The Pit and Pod is the weekly blog of the Archaeology Podcast Network full of updates, news and opinion. Written by co-founder Tristan Boyle and special guest writers.
I had the fortune of attending the Scottish Student Archaeology Conference held in Glasgow. The APN presence was a small table beside the door with a tablet and survey and laptop and of course lots of sweets. The conference as a whole was a very positive experience for me, I want to make a special mention to those from UHI Perth, who were very positive about podcasts and were listeners of the Archaeology Podcast Network.
As well as promoting the network, I was also interested in road-testing my new line of research, that of archaeology podcasts and who listens to them. One of the continual disappointments for me has been the lack of uptake of archaeology podcasts in the study of digital public outreach. There are some researchers who have included podcasts as examples, this article by Colin Admunsen and Cristina Belmonte, Chris Webster and myself. The question is then with almost 30,000 downloads a month for the network alone, and interest in others podcasts, e.g. Archaeology and Anthropology podcast, what’s the missing link, why are podcasts not included in written work?
In order to answer this I have resigned myself to the idea that I will probably have to produce the work. I can’t wait around; so with a couple of good questions I created the survey to be unleashed on unsuspecting attendees. I have to also put this survey and its responses into context, we are talking about a conference that will likely be attended by certain kinds of people, the chance that an attendee is an archaeologist, a student and living in Scotland. This means that the data I get has to be presented in a way that reflects those conditions appropriately. Good research is done with transparency.
Fortunately the lure of sweets meant that many people felt very comfortable coming up the stall, talking to me and completing the survey, even if they didn’t listen to podcasts. The first page of the survey had the all important GDPR question, whether consent was given for the data to be used; there is no point in collecting data if that can’t be used for research and then discussed widely. To ensure that no lines were crossed, the questions regarding identity and background were made optional, what was required was the answers relating to podcasts.
Despite this choice, many respondents took the time to answer and for that I am very grateful. Now comes the difficult part of the work, how to analyse and understand this preliminary data and what lessons can be learned. Even without sifting the data, a clear way forward is by allowing people to be more specific in their answers; I gave ranges for podcast subscriptions thinking about my own listening habits, about 70 subscribed podcasts but only 12 actively on rotation. I wonder how many people actually listen to that many? Would it better to be fine grain?
The questions I eventually choose will reflect my desire to research this but it may not be in the end, the single or best way to conduct this research. I never wanted to be the one person writing about podcasts, and I will be contacting a lot of my acquaintances to gain insight on things that may be important I have inevitably overlooked. In the end, we can only do the best drawing on our experiences, however it is through community and collaboration that good work becomes great.
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