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Abstract
The World Wide Web and other computer-based technologies like listservs, reference management tools, databases, blogs, Skype and visual media have transformed the field of history. In 2008, Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, historians of South Africa at Michigan State University, USA, launched Africa Past and Present, a podcast about history, culture, and politics (http://afripod.aodl.org). Drawing on the 54 episodes of the podcast produced through June 2011, this article explores the role of podcasting technology in the production and dissemination of historical knowledge about Africa and South Africa in a global context. It begins with an examination of the technical aspects of podcasting, and then interrogates the relationship between podcasting and Africanist scholarship and teaching in the digital age. The study demonstrates that, if the advantages are maximized and disadvantages minimized, podcasting can be a useful tool with which to democratize knowledge, enrich classroom learning, and significantly broaden opportunities for and access to scholarly publishing and communication, locally and internationally.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Catherine Foley, Peter Limb, David Bailey, Walter Hawthorne and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the original manuscript. The Department of History at Michigan State University generously funded the author's travel to the Southern African Historical Society's conference in Durban in June 2011, where an earlier version of this paper was presented in a panel organized by Keith Breckenridge on ‘Online Archives and the Politics of Historical Research’.
Notes
1For example, see D. Cohen and R. Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); D. Cohen and T. Scheinfeldt, eds, Hacking the Academy, http://hackingtheacademy.org/, accessed 29 October 2011; and K. Nawrotski and J. Dougherty, eds, Writing History in the Digital Age, http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu, accessed 30 October 2011. The latter is a born-digital edited volume, to be published in the Digital Humanities Series of the University of Michigan Press's digitalculturebooks imprint.
2 Africa Past and Present, http://afripod.aodl.org, accessed 31 October 2011.
3Matrix, ‘About’, http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/about/, accessed 31 October 2011.
4P. Knupfer, ‘H-Net Executive Director Annual Report’, 8 November 2010, http://www.h-net.org/about/report10.pdf, accessed 18 October 2011. Additional H-Net content includes H-Net Reviews (28,186 book reviews archived as of November 2010) and the Job Guide.
5For more information about the African Online Digital Library, visit: http://www.aodl.org/
6For additional detail, see P. Limb, ‘The Politics of Digital ‘Reform and Revolution’: Towards Mainstreaming and African Control of African digitization’, Innovation, 34 (2007), 18–27; and P. Lalu, ‘The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa’, Innovation, 34 (2007), 28–44.
7M.O. West and W.G. Martin, ‘Introduction: The Rival Africas and Paradigms of Africanists and Africans at Home and Abroad’, in W.G. Martin and M.O. West, eds, Out of One, Many Africas: Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 28.
8J. Pritchard, ‘Africa Past and Present: The Podcast about African History, Culture, and Politics,’ 19 October 2009, http://blog.historians.org/resources/897/africa-past-and-present-the-podcast-about-african-history-culture-and-politics, accessed 20 October 2009. Podcasts can be defined succinctly as digital audio files (in mp3 and other formats) available on demand on the Internet.
9In May 2007, the African Studies Centre at the University of California, Los Angeles began archiving podcasts of lectures, speeches, and interventions: http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/podcasts/, accessed 20 October 2011. Since May 2009, the African Studies Centre at Oxford University also posts lectures in podcast format: http://new.thelounge.com/uk/content/podcast/1310087-african-studies-centre, accessed 31 October 2011.
10History Podcast Network, http://www.historypodcastnetwork.blogspot.com/, accessed 30 October 2011. Active from August 2005 to September 2007, this site is no longer updated. ‘Historians on the Record: Podcasts from the Gilder Lehrman Institute’, http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historians/podcasts/, accessed 29 October 2011. While these podcasts can be accessed for free, they are password-protected and require user registration. For a more recent academic history podcast in the United States, see ‘New Books in History’, http://newbooksinhistory.com/, accessed 14 September 2011. For a podcast version of a radio program, see ‘BackStory: with the American History Guys’, http://backstoryradio.org/, accessed 30 October 2011.
