With thanks as ever to Hazel for the words and so much else…

Podcasting the archive: an evaluation of audience engagement with a narrative non-fiction podcast series is now available in issue 2 of volume 28 of Archives, published last month. I am a co-author of the article alongside Professor Hazel Hall, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor.

In this work we compare audience engagement with a Second World War archive presented digitally in two formats as: (1) images and text in a Blipfoto journal, and (2) sound in an eight-episode podcast series (which starts with episode 1 here). The main findings reveal differences in levels of engagement for each presentation in respect of entertainment value, learning opportunities, and emotional response. Flexibility of access and authenticity of the archived material were also found to be important to audience engagement, with the nature of contextual information provided alongside the core archive key to the latter. Here we further understanding of facets of audience engagement with digitised archives while opening up new thinking on means of encouraging the general public to interact in more meaningful ways with historical records.

This article is the main output of the Platform to platform (P2P) and Heritage organisations and podcasts: scoping study (HOPSS) projects I led in 2022. The archive in question centres on the outputs of Lorna Beatrice Lloyd (1914-1942), principally her Diary of the war.

For those who do not have subscription access to Archives, the accepted version of the manuscript can be freely downloaded from the article’s record in the Edinburgh Napier University repository.