Overview
Podcasting has become a fashionable way to present history online to public audiences. Most notably, there is now Backstory, a podcast series put together for National Public Radio by leading historians Edward Ayers, Brian Balogh and Peter Onuf. The House Divided Project at Dickinson has also experimented with a podcast series on Soundcloud featuring Prof. Todd Wronski, our “Voice of Lincoln.” You can see what one Dickinson student (Leah Miller, Class of 2013) attempted with that series when she organized a close reading of a Lincoln document.
Challenge
What Leah did was to edit different sound clips together using an open source tool called Audacity and then posting them in the cloud-based service, Soundcloud. See if you can successfully create a short edited podcast that includes different sound files woven together seamlessly as Leah did.
Guidance
You can check out an overview of sound-editing here or view a video tutorial on Audacity below.
To test out your capacity for sound-editing, you should consider combining one of Todd Wronski’s Lincoln podcasts with a quick overview from yourself. You don’t need to conduct a full close reading of your own (unless you want to), but try to introduce and close the quote with your own voice before and after the snippet from Wronski.