David Staley: Do we think that podcasting is a form of scholarship? Is it teaching? Is it public scholarship? I mean, everyone's nodding when I say scholarship 
Elizabeth Renker: all those things. 
Jim Phelan: I think it's, yeah. Yeah. It blows my mind. I would say. 
David Staley: Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a series of podcasts bringing together Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences podcasters. I'm pleased to welcome several of my colleagues who host podcasts about a variety of things fascinating subjects. College of Arts and Sciences has many great areas to explore with their podcasts, and we'd welcome your feedback and suggestions through any one of our podcast sites, which you'll hear about in a minute.
I'm David Staley. I'm an associate professor in the Department of History, and I host the Voices of Excellence podcast. Let me introduce the other podcasters sitting around the table here. Kayley DeLong is producer of the Shakespeare in the Post colonies. Kayley, tell us about the podcast and why post is in quotation marks.
Kayley Delong: Yeah, David, I would love to. So this project, Shakespeare in the Post Colonies, essentially interrogates what it means to do Shakespeare for people who are located in many ways in places considered post colonial, that's why the post part is in quotations, because the discussions are really about what the limits of that, label is and how people negotiate their identity, their cultural belongings, and and their contributions as artists, as scholars, as theater practitioners, novelists.
It's a very wide array of amazing people. And we believed that having a open access archive of them telling their stories and thinking in reflection about the work that they have done and also the work that they're looking forward to doing was important. So, yeah.
David Staley: Thank you. Jim Phelan is professor of English and hosts the Project Narrative podcast. Project Narrative.
Jim Phelan: Yeah, so what we do is there's two people, usually me and a guest, and the guest will select and then read a short narrative, could be fiction, could be non-fiction and then we'll discuss it, and we'll talk about how it works as a narrative, what its importance is, issues of relevance, all those kinds of things. So it's sort of applied narrative theory, which is one of the things we do in Project Narrative. 
David Staley: Elizabeth Renker is a professor of English and host of the Discovering Sarah Piatt, America's Lost Great Writer podcast. And I must confess, I've never heard of her, so she must be lost.
Elizabeth Renker: Well, indeed, and something we've already realized from your remarks, David, is that there is a lot to be learned about her, including how to pronounce her last name.
David Staley: Oh, did I mispronounce her name, or? 
Elizabeth Renker: You didn't mispronounce it, but on the theory, as a Piatt descendant said to me, that no one can mispronounce their last name, I am using the pronunciation I have inherited from the family, which is Piatt. However, there are other members of other branches of the family who say Piatt. But you will hear me say Piatt. My students are always correcting me, but there's a research story there. My podcast is about the concept you hear in the title, discovering. So one of the big hooks of this podcast is that Sarah Piatt is mostly an author no one has heard of. There's a very small group of people who know about her and her work. And the big gambit of the podcast is that Sarah Piatt is worthy of the status of what we might call a great author. 
Now that's a loaded term. It's one I talk about in the podcast, but I am making the argument that she deserves that kind of canonical stature. And a couple of the other hooks of the podcast are she was a very, very famous transatlantic poet in her lifetime. She published widely in transatlantic venues, the top newspapers, the top periodicals, the top publishers for 50 years and then vanished upon her death in 1919. Why? Now, that's a story about history and in 1919, you're at the height of modernism.
Lots of women are dropping out of the cannon. So there are a lot of reasons to go back to Sarah Piatt. That's one of them. Another one is that she's absolutely great. I mean, she is a fantastic writer. So these are some of the things we talk about in the podcast. The idea of discovering, the idea of a major writer, and why make this claim for Sarah Piatt.
David Staley: Elise Robbins is the most recent host of Nouvelle Nouvelle from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 
Elise Robbins: Yeah, so Nouvelle Nouvelle is, I mean, it's French essentially for announcing like news, like we have news and 
David Staley: Like extra, extra.