11Prior to the interview, guests sign a standard interview release form that, among other things, allows Matrix/Michigan State University to permanently maintain the recording in a fair-use online public archive for educational purposes.
12We use a combination of the Audio-Technica AT831B – Cardioid Lavalier Condenser microphone and the Audio-Technica Pro70 Cardioid Lavalier microphone. Both are miniature clip-on mics.
13 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 26: Elections in South Africa’, podcast, 30 April 2009, http://afripod.aodl.org/2009/04/episode-26-elections-in-south-africa/, accessed 30 April 2009. Skype interviews are recorded with Call Recorder for Skype software (http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/) in uncompressed format on an iMac computer.
14The downside of Skype is higher susceptibility to dropouts, pops, and weak connections. These technical problems require additional time and labour resources which slow down the production process.
15Levelator runs on Windows, OS X, or Linux (Ubuntu) and is available here: http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator
16S. Song, ‘Viewpoint: Bandwidth Can Bring African Universities Up to Speed’, [n.d.] http://publicwebsite.idrc.ca/EN/Resources/Publications/Pages/ArticleDetails.aspx?PublicationID=720, accessed 19 June 2011.
17For more details, see Carnegie Mellon University Office of Technology for Education, ‘A Teaching With Technology White Paper: Podcasting’, (June 2007), http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/…/StudiesWhitepapers/Podcasting_Jun07.pdf, accessed 12 June 2011.
18Dissemination of these announcements is complemented by personal emails and by helpful cross-postings on web sites like The Archival Platform in South Africa (http://www.archivalplatform.org/), the African Studies Association in the US (http://www.africanstudies.org), and The Africa Desk in Britain (http://www.africadesk.ac.uk).
19I do an average of 15 hours of work on each episode. This time includes reading, preparing questions, interviewing, listening to and reviewing the recording, posting announcements, and managing the website.
20 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 34: African Audiences’, podcast, 2 November 2009, http://afripod.aodl.org/2009/11/episode-34-african-audiences/, accessed 2 November 2009; and ‘Episode 48: Nigeria, Gender, Labor, and Environment’, podcast, 15 February 2011, http://afripod.aodl.org/2011/02/afripod-48/, accessed 15 February 2011.
21 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 49: The Revolutionary Situation in North Africa’, podcast, 25 February 2011, http://afripod.aodl.org/2011/02/episode-49/, accessed 25 February 2011; and ‘Episode 50: Political Change in Africa and the Diaspora’, podcast, 30 March 2011, http://afripod.aodl.org/2011/03/afripod-50/, accessed 30 March 2011.
22Cf. R.H. Bates, V.Y. Mudimbe, and J. O'Barr, eds, Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Martin and West, Out of One, Many Africas; and J.E. Philips, ed, Writing African History (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005).
23On the distinctiveness of transnational history vis-à-vis comparative, international, world, and global history, see ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111, 5 (December 2006), 1441–1464. With C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed.
24The other history episodes covered Senegal (three times), Zimbabwe (twice), and Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia (once each). South Africa has also been the main country of analysis in eight other episodes.
25By way of example, see P. Limb, The ANC's Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa before 1940 (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010); and Nelson Mandela: a Biography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008). P. Alegi, Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society from its Origins to 2010 (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010 [first edition 2004]); and African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World's Game (Athens: Ohio University Press; London: Hurst, 2010).
26Recent examples include: C. Rassool, ‘History Anchored in Politics: An Interview with Martin Legassick’, South African Historical Journal, 56, 1 (2006), 19–42; I. Filatova, ‘Interview with Professor Apollon Davidson’, South African Historical Journal, 42, 1 (2000), 307–317; and C. Kros, ‘Interview with Peter Delius’, South African Historical Journal, 37, 1 (1997), 203–207.
