Podcasts are my favorite form of science communication to consume as an audience member. Whether biking around campus, pipetting under a laboratory hood, or on a run around Stanford’s Lake Lagunita, I often have my earbuds in streaming Radiolab, This American Life, 99% Invisible, or another production of enlightening sound bytes. Through a “Stanford Science Podcast” upper-division course within the Notation in Science Communication (NSC), I had an opportunity to try my hand at designing and crafting a podcast of my own in collaboration with a classmate. We chose to focus our 20-minute production on an introduction to philosophical, evolutionary and neurobiological features of human altruism, a dauntingly convoluted and hotly-debated element of human behavior. Through developing this podcast, I achieved a deeper understanding of the unique rhetorical platform that podcasting represents.
Because I have relished listening to podcasts in my everyday life, I was eager to pull back the curtain on the rhetorical and artistic choices made in podcast planning, recording and production. I learned that a diverse range of styles can be successful and that there are an astounding number of rhetorical choices that need to be made in order to translate technical concepts, employ supportive sound effects and develop a narrative with humanized characters, all within a lesson on science. I also realized the delicacy and importance of balancing professionalism with approachability in this medium. I discovered through this course that podcast-based science communication is most effective when it employs a carefully-crafted script but sounds to the audience like a fluid and semi-spontaneous presentation that adapts to the inferred questions and possible confusions of its invisible and distant listeners.
After exploring for myself the nuances of podcasting as a science communication medium, I had an opportunity through the NSC to bring my experience with science podcasts full circle and ask one of my favorite professional podcasters, co-host of Radiolab Jad Abumrad, about his strategies for tackling the challenges I had encountered in my own podcasting work.
Laurie, fellow NSC students and NSC Coordinator with Radiolab co-host and MacArthur Fellow Jad Abumrad