Elise Robbins: Yeah, exactly. Extra, extra. Read all about it. Nouvelle Nouvelle. And so this podcast actually came out of a newsletter that the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has been publishing for many decades now in which we kind of share with our local community, but also our broader national and international community, what's been going on at Ohio State, but also in central and expanding out of central Ohio, but just kind of the region and the institution in terms of medieval and renaissance work, whether that's academic, whether that's more public facing, whether that's artisanal, whether that's reconstruction, all those sorts of things. So the podcast was born out of that newsletter as a different way to engage our audience. And so what we do with the podcast is generally what it's been is the center invites scholars from kind of all disciplines who are, and not just scholars, we also most recently had an author who was an OSU alum, so people who are working in MedRen studies in some capacity who are coming to give a lecture or participate in the center in some way here at Ohio State, we'll invite them to do a podcast and talk about their work, how they see it as being relevant and important, both within an academic and university setting, but also in a more like, what does it do for the public?
Or how do we engage in kind of the popular aspects of MedRen studies in our scholarship in a way that, argues for its continued relevance, I think, in the not only academic community, but also kind of outside the academy. 
David Staley: We mentioned, not just scholars, but a recent author who tends to appear on your or know who is a particularly striking guest on one of your podcasts, Kaylee, who.
Kayley Delong: So part of my role as producer is to listen to every single episode several times before they actually go live. So I get to be intimately familiar with every single episode that we do. And I was thinking about this question of Which ones stand out to me as particularly impactful to me?
And I think about the interview with author Dr. Preti Taneja, who is based in the U. K. She's a South Asian British activist, scholar, and educator. And one of the reasons why I find her perspective in the podcast so important is I think she talks a lot about the role that Shakespeare had in her novel project We That Are Young and also about how the Social problems that came up in the novel reflect the social problems that she faces as a scholar, activist, as an author, and how she reflects upon those now.
She's just always a very considerate, ever evolving political thinker, and you can tell that by the way she talks about things. She's just incredibly thoughtful, considerate, and able to synthesize a lot of really complicated ideas at once. And so when I was reviewing the episode for editing and organizing, I just found myself like, I want to talk like that.
I want to think like that. I want to likeÉ She's incredibly moving to listen to. So, yeah, I think she's definitely up there for me, but there's so many amazing people that we get to talk to. 
David Staley: Jim.
Jim Phelan: Yeah. so, the way we did it, as far as guests goes, was I wanted to make sure that everybody who's a core faculty member of Project Narrative did an episode, picked a text, talked about it with me.
So we did that and then we sort of broadened you know, invitations to other people in the Narrative Society people whom I know through my work as editor of a journal or meeting at conferences or just reading. As far as memorable ones go, I'll pick, it's hard, right? It's like picking your children, right?
Which, which, which, who's your favorite child? Well, you know but I'll, highlight two. One was with Frederick Aldama.
David Staley: Oh, sure 
Jim Phelan: And we were talking about Julio Cortazar's The Continuity of Parks, which is a pretty famous story, and its big gambit is that it's a story about a reader, and the reader is reading about a murder plot, and we follow along and the murderer is on his way to commit the deed, and suddenly we are in the presence of the murderer and the reader reading about him. Right? It's, it's what the narratologists call metalepsis. So, we break from the frame and it's as if, okay, the reader is about to get murdered.
Right? And so, there's a lot of things to talk about. How does Cortazar set this up and so on. But what happened in the episode is that Frederick sort of switched and he became the interviewer, and he wanted to know what I thought about it. And, of course, I had lots of things to say about it, so I just went with it, and it turned out to be, you know, as much my episode as, as Frederick's. So that was unusual. The other one I'll mention is with Dorothy Hale from University of California at Berkeley, who's a specialist in the history of the novel, and she wanted to do the first chapter of James' Ambassadors. And we did that. And a lot of stuff goes on there.
The main character is sort of on holiday. He's from New England, and he's in Europe and it's all so exciting and he meets this woman, and he starts flirting with her and all this stuff that he wouldn't do if he were still in New England. And Dory also asked me to read the male characters part, which was a lot of fun.
And Dory just brought all kinds of energy to the reading and to the discussion. And it was just, I think two of us really had just a wonderful time, and we hope our, our listeners did too.