27E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Random House, 1961), 16.
28 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 3: Media, Culture, and Politics’, podcast, 15 February 2008, http://afripod.aodl.org/2008/02/africa-past-present-2/, accessed 15 February 2008.
29Former US Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, quoted in J. Bamford, The Shadow Factor: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 299. While North Americans use more bandwidth, the largest number of Internet users is in Asia (922 million, according to Internet World Stats [31 March 2011]), nearly four times as many as North America; see http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, accessed 19 June 2011.
30History Podcast Network, ‘World at War Podcast’, 26 July 2007, http://historypodcastnetwork.blogspot.com/, accessed 30 October 2011.
31J. Ong, ‘Apple's iTunes Store, App Store now cost roughly $1.3 billion a year to operate,’ Apple Insider, 13 June 2011, http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/13/apples_itunes_store_app_store_now_cost_roughly_1_3_billion_a_year_to_operate.html, accessed 15 June 2011.
32On the Internet's impact on African higher education, see Africa Today 52, 2 (2005), Special Issue: African Electronic Publishing.
33The iTunes hits in December 2009 amounted to 36.8 per cent of total hits for the podcast; 16,308 hits (25.8 per cent) came via MS Internet Explorer, 10,351 (16.4 per cent) via Firefox, and 5,128 (8.1 per cent) via Safari. 6.7 per cent used unknown browsers, 1.6 used Google Chrome, and 1.2 Mozilla. A very small number of users accessed the podcast through various RSS readers and Opera.
34J. Jarrett, ‘Popular History, the Academy and the Internet: Blogging History for New and Old Audiences’, in Nawrotski and Dougherty, Writing History in the Digital Age, http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/revisioning/popular-history-the-academy-the-internet-jarrett/, accessed 25 October 2011.
35On Matrix preservation work, see L. Schmidt, ‘Preserving the H-Net Email Lists: A Case Study in Trusted Digital Repository Assessment’, American Archivist, 74, 1 (2011), 257–296.
36J.J. Musakali and D.C. Rotich, ‘Open Access in African Publishing Industry: Opportunities and Challenges’, KMAfrica conference paper, Dakar, Senegal (2009), http://www.kmafrica.com/group.emerging.technologies.open.access.in.african.publishing.Industry, accessed 26 October 2011.
37For details on this project, see http://www.widernet.org /digitallibrary/; and E. Miner and C. Missen, ‘“Internet in a Box”: Augmenting Bandwidth with the eGranary Digital Library’, Africa Today, 52, 2 (2005), 21–37.
38‘About the Internet Archive’, http://www.archive.org/about/about.php, accessed 27 November 2011.
39 Digital Campus, ‘Episode 41 – Interview with Stan Katz’, podcast, 20 May 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UPUhU-A37M, accessed 10 June 2011.
40On evaluating digital work in the academy, see T. Mills Kelly, ‘Making Digital Scholarship Count (2)’, 16 June 2008, http://edwired.org/2008/06/16/making-digital-scholarship-count-2/, accessed 13 June 2011.
41That is not to say that I advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While peer review is essential to our profession, its definition could be revised and updated to take forms of digital scholarship more fully into account. On this topic, see T. Mills Kelly, ‘Making Digital Scholarship Count (3)’, 27 June 2008, http://edwired.org/2008/06/27/making-digital-scholarship-count-3/, accessed 3 December 2009. For an example of a new academic digital outlet, see the Social Science Research Network (http://ssrn.com/). At first glance, SSRN strikes me as a more appropriate outlet for legal scholars than historians.
42See American Historical Association, ‘Statement on Peer Review’, 15 August 2005, http://www.historians.org/press/2005_08_15_PeerReviewStatement.htm, accessed 16 June 2011.
43Personal communication with David Bailey, East Lansing, Michigan, USA, 8 June 2011.
