2009 Podcast Award Competition

The Association for Political and Legal Anthropology welcomes submissions of original podcasts for our inaugural Podcast Award. Podcasts will be judged on the basis of relevance, creativity, and production quality. We especially encourage podcasts that speak to topics raised in recent and forthcoming issues of PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review (see below).  For example, hold a reading group and record the discussion, record a public talk and a conversation in response to it to it, or read from a classic text that inspired a PoLAR author or is relevant to a particular PoLAR article.  We encourage faculty members to have students submit course-related podcasts, and look forward to submissions from faculty members and students alike.  Winners will receive free APLA dues (and PoLAR) for one year and the winning podcast will be made available on the APLA website.

The deadline for submissions for our inaugural Podcast Award is October 30, 2009

General Guidelines

Podcasts for submission:
•    must address topics pertinent to the association
•    may include either or both audio and video content
•    must be no shorter than 10 minutes and no longer than one hour
•    may include lectures and talks, audio recordings of book sections or articles, roundtable discussions, student projects, or any other suitable and related content
•    may ideally be related to recent and upcoming issues of PoLAR:

• May (Volume 32 Issue 1): contents at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/rss/journal/118902509
• November (Volume 32 Issue 2): Indigeneity/Native Politics and Law
• Forthcoming (Volume 32 Issue 2 Supplement): At Disciplinary Edges: Methods and Dialogues.  CfP at http://www.aaanet.org/sections/apla/call-for-papers.html
  

•    must be submitted in mp or Quicktime format.  See instructions below for formatting.

Creating, Formatting, and Submitting Podcasts

Audio Podcasting Basics: To make an audio podcast you can record with a handheld digital audio device or with a built-in laptop microphone and edit this content to make a finished podcast.  Useful software programs for editing audio files and converting files are available as free downloads online.  In particular:

•    Switch can be used to convert audio files from a number of audio formats (such as AIFF, wma, mp4) into other formats.  
•    Audacity is a user-friendly audio editing program for editing out sections of an audio file, combining and layering audio files, amplifying sound, reducing background noise, and so forth.  

For novices, useful Audacity tutorials can be found at: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Tutorials or http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Creating_a_simple_voice_and_music_Podcast_with_Audacity

Converting and Editing Audio Files in Audacity:

•    If you are using Audacity to edit an audio file you created on an external digital recorder you may have to convert the file before importing; Audacity only recognizes certain formats, such as AIFF and wav.  You can use Switch to convert your file into one of these formats before importing.  
•    One common issue with audio recording is background noise and overall volume. To improve the audio quality for desired content use a directional microphone when recording if possible and place the recording device close to the person or persons speaking.  Background noise is much harder to control but can be lessened through post-production editing.  For reducing background noise and raising the sound levels on desired content (the speaker/s), use features found in the ‘effects’ tab in Audacity.  ‘Normalize’ and ‘Equalize’ can improve the audio quality, and ‘Amplify’ can increase the overall volume if speakers’ voices are quiet or too far from the microphone.  See the following link for more detailed information on improving the sound quality: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Tips

Formatting and Submitting a Podcast:

•    When you’ve finished editing you podcast in Audacity, under File select ‘Save as mp3’.
•    To submit the file you will upload it to the APLA ftp server.  If you don’t have ftp client software, you can download an open source (free) ftp client like Cyberduck.  Once you’ve downloaded the program, you will be able to connect to the APLA ftp server and to select your files to upload.  

•    You must upload 2 files, your podcast and a text (Word or PDF) file with your name and contact information, university affiliation, podcast filename, podcast title and an abstract (250 words or less).

Note: For Mac users, Garageband is also an excellent program to use for audio editing; follow the tutorial for creating and exporting a podcast and/or search under the help menu for tips and tricks.  For video podcasts, iMovie can be used for video editing and outputting as a Quicktime movie.  


If you have questions about or problems submitting a podcast, please contact Christine Hegel-Cantarella at chegel@gc.cuny.edu.