David Staley: Memorable guest for you, Elise.
Elise Robbins: I'm going to do the same thing as Jim. I have to pick two. Because as I was thinking about it, I couldn't just pick one. And they're favorites for different reasons. And so, at the end of last year, we did a great podcast for a lecture that the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies did in partnership with the Center for Folklore Studies.
And we brought in Professor Christopher Marsh from Queens University, Belfast, and he does early modern ballads and was creating a online repository of the top hits of early modern England in terms of these ballads. And so Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth director of the Center for Folklore Studies, did that podcast with me.
And so it was just really amazing to have a couple: me who has the Renaissance aspect, right? And Renaissance England is my area, but I don't know much about kind of folk culture and music. And then we have Jasper who studies Appalachian folk music. And then of course, Professor Marsh, who has the kind of folk music and Renaissance aspects.
So it's just really lovely to see the different questions that came out from each of us about each other's topics and areas and how that overlap, just the beauty of interdisciplinarity, I think, and how that all was able to overlap in a really fun environment. Every time I pass by Jasper now, he'll talk about mention it and talk about how fun it was.
And I agree. I think it was a lot of fun and just a lot of voice as part of that conversation. And then the second one is the one I mentioned with the author. Genevieve Gornicek is an OSU alum and an alum from the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. And I love talking to her about her inspiration for her first book, The Witch's Heart, which actually came from a class that she took with Merrill Kaplan from the Department of English.
And she was in that class and she was reading this great, Old Norse or Icelandic sagas that the whole class was about reading these texts, and she latched on to this character or this series of characters, and she made a comment in the class to Professor Kaplan saying, Oh, what if these were all related or the same person or something, and Merrill was like, Hmm, that would be extremely interesting if there's this one big bad lady behind everything that's going wacky in these stories. Interesting. And so she talked to her more about it later, and she's like, Well, that's not really a topic for a term paper. It's a little too speculative, but I would love to read a novel about that.
And so essentially, Genevieve wrote the novel during the month of November, which now I know there's a name for it where writers will sit down to write an entire novel in the month of November. And I know there's a catchy, sweet name for it, but I can't remember it, but she wrote that whole novel over the course of the month of November and then ended up writing a separate really lovely term paper, but she wrote that and then it ended up becoming her debut novel.
And it was just really wonderful to hear her enthusiasm about Professor Kaplan's class and the inspiration that just like took hold. And then Professor Kaplan was able to introduce her later that night. So there was just really like sweet bond and story that happened there. 
David Staley: Too speculative. 
Elise Robbins: Too speculative. 
David Staley: What does that mean?
Elise Robbins: I mean, so there's not necessarily a place in the text where you can find that there would be evidence. So essentially there's these giantesses in sagas. And so they all have traits that kind of overlap. But there's no way to necessarily say from the text themselves that they would be the same person.
And so to base an entire paper on this kind of interesting idea would perhaps be too speculative for an academic situation. 
David Staley: Well, but I ask because I'm someone who works in speculative design, so, ah, there go. So it's, it's, it's purely my own sort of interest here.
Elise Robbins: There's never anything too speculative. We love speculation 
David Staley: Elizabeth, what could we hear in one of the Discovering Sarah Piatt podcasts? Do you interview people??
Elizabeth Renker: I do indeed. I think maybe this is a good place to explain something that might be a little bit different about my podcast, which is that my podcast is one arm of a very, very large public humanity site that I have created with the help of the Ohio State University Libraries Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and the Knowledge Bank.
And we have created a project there called the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project. you can Google that, and you'll find it. 
And there's all kinds of stuff there. Remember: very few people have even heard of Sarah Piatt, and there was no biography of her. I am writing her biography now. And the enterprise of collecting. I refer to this using the technical term, quote, finding the stuff. The project of finding the stuff, you can imagine, is gargantuan. 
David Staley: there stuff? 
Elizabeth Renker: Oh, there's tons of stuff. But the thing is, this is a great misunderstanding people have. You can't just Google something and find it. Someone has to find it. 
