New Semester Update!

Over the winter break, I took admittedly more of a vacation from my thesis than I was planning on, but now the new semester has started and I've jumped right back into work!

After completing a first draft, I feel much more confident in the direction that my thesis is going, as I've moved on from ideas to more hard data. In writing my proposal I focused a lot on the history and theory of public history and podcasting, and now I have transitioned to focusing on my case studies, BackStory Radio and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.

In researching and investigating these podcasts, I was fortunate enough to be able to conduct an interview with Dr. Nathan Connolly, one of the four main hosts of backstory radio. Being able to talk directly with someone in the podcasting realm, and even better on one of my case studies, will be an invaluable resource going forward and I am very excited to incorporate it into my work.

Going forward, I will be diving further into my research of these two podcasts and will work to tie together my initial research with the data I am collecting now.

If you give a student a research question, they'll ask for sources and sources and sources...

As the old story goes, if you give a mouse a cookie, he'll ask for milk, and then a straw, and then a napkin, and on and on and on....and this has been what researching for my thesis has been like. A few questions at first have evolved over thirteen weeks into what feels like hundreds, and although I can't answer them all, they have pushed and nudged my thesis into all kinds of different directions.

In the beginning I asked myself, "how do podcasts function in the realm of public history?," and it seemed simple enough. The idea was to figure out what podcasts accomplish, then see if that fits into what public history accomplishes, but I think you can tell where things start getting a little muddy. Public history is something that, through my research, I have come to realize is very malleable and rather undefined. If you break down the term you understand that it quite literally is history, usually applied by historians or academics, made available for the public, but that encompasses so many things! My task then was then not only figuring out the nature of podcasts, but of public history itself.

This has since changed my research from focusing solely on podcasts, their creators, and their applications. It has led me to incorporate ideas on public history; it's history, it's goals, what it is, and what it can be. This is not to say my thesis will now be a manifesto on the nature of public history, but it means that it has gained a more specific angle that I will be approaching the work of podcasts from. This is not so much an evolution of my original question, since it primarily remains the same, but it gives my topic a more defined path to follow. I see it being a lot easier to focus my hundreds of other questions into elements of these two guiding questions: "What are the goals of historically minded podcasts?" and "What are the goals of public history?"