If you’re listening to Really Specific Stories, you’re a fan of tech shows or at least broadly interested in the podcast medium. You have probably heard tech podcasts with multiple co-hosts or participants before, and while these conversations require the agreement of any guests, there is inherently less pressure when it’s purely between friends, colleagues or fans of the same medium.

In the case of an academic project, there is a different dynamic to consider: the relationship between the researcher and those who are being researched. Although I am a listening fan of many podcasts, including the project case studies so far, the moment that I become an interviewer and researcher of participants, I am responsible for the ethical sharing and presentation of their narratives. Whenever you interview someone, even if you are a fellow fan, you are benefitting from their time to fuel your own project. A new power dynamic is established. You must ask yourself: what’s in it for them and what are the potential risks to their identity and reputation?

To ensure that I gain appropriate consent to publish, every participant gives their signed permission to be featured in the Really Specific Stories podcast and eventual thesis. This is the result of detailed documentation after an extensive ethical review process with my university. Still, it doesn’t sound great to record someone’s responses and just run off with their signature and data, does it? How can we make podcasting for research more ethical in its production and review?

The answer lies in a fantastic process that was formulated and visualised by writers Day et al. (2017) to gather, review and publish (hitherto marginalised) Indigenous perspectives on water management in Canada. The resulting Water Dialogues podcast was an example of community-based participatory research and focused on decolonising and breaking down unequal power dynamics in research.

The Collaborative Podcasting Process explains how to construct a podcast in which participants are involved actively in production, review and any discussion following publication. It has served as the guiding production method and inspiration behind Really Specific Stories. See a diagram of the Collaborative Podcasting Process below (Day et al., 2017, p. 209), including the steps for audio collection, review and analysis, structure and sequencing, sound editing, participant review and public release.

Every interview participant whom you have heard has gone through this process with me. They are in full control of their stories, whether requesting to remove certain elements or even the potential to refuse publication of their respective episodes, should they be unhappy with what they have heard.

So, why am I sharing this with you? Aside from my ethical obligations as an academic researcher, I believe that it is important to share this process with everyone who is enjoying the podcast. Whether you’re a podcast producer, an enthusiastic listener or you engage in any other collaborative projects in your daily working life or set of hobbies, it’s crucial to prioritise care for others. How can you be more transparent with people, open about your intentions and ensure that personal experiences and data are handled appropriately?

Every voice deserves to be treated with respect.

Source: Day, L., Cunsolo, A., Castleden, H., Martin, D., Hart, C., Anaviapik-Soucie, T., Russell, G., Paul, C., Dewey, C. and Harper, S.L., 2017, ‘The Expanding Digital Media Landscape of Qualitative and Decolonizing Research: Examining Collaborative Podcasting as a Research Method’, in MediaTropes eJournal, Vol. 7, No. 1., pp. 203–228.

Even with this strong view of mine, I’m often struck by how much I expect or rely on numbers in a range of contexts. Every day, I repeatedly check times, dates and calendar events on my Apple Watch, watch gigabytes of data download and upload for creative projects at work and for my podcasting and pay close attention to the naming of files, such as 2023-01-21 No Numbers for this very blog post, as I draft it in iA Writer on my Mac.

One particular example of numbers that has given me pause during this very project is the question of episode naming and ordering. If you’ve been listening to Really Specific Stories, you’ve probably noticed that no episodes have a number at the beginning of their titles. Since the advent of podcasting, numbers at the beginning of titles have been an excellent way of denoting how far into a podcast the producers and listeners have ventured. Not every show does this, but it’s quite common and tech shows certainly do it. Not to mention, if you engage in the stereotypical Siracusan follow-up, revisiting earlier episodes and topics, it’s easy to go back, explore and refer to previous instalments in the archive.

When I launched Really Specific Stories in July last year, I found myself instantly wanting to number the first few episodes once they were complete—then I stopped myself. The very first episode of the podcast is Introducing Really Specific Stories, which is a monologic discussion of the project and its background; following the introduction is the first interview episode, whose style matches all the episodes that follow. Would it have made sense to number the first real episode, Jason Burk as ‘2. Jason Burk’? That felt odd to me.