David Staley: Yeah, 
Elizabeth Renker: Someone has to figure out what it means. So the podcast is tied to the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project, and it began as something other than a podcast, which also lives on the website, which is a page called Oral Histories and Written Memoirs.
And all of those now are also podcast episodes, so they have a double life. But the premise originally, when I started those, was to interview people, researchers. Some of them are scholars, some of them are not. Some of them are people who found Sara Piatt and just were like amazed, and she changed their lives.
And devote their lives to researching her. So I started interviewing the people who have done the research, who have, quote, found the stuff. And so every single interview this is another reason I can't choose a favorite, everyone of these people has made some contribution to humanity in the form of discovering knowledge about this person.
Stuff nobody knew. You know, obscure records and figuring out how does it fit into this big puzzle. So every one of my episodes in season one is an interview and a conversation with one of these incredible pioneering human beings.
David Staley: Well, I asked this of all of you. Why did you decide to do a podcast? Couldn't you have just written another article or publish another monograph? Why podcasting?
Jim Phelan: I think there's something about the medium. There's several things about the medium that made it attractive for me. So one is that people like to listen to podcasts, right?And there's a way of then that they can disseminate them in a way that more people are likely to find it than the article in the specialized journal.
But second, I think there's something about the live conversation that adds a dimension that sort of writing an article doesn't. And I love the idea that, with the help of the recording studio here and Ohio State in general, we can have this archive, so all there, you listen to one, Oh, maybe I'll, I'll go and listen to another one.
I don't think that happens with my published research. Also, I think the fact that itÕs a conversation, and I get a chance to talk to all these people whose ideas I'm interested in, who bring me new ideas about stories I do know, or introduce me to stories I don't know.
And then presumably our audience has similar kinds of experience. So that's all, all that's very attractive.
Kayley Delong: Yeah, I think there's something really important about the question of What does the democratization of knowledge mean in this day and age? I think it would be fundamentally hypocritical to have a archival project interviewing post colonial Shakespeareans about their life experiences with colonialism, the privatization of knowledge, education, access, all of these barriers to equity and equality, and then to warehouse their testimonies in and behind a paywall. and I think that's something that Dr. Amrita Dhar was very pointed about addressing from the get-go of this project.
And Dr. Dhar, Dr. Adˇeko, Dr. Shane, they all have these very strong ironclad commitments to, Open access information, open access pedagogy, which I think is another central pillar to this project is how do we create this archive that is then able to be used as a teaching tool, and we're very adamant that this should be able to be used by everyone, whether they're learning by themselves or they're learning in a classroom space, just really decentering the western university classroom space as a space in which these collaborations can be impactful and really make a difference in people's knowledge journeys, I think was really step one. 
Elizabeth Renker: Well, I'm going to second things my colleagues have said. Very popular medium, great way to share knowledge in a public space tied to what I said before about the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project. My motto in this entire enterprise of more than 20 years of my life is build it and they will come.
Everything I do is about creating infrastructure. So the podcast, free. Great public teaching venue, can bring people to the Sarah Piatt Recovery Project where everything is free. One of the things we did there was we digitized an extraordinarily rare Washington, D. C. newspaper of the Reconstruction period that published a lot of Sarah's political poems.
Rare, you couldn't find this anywhere. I borrowed those from the family. They had a full run of this newspaper. It was nowhere else. I borrowed it from them. The library did the exacting work of digitizing that. It's free on our site. 
And I noticed, this is an interesting turn because we did that about 10 years ago. I just noticed now Readex has that paper. But you have to have a subscription.
So it's still free from Ohio State. You know, it's fantastic. And we did the same thing with another blockbuster newspaper that published a lot of Sarah's poems when she was not Sarah Piatt, yet. She wasn't yet married.
She was Sally M. Bryan. That was her byline. The New York Ledger. And Ohio State, once again, my library heroes digitized every issue that ran a poem of hers free. 
