From 2017 – 2021 I was a senior multimedia producer & educator at Hart House (University of Toronto) where I had to opportunity to design and facilitate a podcasting/community radio program for a team of work-study students. Together we crafted a collaborative environment for experimenting with multimedia storytelling, broadcast media production, and multi-channel outreach.
During that time, we created a rich body of work, convening multigeneration conversations with artists and community organizers – hosting them in an intentionally slow studio setting, as we dared to share and connect and play together.
Our success as weavers of content & community got the attention of a team of researchers that asked us to model our podcasting practices as a praxis for interview-based research. Our model for collaborative storytelling was so successful that we mentored several departments across the University of Toronto tri-campus on how to bring narrative storytelling in their classrooms, research and community building.
Sadly, like many collections these days, this archive isn’t formally held anywhere. It’s former pages on Hart House website now serve 404s. While many of these episodes are available for listening on their website, there is currently no structured record of the 55 episodes that emerged from our time in studio studio. But no user will be able to happen upon them because they buried between broken links, with no sitemaps for discovery.
As an attempt to preserve this collection we were so proud to create and a chance revisit the depth of these conversations, this is the start of an archive of our community radio & podcast episodes that I am annotating with structured metadata and publishing using ImageSnippets.
