‘Podcasting the archive: an evaluation of audience engagement with a narrative non-fiction podcast series’ has been accepted for publication by Archives journal in October 2024. This contribution is the main output of the AHRC-Creative Informatics funded Platform to platform project. It is co-authored by Dr Bruce Ryan, Professor Hazel Hall, Marianne Wilson, and Dr Iain McGregor.

Our article starts with an extensive literature review that covers published research on the use of podcasting in cultural heritage, and on podcasting and audience engagement. Then we outline the phases of the practical work undertaken in the Platform to platform project. This project brought to a listening audience a young English woman’s war diary entries written between 1939 and 1941, which had been made publicly available for the first time as online images and text between 2019 and 2021. Then we cover the design, implementation, and results of an empirical study to compare the reception of two digitised presentations of the same core archive material. We argue that our research contributes new perspectives on the theme of audience engagement with digitised archives, and opens up avenues for further academic enquiry in this area.

Further details of the article can be found in the abstract below, and in the article’s record on the Edinburgh Napier repository.

Abstract of ‘Podcasting the archive: an evaluation of audience engagement with a narrative non-fiction podcast series’ to be published in Archives 58(2), October 2024