Elise Robbins: Definitely agree with what all of you have said up until this point for our podcast as well. And I think just to add a little bit, I think particularly for medieval Renaissance studies, I think it can feel really illegible to people and inaccessible just because it is so like steeped in this history and historical study, but at the same time it also feels like it's stable because it happened so long ago, and I think the conversational format of a podcast really shows that, I mean, it demonstrates that scholarship is a conversation and that these topics that we are discussing are not, there's not one way to understand or discuss them, right? There's a multitude of ways to talk about the quote, you know, in quotes, the past, right?
This medieval renaissance, the past, the inheritances that we have from them. And so I think by allowing them people to literally listen in on these conversations, right? It shows the nature of scholarship that demystifies the academic work that we do a little bit by inviting people into the conversation.
David Staley: So I was listening to how you were responding to this. Do we think that podcasting is a form of scholarship? Is it teaching? Is it public scholarship? I mean, everyone's nodding when I say scholarship 
Elizabeth Renker: all those things. 
Jim Phelan: I think it's, yeah. Yeah. It blows my mind. I would say. 
David Staley: Say a little more, Jim 
Jim Phelan: With the Project Narrative podcast, I think the guests and I are sometimes drawing on a critical conversation about the text and then adding to that like traditional published scholarship does.
But we don't have all the apparatus of that. And so in that sense, maybe it's more like teaching. I do think, and I have heard from some people that they've assigned the podcast for their students. You know, and they do that, but Elizabeth's case is the clearest about the public side of this, right?
The recovery project, the discovery and so on, but I think all of us are saying, well, let's make this kind of knowledge available to the public, right? And it's great that OSU supports us in these ways. 
David Staley: I've noted before that at least the way I structure my podcast, and it sounds like the way you do yours as well it focuses on questions.
And I'm not certain that questions are something that we value in the Academy. Answers, professing, but rather than listening and questioning.
Jim Phelan: Well, I mean, I think research is about questions, right? So to the extent that we are a research university, we are a university that's committed to asking questions that we don't really have the interest to and that are significant questions, right? And so, I hope, that not a weird thing on my part, that the Academy is about questions, right? And so the podcast, I hope, kind of reflects that. So maybe you and I disagree, or maybe we have had different experiences, David.
David Staley: Or maybe we don't disagree, but so I have a personal reason for wanting to, too. And I've said this on my podcast, so I'm not saying anything too personal, I have a professional, personal reasons. Professionally, I was approached by the college just to say, would you want to host a podcast where you interview, your colleagues across the arts and sciences?
I said, yes, what they weren't hearing is as a boy radio played an outsized role in my life for someone my age, right? And when I was a kid, I either wanted to be a disc jockey or a radio interviewer. And so when the college said would you like to have an interview program, I was literally jumping up inside, inside.
I said, yes. So I'm actually living out a childhood dream here in addition to doing some really good scholarship, I think. Do you get any feedback or do you hear from your listeners? Do you know who your listeners are? 
Kayley Delong: A lot of our audience is also either situated in or adjacent to the academy. And I think that's one because of the amazing collaborators that our project is able to bring in to help not only as interviewees, but as interviewers.
We've had some amazing scholars come in and, facilitate interviews with our interviewees. And they've been amazing interlocutors. So I think there's definitely a resonance there with teachers see a tool, like we see a tool and we're like, Oh, amazing. This is going to help me. This is going to help me with my students.
And so, speaking to the earlier point, I think podcasts provide a really interesting way of subverting the overdependence on articles and literature in the traditional sense and offering something that kind of shakes up the system a little bit and shakes up the routine for our students.
I also just think a writer like Shakespeare draws so many different kinds of people. Everyone has an encounter with Shakespeare, whether it's indirect or direct, just because of how he has been circulated around the world for better and worse. A lot of the times worse. But I think the whole central point of the project is that those encounters deserve to be like teased out and deserve to be articulated. And so I think we attract a wide swath of people who are interested in seeing and hearing and listening to what those look like. And I think that's kind of adds to the beauty of it, the multimodality aspect of it as well, but also just the transdisciplinarity of it. Definitely.
