00:00:55.540So we've been on a short break from the podcast, but I just couldn't stay away.
00:01:00.780And recently, Apple picked five Black creators disrupting their fields to spotlight for Black History Month.0.92
00:01:06.460And I'm really pleased and humbled and honored to say that the Tangodi community were among the voices that Apple says are disrupting technology.0.55
00:01:23.240And in honor of all this, I'm revisiting one of my favorite episodes, my conversation with archivist Jocelyn Robinson about her work preserving Black voices, literally, by archiving audio from historically Black colleges and universities.
00:01:37.560I hope your month is full of celebrating Black history, the Black present, and beautiful Black futures.
00:01:42.580And we'll be back soon with more episodes of There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:04:21.500And by 2015, I had quit my day job and was producing part-time and teaching part-time.
00:04:29.360And I had always in the back of my mind had this idea that I, you know, would love the thought of doing long-form audio at HBCUs because it's not something that's typically taught in mass communications courses and programs.
00:04:48.940and at when i was working initially um i used uh some archival audio from wyso that is mainly from
00:04:59.820the 60s and 70s into the 80s um and so it reflected the the civil rights era and also
00:05:07.980the movement into black nationalism the the peace movement um anti-war movement of the 70s
00:05:14.140And I just became enamored of historical materials, kind of related to my background in the museum community.
00:05:25.460There's around 100 roughly HBCUs in existence today, and a third of them, just about, have radio stations.
00:05:33.840And I thought, you know, if WISO has this kind of material, it was also a college radio station initially at Antioch College in Yellow Springs.
00:05:42.800If that college radio station has such incredible material, and I mean, it's incredible material and the voices of people who were significant from those periods are represented there, as well as the history of the local area and the college and the state and, you know, what was going on in the world.
00:06:03.920But I thought HBCUs, being the crucible of the civil rights movement in so many ways, must have some materials too.
00:06:11.740And so I had I had thought about it. And when I quit my day job, I went back to school and got a grad certificate in public history with a with a focus on archives so that I would be knowledgeable about the archival process and about the materials and their preservation.
00:06:31.060And in the course of doing that, I kind of fell into a preservation activity that was
00:06:38.560initiated at the Library of Congress, the Radio Preservation Task Force.
00:06:43.240And that just opened up this whole world of people who were seeking out and figuring out
00:06:49.860how to preserve and use these materials all over the world.
00:06:53.700So I was aware of this world, but I became kind of immersed in it.
00:06:57.920And I became a member of the African-American and Civil Rights Radio Caucus of the Radio Preservation Task Force and went to conferences and did presentations with this idea that wouldn't it be great if we could survey the materials at historically Black colleges and universities and someday if I can find the funding for it, that's what I'm going to do.
00:07:22.880Jocelyn got a grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation to survey HBCUs about what kind of audio were housed at their campus radio stations.
00:07:32.040How tragic is it to think that an audio recording of Rosa Parks could be collecting dust in some campus basement somewhere?
00:07:39.480Well, Jocelyn wanted to make sure these radio stations had access to the ability to archive their audio.
00:07:44.760What I found was that radio stations at most colleges are not necessarily included in the institutional records management or preservation efforts that the college normally takes on.
00:08:02.900and that it was an opportunity to connect the radio stations with the institutional archives on their campuses
00:08:10.820and at least get a dialogue going, if not get the institutional archives to take on the task of preserving the audio material.
00:08:21.100So what was it exactly about HBCUs? Why did you feel like it was so important to be doing that work on HBCU campuses?
00:08:28.160Having sort of an intimate understanding of the challenges that are faced by HBCUs and also their importance to the American higher education landscape and to our communities.
00:08:46.160I mean, there were times when, you know, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers were, you know, trained primarily at HBCUs.
00:08:57.780And that's one of the things that distinguishes a historically black college from a predominantly white institution.
00:09:13.340And, you know, here in Ohio, we're a bit isolated. But as I got to know my counterparts at other campuses and got to know their institutions, you know, and realizing how important they are to Black people in this country and particularly in the Southeast, they are hallowed ground.
00:09:36.920And anything that took place there is worthy of not just preservation, but also honoring to look to it as an example of resilience.
