Humanities Hub website needs to be reconstructed and could use Information and Technology Service’s Knowledgebase to pull tutorial links from.

The session wrapped up by talking about what to do moving forward.

One thing discussed was that Varner is going to continue to put together the digital space to help draw in more students.

The creation of a tagline and branding was something that the participants of the discussion felt was important to start working on.

To help with this branding, the idea of linking faculty to the Hub website was suggested.

Another important factor was educating people about what digital humanities really means.

“It is an interdisciplinary field and involves the sharing of resources and knowledge. This sharing of knowledge and resources should have an academic component,” Costa-Ouimet said.

According to Costa-Ouimet, digital humanities allows people to get out of their academic groups and work across multiple disciplines.

In order to enhance the education on this topic, the idea of getting feedback from others at events like faculty assembly was also mentioned.

Another podcasting session will be held in the future to regroup and provide an update on where everyone is in the process.