David Staley: Do you know your listeners? Have you heard from them? Yes. 
Elise Robbins: A little bit. Yes. So With the Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies, it's really nice over the years we've developed, I mean, they're always going to be people who are in some former fashion interested in medieval and Renaissance studies. So that is kind of like, no, I was going to say it limits the population, but not really, because there are attachments to MedRen stories, characters, aesthetics, like, across, I think, the population.
But particularly, you know, in who's listening to our podcast, some of the amazing people whether they're artisans or, like, historical reconstructors that we've gotten to meet over the years in addition to our, like, it's a very academic community, but we have made those connections with people locally and across the state of Ohio, too, who are engaged in MedRen matters, but are not part of the Academy.
So the combination of them, plus our Ohio State people, plus alums, plus people who have just kind of met us at different things at different points in their life. Those are our listeners, and I would love to see it continue to be able to be kind of, I think, pushed out even further because our podcast, we're interviewing a single person on kind of just a high-level conversation about their scholarship and their thoughts about their scholarship, right?
I think it would be really accessible to people in different areas just to see the breadth, I think, of MedRen studies. So we'd like to see more of that. But for now, we've got the networks we built over the years our listeners, which is really nice to hear from them. And people I think who I hear from most are probably the people who are really excited when I ask them to do the podcast.
Like when I ask Elizabeth Kolkovich and Tamara Mahadin, who had done a project on a play called The Tragedy of Miriam, a closet drama, to talk about this project that they did with Lord Denny's Players. And when I asked Elizabeth to do the podcast, she was so excited. She shared it all over Facebook.
So people are excited to be a part of it and get a chance to talk about the work they're doing. So I hear some from the listeners, but I also hear just a lot of excitement when people get to be a part of it on campus, too. 
Elizabeth Renker: I have two very different kinds of answers. One is individuals who have gotten in touch with me I find tend to fall into categories. Scholars and researchers who love the stories of the on the ground research usually in archives. They're great stories. They're riveting stories. I use the term for them in the podcast Scholar Adventures. They're detective stories and people eat those up, and I love them. And my more general audience in particular likes the story of the idea of a recovered woman from history. Now, on the other hand, this goes back to the public humanities site that I told you about at the OSU libraries, and the podcasts live there as oral histories with footnotes and transcripts, a slightly different life than the podcast. But what I can tell you is that the page, the whole Sarah Piatt Recovery Project, one of the things we can do with that, is we can track views and downloads. So, I checked this week, before coming, I rub my eyes every time I see this, but it has 107 thousand views and downloads. And the digital team at the libraries can show me the map in the world of where these are coming from. And I just look at it, and I think, who are these people? A hundred and seven thousand people. And I mean, the top hit on the whole thing, which includes the oral histories and all the newspapers I told you about, is a poem from when Sarah Piatt was not yet married. She was Sally M. Bryan. She's a teenager in Kentucky, publishing in the two most popular newspapers of the era and it's a poem called The Poetry of Heaven and it's the top hit. I would love to know who these people are. So. 
Jim Phelan: I send out the links to the Narrative Society listserv which has over a thousand subscribers, I believe.
And so I occasionally hear from people there who liked them. There's not a lot of detailed conversation. But, just to go back to the one on Henry James's The Ambassadors. I did send that to a particular James scholar who had published about James's technique in the journal Narrative because I thought he would be very interested. We didn't actually mention his name, but some of his work was sort of behind some of what we talked about, and he wrote back and he said I typically don't listen to podcasts. And whenever I do, I always find myself disagreeing. But with that one, I found myself nodding and saying yes, yes, all the time. So, that was very heartening to hear.
David Staley: Do you listen to podcasts?
Jim Phelan: I do.
David Staley: Everyone's nodding here.
Elise Robbins: I need them to fall asleep, actually. Because it, it kind of, I don't know what it is. It's something about being a millennial child who grew up in like the zeitgeist of like cable television. I fell asleep to a TV every night.