00:09:50.460I don't know that we can even imagine, those of us who do not live in the former Confederate states, what life was like and how our institutions, our churches, our communities, but especially centered around our historically Black campuses were refuges, places of, you know, where the intellect and ingenuity and
00:10:20.460Creativity of black people could shine and thrive.
00:10:25.760And, you know, that's an important legacy to honor.
00:10:31.560And with audio, it's such an intimate and, you know, emotionally charged medium.
00:10:42.940And I think that, you know, finding materials, which is very difficult.
00:10:49.140Well, radio is ephemeral and not a lot of recordings were made at times.
00:10:58.580You know, a quarter inch tape was expensive.
00:11:00.480The playback equipment was, you know, expensive and maybe few and far between at times.
00:11:07.580That changed, you know, when cassettes became more prominent.
00:11:12.920But certainly when it was reel-to-reel, you know, that's a big bulky machine with a big bulky tape.
00:11:18.420So, you know, to try to find anything. And also, you know, the thing about radio stations is that they often change format when the license changes hands. And what happens is whatever was happening before kind of gets swept up and thrown out into the dumpster.
00:11:40.060So to make sure that anything that might be of significance at an HBCU radio station is, you know, found and preserved is kind of, that's a mission for sure.
00:12:27.720She is from Charlotte, North Carolina, and she is a, you know, Black Southern matriarch of a big Southern family.
00:12:35.300And the University of North Carolina reached out to her to do this archival project where she sat down and talked about her life with a researcher.
00:12:44.600And I had read clips of this before, and I really enjoyed reading it.
00:12:48.200But one day I found the audio of her telling these stories.
00:12:53.780And something about hearing her voice was so different.
00:12:59.120I had read what she had said before, but hearing her say it in her own words, I've always felt that there's something intimate and magical about the medium of audio. It's so intimate. It's in your ears. And it just can hit you in a different way, I feel.
00:13:19.600And I don't know, I guess I've always, when people ask, you know, why audio? I never really have a good answer, but I think it just always comes back to that intimacy.
00:13:28.660Well, one of the things that creates that intimacy, if you think about it, is that if we're thinking of other media and we're thinking of especially a visual media, what you see is what is in the frame.
00:13:42.120What you see is what the person who made that image, whether it's moving or not, but what the person you're seeing, what the person that made that image chose for you to see, what they curated for your eyes.
00:13:57.880And with audio, I tell people, you can't use Photoshop on audio.
00:14:21.300You hear the birds singing or the crickets chirping.
00:14:23.580and so not only do you hear all of that you hear the emotion in someone's voice you hear
00:14:30.620them take a breath and think about what it is they're about to say you hear them choke up
00:14:37.440you hear them laugh you know so it's and and you hear it all um without a filter the same way that
00:14:48.160that, you know, that with a visual, that image is curated. So I think that that's what creates
00:14:57.360that sense of total experience, even though it's just coming through your ears. And there's
00:15:05.640something about that vibration that, you know, it's on a vibrational level, you know, that even
00:15:10.580in a recording, even in a facsimile, you can feel that vibration.
00:15:18.200When I first got into podcasting, I was very self-conscious because I was very new at it.
00:15:23.120And so I would try to edit my audio to make it seem as though I was just the most well-spoken
00:15:29.280person. I never used a filler word. I never stopped and restarted. I never had to catch
00:15:36.580my breath. I never, you know, cleared my throat while I was thinking. And it's funny because
00:15:40.680those are all the little markers of somebody figuring something out in real time. And that's
00:15:45.500actually why you listen to audio, because you get these unfiltered, unedited moments that don't,
00:15:51.020that aren't photoshopped, like you said. And I think the more that I, when I realized that the
00:15:57.960reason why I like audio is because you get to hear the crickets chirping and the this and the that,
00:16:02.520And allowing those little nuances to stay in my own audio, it really just, I feel like it all clicked for me. It really helped me in the craft of audio storytelling.
00:16:13.900Mm hmm. It's I think what it does is it helps us stay in touch with our humanity. You know, it even if it's even if something we're listening to is highly produced, you still get that that sense that that, you know, you're hearing it.
00:16:34.120It's that hearing and listening are active, you know, sorts of things.
00:16:43.840You know, you have to let your brain absorb, you know, what's being heard and make sense out of it.
00:16:52.760And I think there's a humanness to audio work that really kind of transcends the fact that we are using these highly technical and technological tools to preserve it and disseminate it.
