Recently I listened to Conway on Gardner, over at Mathfactor. I enjoyed this a great deal and it made me want to say something about podcasting as a format.
I think the conversation between Chaim Goodman-Strauss and John Conway (h2g2; wikipedia) is unsuitable for broadcast in several ways – it is rambling and lacks the structure of questions, has a lot of background noise and through a good part of it has an occasional loud crashing noise in the background. It needs a serious edit. Terrible! It also happens to be a fascinating listen and I am extremely grateful Chaim was able to record it and share it with us. Conway is relaxed and engaging and the lack of formality works very well. I think this points to the power of podcasting – to be able to capture these rare and interesting moments and offer a glimpse into a world that otherwise would not be open to us. If the battery hadn’t run out after an hour, I, for one, would have happily carried on listening.
Earlier in the year I spoke at the BSHM/MSOR Network workshop ‘History of Mathematics in the Undergraduate Curriculum‘ and Tony Mann of Greenwich spoke about the opportunity historians of the future have if people now use the ready availability of recording equipment to capture current mathematicians talking about their work, and pointed out my podcast Travels in a Mathematical World as a good example of this process of building up an interesting resource for the future. With Travels in a Mathematical World, I deliberately try to minimise my voice; I choose someone with an interesting story to tell and give them space to tell it. In order to be opportunistic I make the recordings using a small camera that works as a digital voice recorder wherever I meet the person, even though that can produced mixed quality recordings.
Another podcast I have recently become involved with is the Math/Maths Podcast for Pulse-Project. This is a conversation between me and American maths podcaster Samuel Hansen about what’s happening in the world of maths and in our mathematical lives. We’re hoping people will write in and share their experiences with us as well. Again, this is rough and ready and insufficiently planned, scripted and edited to be a real broadcast but it is easy to produce and I think it is a format that works really well in a podcast. It interests me greatly to see a point of view on mathematics from another part of the world, and to try to draw out similarities and differences between our perspectives on the world.
I have also recently been listening to Combinations and Permutations, hosted by Samuel Hansen. This is a group of friends getting together and chewing over a mathematical topic. It frequently wanders off topic and involves quite a lot of swearing. Again, I can’t imagine this working as a mainstream broadcast – it is too ‘maths’ for the ‘having a laugh’-chat format, yet too silly and rude for a serious science broadcast. It is very good that Samuel is able to produce this unique oddity and I am delighted that podcasting gives the opportunity for him to make this available.
These outputs are not of wide enough interest for a mainstream audience (although they needn’t be limited to a mathematical audience either) and they would need to be more polished if the idea was to draw people (particularly children) into an interest in maths. Nonetheless, I think what is produced is interesting and worthwhile and I’m glad that podcasting exists as an output for these endeavours.
Hi Peter,
Really, though, podcasts in general need to be about as tightly edited as a broadcast piece– we certainly aim for that in general. The Conway piece is less of a podcast and more of a bit of primary source material, that happens to be exploiting an infrastructure we’ve built up over time. I seriously doubt the Math Factor would have very many listeners if every piece were as long and rambling as that one!
But as a serious Gardner/Conway fan, there was no way I was going to compromise for the masses on this one!
Thanks for listening,
Chaim
Hi Chaim,
You’re right, of course, that this sort of thing needs to be the exception rather than the rule. I was a bit overstimulated having listened to it when I wrote this! I’m still pleased a mechanism exists for you to have got this to me. I know you could have posted an audio file on the web but the existence of podcasts and directories of these makes the process of finding interesting content from my niche of choice much easier.
I do though think podcasting benefits from a certain flexibility. I hear that BBC radio ‘as live’ comedy show editors go through removing every “err” and shortening each burst of applause, in order to fit one more joke at the end. I enjoy the fact that on the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast the episode length can be left to vary. My rule of thumb is if the person hasn’t said enough I encourage them to say more – and I judge this by whether they’ve told a complete story and come to a nice conclusion, rather than a fixed time limit (although I have split some very long recordings into two episodes).
Cheers,
Peter.