The Future of Academic Podcasting: Establishing its importance and uses in scholarly communication

The Authority File

In the final episode of this four-part series, Lori Beckstead and Dario Llinares, coeditors of the forthcoming Podcast Studies: Practice into Theory, look ahead to the future of scholarly podcasting. First, Lori underscores podcasting’s ability to center marginalized voices by spotlighting lived experiences and demonstrating oral communication as a legitimate form of scholarship. Further, Dario parses through the benefits of creating podcasts to study the medium itself, much like the way media studies scholars create video essays about their research.

Next, Lori explains how librarians can help establish podcasts in traditional scholarly communication channels by preserving academic podcasts in institutional repositories. Our guests also recommend a list of scholarly podcasts including The Amplify Network, Her Media Diary, and Dario’s own The Cinematologists. Last, Lori and Dario postulate about the potential impacts of Google’s NotebookLM, a generative AI tool that creates extremely realistic-sounding podcast episodes from user-submitted prompts.

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