In honor of Women’s History Month, this week’s episode focuses on women in sound. Our guests, Jennifer Hyland Wang and Jenny Stoever, return to the show to discuss sound studies, the cultural politics of listening, the history of women’s voices on the airwaves and on podcasts, as well as broader issues of representation. Jennifer Hyland […]
Archive | Archiving and Preservation
Podcast #286 – Native American Voices on the Air in the Early Days of Radio
On this week’s show we take a look at the ways that Native Americans used sound technology during radio’s earliest days and how that inspired and led to the flourishing Native media landscape, including tribal radio stations. Our guest, Josh Garrett-Davis, is Associate Curator at the Autry Museum and author of a recently completed dissertation: […]
Podcast #284 – SpokenWeb and Literary Sound
On this week’s show we learn about SpokenWeb, a Canadian project focused on the preservation of literary sound recordings. Partly inspired by the energetic poetry scene of the 1960s, SpokenWeb works to preserve recordings of these live events and also describe and share this material. Our guest, Hannah McGregor, leads the SpokenWeb Podcast Task Force […]
Podcast #283 – Project STAND is Archiving Student Activism
On Radio Survivor we are interested in not only audio, but also its history as well as preservation efforts. Along those lines, we have done numerous episodes about archives. We additionally have a strong passion for student-produced media, like high school and college radio. On this episode, we discuss an interesting intersection of the two, […]
Preserving Pieces of Microradio History
For the first time in a while I needed to dip into my dwindling archive of cassette tape airchecks. A couple of tapes immediately caught my eye and spurred me to restart the digitizing project I’ve been working on and off for the last five years. They took me on a fun journey back in […]
Podcast #256 – The Robin Hood of the Avant-Garde
Poet Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb in 1996 as an online repository for obscure avant-garde art that, by virtue of having little commercial potential, was hard to find. Audio was an early component of the archive, owing to Kenneth’s interest in sound poetry, an even more obscure art form. Since then he’s served as the chief, […]
Podcast #230 – The Library of Congress Launches Podcast Preservation Project
On this week’s episode we learn about a brand new project at the Library of Congress that is focused entirely on archiving podcasts. Ted Westervelt, Manager of the Podcast Preservation Project at Library of Congress, joins us to share early details from this new initiative. He explains that the hope is that a wide variety […]
Preservation is One of the Most Important Radio Trends of the Decade
Welcome to 2020! As Matthew Lasar noted this week, this year marks the 100th anniversary of some significant moments in radio history, including KDKA’s first broadcast. While other stations were on the air with regular broadcasts prior to 1920 (shout out to Doc Herrold’s early broadcasts to fellow radio amateurs); KDKA’s debut is a rallying […]
Podcast #226 – Irish Pirate Radio Encore
Here at the close of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 we’re celebrating the 31st anniversary of the end of one of the most fascinating periods in radio broadcast history, when pirate radio ruled the Irish airwaves. We enjoyed this interview – recorded at the beginning of 2019 – and we think you will, too. […]
Walter Benjamin diary: on earthquakes and radio time
“Benjamin was explaining his sense of the nature of radio, a medium that he felt did not have the time to narrate events like a history book. It had to get to the point. And the Lisbon Earthquake of 1771 had not one point, Benjamin thought, but four.”