‘Aha!’, you may be thinking, 'Couldn’t you just have named the first episode, "0. Introducing Really Specific Stories"? That would enable the first interview episode with Jason to have the number one!’

Well, I’d say that the number zero denotes that there is nothing and it isn’t terribly elegant. I would also argue that it serves as a more of a distraction than a useful way of ordering: ‘1.’ means the first, but the second one would carry this number, which doesn’t really make sense. I’ve seen and done this elsewhere but I haven’t been totally happy with it, unless it somehow indicated a demo or pilot.

This led me to question what the value of numbers in titles would actually be. There isn’t really any benefit other than referral and navigation in archives. I decided that in the Really Specific Stories archive, there would be no numbers. When people listen to the podcast, whether they’re a fan of tech shows, an interested academic or someone who just stumbles on the site, I wish for them to dive into any episode—free of the assumption that stories should be consumed in a particular order or that one came earlier than another because it was more important. It doesn’t matter if participants are producers, listeners or both, they and all of their experiences are all equal. Their order depends purely on when I am able to approach participants and when they agree to be featured. That’s it!

To be clear, numbers make sense for technology shows that prioritise news and current events. Really Specific Stories may be a technology podcast, but it is also a narrative-based show that is free from the news and rumour mill.

For those of you who are thinking ahead, if for whatever reason a participant were to return for a follow-up interview post-project-completion, I could always include a ‘2’ (and so on) in the permalink. Numbers can play an important role technically behind the scenes but we don’t always have to stick them front and centre.

Now, to you! How much do you rely on or actively think about numbers in your day-to-day life? Do they help or hinder your thinking as a human being?

I'd love to know what you think! Feel free to let me know on Mastodon.

What you hear on Really Specific Stories is the result of practising (in public) on my earlier podcasts, Lounge Ruminator and Feld Notes, along with shared ideas with co-hosts Andrew and Jason on Hemispheric Views. Not to mention, I’ve learnt a lot from others in the tech-podcasting community, including people who’ve kindly agreed to feature as guests on this show.

For anyone who’s found Really Specific Stories or listened to other shows and is wondering, ‘What do they use and how do they do it?’, I thought that I would link to the various apps, tools and services that I use to get the job done. (None of the following is a sponsor of this podcast.)

To capture audio interviews, I generally use Zoom or Zencastr as the calling service, Audio Hijack for recording and The Levelator to ensure that all tracks are consistent. Regardless of which calling service you use, I strongly recommend Audio Hijack to record the audio into a set of distinct tracks. Check out the app interface below, with various audio outputs that can be transformed into an edited episode. Andrew, Jason and I also use this particular session whenever we record episodes of Hemispheric Views.

For editing, I use the app Ferrite Recording Studio on my iPad Pro 11-inch with Apple Pencil. This was inspired by well-known tech podcaster Jason Snell, who offers an amazing video demo of editing in the app. Since trying this method, I’ve found the Apple Pencil to be the most fun way of editing and manipulating audio—much more direct than a mouse or trackpad pointer but more precise than a finger. See the links and show notes for any of my published episodes to find a screenshot of each Ferrite timeline.

For transcription, I use the automatic service Otter.ai, which is speedy and accurate and offers an easy editing interface either in the browser or available iOS and iPadOS apps.

Once I have reviewed each edited episode with its relevant participant and have received their permission to publish, I revisit the transcript to type the links and show notes and publish the MP3 file on the Fireside hosting platform. See the image below, in which you can see my Mac running the app Magnet to tile other apps for my final publishing workflow: in the left column, my edited transcript can be seen in Pages; in the middle column, the links and show notes are drafted in iA Writer; and in the right column, Safari browser tabs show each item to be copied and linked. To the left of the computer, my iPad Pro displays the chapter timestamps in Ferrite Recording Studio.

I took the photo above while preparing the episode with Kelvin Lee of Naked Tech Podcast.

I hope that you’ve found this explanation of my workflow somewhat interesting and/or helpful! If you have any suggestions or questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me @martinfeld on Twitter.