00:25:07.800And not only for people newly entering the field and a pivot in their careers, but people who have been in the business for many, many, many years and have weathered all its changes as it has progressed and are finding themselves now getting boxed out or overlooked for something younger, newer, fresher kinds of things.
00:25:32.360So, you know, I think because I work with historical materials and I have a certain amount of firsthand knowledge of some of the events and so forth, you know, it has served me really well.
00:25:48.280But, you know, I also have found that I need to push my skill set and my producing chops.
00:25:58.040I have to just keep pushing it beyond that so that I'm doing work that is, you know, topical and, you know, again, new and fresh and, you know, keeping not just myself, but listeners engaged with what's going on in the world.
00:26:17.660So, yeah, I've just been really fortunate. It was all kind of a perfect storm of goodness.
00:26:30.960You talked about ageism and how, I don't know, I guess I feel like we have this very pervasive culture where we're obsessed with 30 under 30 lists and people who are sort of young and successful.
00:26:46.680And that's a great story, but it does discount the wisdom and the skill set and the experience that comes with age.
00:26:56.500And I feel like we are so obsessed with youth that we can overlook that, yeah, if you if you came to audio production in your 50s, that would mean that you would come with an entire skill set, you know, of like many years of experience.
00:27:12.580And I think that because we're obsessed with youth, we don't allow for that to be as meaningful and as good of a thing as it really, truly is.
00:27:24.960You know, and a lot of that is very cultural. And, you know, I mean, one of the things that I have been working with lately has been community-based storytelling projects. And much of that is focused on gathering and preserving and sharing the stories of elders and going back to, you know, a cultural mindset in which the wisdom of elders is held in high esteem.
00:27:51.960esteem. And that is, you know, very much a traditional communities hold elders in high
00:28:03.180esteem. And, you know, trying to move back toward that, I think, is very important. But, you know,
00:28:09.200work with oral histories and with, you know, interpreting some of the, say, for instance,
00:28:16.700interpreting some of the events that some of the historical audio might be representing is, you know, who better than someone who was actually there and who experienced it, you know, in their own lifetime.
00:28:28.560So, you know, really honoring the voices and the stories of elders as part of this work and finding that, you know, many of those elders are quite capable of, you know, producing and being, you know, active participants in that story gathering and that storytelling.
00:28:50.220So, you know, that's, I think, really important work. But truly, it's a cultural thing in the U.S., for sure. It's not quite as, I think, intense in other places as it really is here. It definitely is a cult of youth in the U.S.
00:29:12.000And, you know, one of my favorite things to tell people is like there's this old Richard Pryor bit where the junkie and the wino are talking and the junkie says something to him of the effect.0.99
00:29:28.220It's like, you old fool. And the wino says, boy, you don't get to be old being no fool.0.99
00:30:31.300If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:30:37.220This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:30:49.700I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:30:56.800I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:30:59.940From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:31:06.340It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:31:14.260Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:31:23.420Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:31:38.320I have to tell you, I mean, I hope this isn't like too much information, but I'm speaking to you today from my brother's condo in Richmond, Virginia.
00:32:03.440But when I brought him in on when he came to the hospital on Monday night and he was not doing so well, all I could think was that I wish I had brought my recorder so that we could have a conversation so that I could hear his stories and get them on audio.
00:32:21.320That was all I could think was, God, I wish I had my recorder. God, I wish I had my recorder so that we could have a conversation. Because I often worry that we all love to have our elders in our lives. And then when they pass on, how meaningful would it be to be able to have an archival of those stories in their own words?
00:32:47.820That was all I could think was, like, I hope I haven't missed my chance to get his stories on audio.
00:32:54.940That was, like, the number one thing in my mind.
00:33:10.620You know, but I have a bag that I love that has my kid in it.
00:33:15.160And I just make sure that if I'm going to be someplace where I don't know what's going on necessarily, that it's in the car.
00:33:24.760You know, I just take it with me everywhere.
00:33:27.980But the other thing is, you know, you have a recorder probably, you know, in your back pocket and done right, you can capture some pretty decent audio with a smartphone.
00:33:46.420And so in a pinch, you've got something right there that you could use.
00:33:52.720And, you know, StoryCorps has done a marvelous job of making it possible, you know, democratizing the whole notion of preserving stories.
00:34:06.460And their interface for recording is really, really good.
