What an ambitious and important project! I love the concept, and that it is meant to be a "long, slow project."
It probably should be paced slowly due to the scope and complexity of material. I think a slower pace should also help "smooth" the exponential change rate of technological progress into a narrative listeners can follow, without sacrificing too much detail for the sake of listenability.*
I'm going to sub right now.
*I listen to a lot of podcasts, and this happens more than it should, IMO.
Edit: I haven't seen a podcast with its own git repo before, but it makes a lot of sense, and I imagine it is immensely helpful as a creator. I took a quick glance to satisfy my curiosity, and the notes I looked at (show notes) were comprehensive and really well done. This is inspiring, no joke; I have renewed enthusiasm for my own podcast-to-be. Thank you for that!
It's all scripted. Google books and archive.org have been great resources.
There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles. I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable.
I'll be putting more of these tools in the repo and eventually put the search systems online for the general public. Google's navigation of annualised volumes is a joke so I'm going to do better.
I've also cleared out a closet and installed acoustic foam. I tested a number of microphones... I'm sure acting like it's a real thing. Hopefully I'll keep at it.
The hardest part has been trying to get it done on a weekly schedule. I don't have this week's done for instance. There's two parts I really want to fit in and I need to find a place for them. I'm going to try to take a nap and get up in an hour or two and work a bit more.
I don't know if I'll be able to pull the weekly schedule off honestly. I'm going to try to sweat it out a bit longer and hopefully I'll get faster as I accumulate more notes, references and materials.
>It's all scripted. Google books and archive.org have been great resources.
Do you use any off-browser tools to navigate archive.org / google books? if so which? or the web sites always sufficed?
>There's also a couple torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles.
Could you expand a bit on this? This sounds very interesting for a project of mine! Where did you find torrents of 17th-19th c. journal articles? It sounds like the copyrights on these would have expired, did you find human curated database of this era journal articles? how comprehensive is it, all journals of this time span?
(one of the things I would like to do is map out the transition from alchemy to chemistry, for example WP states Lavoisier convinced the scientific community that sulphur was an element and not a compound, which sounds utterly bizarre for essentially all of us who were exposed to chemistry as a deductive system without the abductive reasoning that led to it)
>I've made my own sqlite databases from the meta information and ran ocr over them to make things searchable.
That is pretty amazing work!
> I'll be putting more of these tools in the repo and eventually put the search systems online for the general public. Google's navigation of annualised volumes is a joke so I'm going to do better.
I'll just reiterate that I find it quite impressive. The above just reinforces that.
I mentioned that I listen to a lot of podcasts; have been, in fact since ~2006. I've watched the evolution of the medium over the years, have seen many pods come and go, and have witnessed many content creators experiment with different methods of attaining/maintaining/interacting with listeners.
Later on, as the form started to mature and gain more of an audience, the issue of monetization became more and more important and necessary; I've seen many experiments focused on that facet as well. This was still before "podcast" had entered the vernacular for most people I would classify as tech-adjacent--the general public was still not really aware of podcasting. Those who were didn't exactly advertise their listening habits yet, and podcasts were almost like an embarrassing thing one did in private.
You've done so much correctly, at least from my observations over the years, from the get-go.
If some of your ideas come to fruition, it would be a boon to those who'd like to make a podcast of their own, especially if technical or academic in nature. I love the work you've done, appreciate the open distribution of your expanding toolkit, and also want that auto-hyperlinked footnotes a whole lot.
I am doing what I can to encourage you for two reasons. One, I am personally interested in the subject(s) being covered, and I think projects like this are needed if we aren't going to lose a lot to the mists of history in the face of accelerating acceleration, to borrow a phrase. Two, I want the tools for my project and do not possess the requisite skills to make them myself, although I'm working on it.
It probably should be paced slowly due to the scope and complexity of material. I think a slower pace should also help "smooth" the exponential change rate of technological progress into a narrative listeners can follow, without sacrificing too much detail for the sake of listenability.*
I'm going to sub right now.
*I listen to a lot of podcasts, and this happens more than it should, IMO.
Edit: I haven't seen a podcast with its own git repo before, but it makes a lot of sense, and I imagine it is immensely helpful as a creator. I took a quick glance to satisfy my curiosity, and the notes I looked at (show notes) were comprehensive and really well done. This is inspiring, no joke; I have renewed enthusiasm for my own podcast-to-be. Thank you for that!