Is There a Transcript?

Abstract

Podcasting has grown into an established mode of cultural production, knowledge making, and community building. Though podcasts are commonly designed within multimodal content systems, transcript availability for many podcast series remains uneven. I survey the webpages of 94 English-language podcasts (two each sampled from 47 podcast production networks) in order to measure the availability and findability of official transcripts. With this research, I begin to both investigate the limits of podcasting's practical attention to access and question some of the values, priorities, and assumptions that underly the conventions of podcasting. Transcript availability matters for purposes of inclusion and for the empowerment of audiences who hope to engage with podcasting conversations for scholarship, activism, or coalition-building. This small study forms a foundation from which we can continue building the infrastructure needed to make transcripts more expected and more widely available.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.