And so podcasts for me is like a surrogacy of that, except I feel like I'm learning something, too, but also it's just an interesting way to just put a voice to someone. Like thinking about the saliency of podcasting. I think one of the most significant results of it is that you're able to put a voice to the work. And I think as academics, even though we get the chance to write a lot, we don't get the chance to really talk a lot in a public forum about our work and what really makes us tick and what's fascinating to us.
So I find myself even when it comes to this podcast that I'm a producer on getting to put a voice and a face to the work is so cool. And I think it provides such a wonderful opportunity for people to really get to embody the years worth of work and experiences and emotions that they go through to produce the work that they do and to have the careers that they have that you don't necessarily get when you read an article about them or read some of their scholarship. You kind of lose out on that multidimensionality. So... 
Elizabeth Renker: Yeah, if I can just piggyback on what you've said for a minute. I think this is percolated up through our conversation as well, but especially for someone of my generation, we've seen a shift in scholarship from being a concept much more of the great person alone in a room, kind of an auteur scholar, to a model of not only public engagement of the kinds we've been talking about, but also the collaborative nature of scholarship, which is one of the things that's so great about these conversations. And I think it just opens up the whole enterprise about discovery, about investigation, and about thinking things through with other human beings. And you say, as actual personalities, you hear them talking, and it's a completely different thing reading a journal article. 
David Staley: We're modeling conversation. I know I thought of it until, until just now. This is what we're doing, I think.
Elizabeth Renker: And the willingness, willingness is the wrong term now. For some, again, a scholar of my age, it would have been very different in the era when I was in graduate school when, especially at the program I attended, we were basically trained to be afraid to ask questions because you were already supposed to know the answers.
You know, as I said, I'm Piatt's biographer, every guest I have on, I am just thrilled that I can ask this person all the questions I don't know the answers to. Can you tell me this about Kentucky in 1852? Fantastic. You know, I mean, it's, it's about that and it brings just great energy to the whole enterprise of acquiring knowledge, I think.
Jim Phelan: What Elizabeth is saying goes back to what we were talking about before in terms of research teaching public humanities, right? So she's doing research, right? But it's collaborative research, right? And this is somehow, you know, the affordance of the medium really, she's taking advantage of the affordance of the medium to do this collaborative research and it's going to produce a terrific biography.
David Staley: When can we expect to see the biography, by the way? I'm very eager, as someone who likes biography. 
Elizabeth Renker: I always love when people say to me, So, you think you'll be done? Like, what does it take? About a year? Like, well, I'm in, year 24 now. So, you know. My hope is that the draft will be complete in about the next 18 months. That's an advanced draft. And then it's going to have to go through copy editing and so on. So I have about a thousand pages now. It has to be wrestled into shape.
David Staley: I eagerly await it. So what's your question for me?
Jim Phelan: Well I would say, what do you find challenging about doing podcasts? We've been talking mostly about, the affordances, the advantages, the positive side. What about the difficulties?
David Staley: I've not encountered too many difficulties. But if there is one I think it is because I assume that the audience for Voices is not just simply our colleagues, but is a general audience.
Occasionally it's dealing with jargon or specialized language and so before we start recording, I'll often say to the person I'm interviewing, that I'll play the role of a curious sometimes say, maybe you'll define for us what, this, you and I both know what this term means I'm not certain a general audience would know.
And it's not always technical scientific knowledge. I was interviewing a colleague once that said, "So I put it in a FOIA request." And I said, "You mean a Freedom of Information Act request," but you know, it doesn't happen that often. the only other time, and I'd say it's about a quarter of the time, and I don't want to mention anybody specifically. But the number of people that are actually sort of intimidated by the microphone, and these are, researchers and people who teach classes and they come in with some, jitters, I think. That can be ...not difficult. I at least try to be mindful of that and they say when we're done, Oh, that wasn't so bad. That actually, boy, you put, yeah, put a microphone sometime in front of people. That was certainly not the case though with this group. Kaylee DeLong, Jim Phelan, Elizabeth Renker, Elise Robbins, thank you.
Jim Phelan: Thank you, David.
Elizabeth Renker: Thank you.