44K. Fitzpatrick, ‘Open Access Publishing’, in Cohen and Scheinfeldt, Hacking the Academy, http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/hacking-scholarship/#scholarship-fitzpatrick, accessed 1 November 2011.
45P. Limb and P. Alegi, ‘Interview with Bob Edgar’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10, 3 (2009), 335–341, 335; Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 7: American Zulus and the Ash Heap of South African History’, podcast, 15 April 2008, http://afripod.aodl.org/2008/04/april-15/, accessed 28 November 2011.
46‘Podcast: Hlonipha Mokoena on Zulu Intellectual History in Magema Fuze’, 11 May 2011, http://ukznpress.book.co.za/blog/2011/05/11/podcast-hlonipha-mokoena-on-zulu-intellectual-history-in-magema-fuze/, accessed 15 June 2011; Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 52: Zulu Intellectual History’, podcast, 27 April 2011, http://afripod.aodl.org/2011/04/afripod-52/, accessed 14 June 2011.
47‘Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World’ (‘Description’), http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?isbn=978-0-253-22305-0, accessed 15 June 2011; Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 51: Maasai Women, Culture, and the Indigenous Rights Movement’, podcast, 13 April 2011, http://afripod.aodl.org/2011/04/afripod-51/, accessed 10 June 2011.
48 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 17: New Media and Southern African Studies’, podcast, 19 November 2008, http://afripod.aodl.org/2008/11/africa-past-and-present-episode-17/, accessed 19 November 2008.
49David Parry, ‘Burn the Boats/Books’, in Cohen and Scheinfeldt, Hacking the Academy, http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/hacking-scholarship/#scholarship-parry, accessed 4 November 2011.
50Chapters are assigned from D. Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
51 Africa Past and Present, ‘Episode 1: Amadu Bamba and the Muridiyya of Senegal’, podcast, 15 January 2008, http://afripod.aodl.org/2008/01/african-past-present/, accessed 15 January 2008; Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008).
52Cf. S.M. Walls et al., ‘Podcasting in Education: Are Students as Ready and Eager as We Think They Are?’, Computers & Education, 54 (2010), 371–378. My students report listening to podcasts multiple times before examinations.
53S.B. Heilesen, ‘What is the Academic Efficacy of Podcasting?’, Computers & Education, 55 (2010), 1065.
54Dr Kirk Kidwell, Acting Director CISAH, 2010 Fintz Excellence in Teaching Award letter to the author, 26 March 2010.
55 J. Pritchard, ‘Africa Past and Present Podcast – Q&A with Dr. Peter Alegi’, 21 October 2009, http://blog.historians.org/resources/899/africa-past-and-present-podcast-qa-with-dr-peter-alegi, accessed 22 October 2009.
56M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 27.
57Pritchard, ‘Africa Past and Present Podcast – Q&A with Dr Peter Alegi’.
58I am indebted to David Bailey for this insight.
59Quotes are from readers’ comments in the blog post by Pritchard, ‘Africa Past and Present Podcast – Q&A with Dr Peter Alegi’.
60E. Green Musselman, ‘Missing the Missing Link?’, 1 October 2008, http://missinglinkpodcast.wordpress.com/, accessed 3 October 2008.
61See P. Limb, ‘The Digitization of Africa’, Africa Today, 52, 2 (2005), 3–19; and T. Mills Kelly, ‘Making Digital Scholarship Count’, 13 June 2008, http://edwired.org/2008/06/13/making-digital-scholarship-count/, accessed 15 June 2009.
62T. Carmody, ‘The Trouble with Digital Culture’, in Cohen and Scheinfeldt, Hacking the Academy, http://www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/conclusions/#conclusions-carmody, accessed 30 October 2011.
63For a comparative look at history podcasts, see E. Grant, ‘History Podcasts, Take 4’, 23 February 2011, http://blog.historians.org/resources/1269/history-podcasts-take-4, accessed 7 March 2011.