Here’s the audio file of my pitch in Albany yesterday. It’s just under
twenty minutes (5.8MB). The more I think about it, the more I think I got
a few things wrong. Well, maybe not horribly, embarrassingly wrong,
but not quite right, either. There’s a zany, complementary slideshow, but
in my first try I wasn’t having any luck converting it for web viewing, and so I
gave up in favor of other, more pressing work. I’ve got a lot of that piled
up–pressing, pressing work. Late April: ugh.
Cool. Podcasting as a way to distribute academic essays. Enjoyed it!
Thanks, Andy. I don’t know yet whether I will make podcasting a regular part of what I do here, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the performance of the conference paper. It’s been helpful to pre-record and playback to hear how it comes off, listen for cadence and rhythm and so on. Plus, well, it was a rather small audience, as might be expected at a regional conference.
For future podcasts I suggest you provide an accompanying list of references because it is hard to give full attribution in a conference paper reading without interrupting your speech.
Also, can I suggest when encoding into MP3 you could easily do it at much lower quality levels without losing any audibility which would make your podcasts more accessible to people without broadband. I find 16 kbits per sec mono 11KHz is fine…
I appreciate the pointers, David. Fwiw, I have a ms version of this paper complete with citations (ironic, eh?, since the CCCC paper you inquired about wasn’t in such ship-shape w/ respect to documentation). And I’ll take into account the rendering at a lower quality. Basically, this was the best I could do given the other demands, obligations, and so on. But yeah, lowest non-degraded rendering makes sense.
I think that podcasting does add something – even when the text of the paper is available. Firstly, it may get around rules prohibiting distribution of conference papers and secondly (and most usefully for me) it allows me to keep learning and thinking even when I am on my bicycle or doing the dishes!
If you want to degrade MP3 files, you can open them in Audacity and do a “save as” into the lower quality – doesn’t take long.
I switched to a lower quality and dispensed with 13MB of file size. It’s not as low as you suggested, yet good enough for now. Tks again for the suggestion.