00:34:13.580But you can get a pretty decent recording if you have an iPhone with voice memo.
00:34:19.340So voice memos is a perfectly good recorder.
00:34:28.220On this podcast, what I try to do is sort of create a kind of audio archive of underrepresented people and their contributions to technology, to digital culture, to internet culture, specifically because I feel those things can be kind of ephemeral.
00:34:43.460They can, you know, the Internet changes so quickly and people forget about what came before.
00:34:48.100And so I wanted to chronicle some of this.
00:34:52.280What would your advice be to make sure that more underrepresented communities and voices are having their stories included in records and archives so that we know they existed?
00:35:04.280Well, particularly with podcasts, there are a number of people who are developing podcast archives and seeking those folks out is important.
00:35:19.400But also public libraries are undertaking some audio preservation. We work with the Greene County Public Library here to preserve some of the digitized material from the WISO collection, which includes oral histories and so forth from the civil rights era.
00:35:45.160So making sure that you approach your existing institutions to be able to make sure that they're including your materials in their collections as a member of that community, I think is an important thing to do.
00:36:02.300And I think that that's something that archivists as a profession are looking at more of knowing that they are gatekeepers for cultural materials and knowing historically what that has meant, in which, you know, white supremacy has created barriers to that material being collected and preserved.
00:36:29.040So, you know, there are many, many archival projects and archives that are, I think, opening their collecting policies to right wrongs that have been perpetrated in the past.
00:36:49.540So I think it's a changing situation, but certainly, again, you know, the HBCU community is a place where our stories are important and are considered, you know, worthy of preservation.
00:37:07.340And once again, I can't sing the praises of something like a community-based project that I'm doing at West Dayton Stories, which is working with the African-American communities in Dayton, Ohio, to collect and preserve stories, or what StoryCorps can do with community-based projects.
00:37:31.500They have a whole tutorial that can teach an organization about how to collect and gather stories and preserve them through the StoryCorps at the Library of Congress or through their own means in the libraries or what have you in the community.
00:37:47.540So, you know, there's that, but I think part of it too is there's an understanding, you know, that materials are somewhat ephemeral themselves, you know, magnetic tape deteriorates, color photographs fade, you know, film sticks together and can no longer be played or even digitized.
00:38:15.280And the whole digital environment also is not permanent there.
00:38:21.500You know, if you have materials that are preserved, so you think, on a hard drive and that hard drive fails, that material is gone forever.
00:38:34.120So, you know, digital preservation is a whole world unto itself.
00:38:39.940And, you know, look for libraries often will have, you know, little preservation workshops for families and individuals.
00:38:50.760And sometimes there's a lot to be found there.
00:38:53.020But then there are some wonderful websites that have, you know, material that people can read to figure out how to preserve their photographs or preserve their old tapes or what have you.
00:39:07.100And the Library of Congress has a really good website for that.
00:39:09.940So, you know, there's there's information out there, but it really does help to talk to somebody who's in the know.
00:39:16.700And oftentimes that's, you know, somebody you can find at your local library.
00:39:22.680I love how oftentimes it always comes back to libraries, like we forget what a resource they are.
00:39:28.700Oh, they're they're so important, you know. Yeah, they are community touchstones for sure.
00:39:36.980in many communities. And, you know, it's really one of those places where civic life can take
00:39:44.020place. And that's their charge. And that's what they're there for. So it's not just a repository
00:39:49.180for books and reading material, but there's so many other things. And today's libraries
00:39:56.320are places where there are maker spaces and they have podcasting studios and they do training in
00:40:03.440podcasting and or audio or oral history gathering and all of those things. So, you know, they're
00:40:09.660really great resources for all of it. Yeah, I mean, you're a great resource, too. You've really
00:40:14.720created this model of how institutions can be thinking about preservation and how all of us
00:40:19.580can be thinking about preserving the stories for our own families and our own communities
00:40:23.220so the next generation can learn from them when we're gone. So, you know, to that end,
00:40:27.460what do you hope that people say about your work 100 years from now?
00:40:30.220Well, I hope that, for one thing, that the HBCU materials are still available and accessible to students and researchers and community members to tap into, to know what life was like in some respects before, you know,
00:40:53.220the civil rights movement was able to turn a tide of experience for black people in America
00:41:01.560and what happened throughout that and then beyond. And, you know, if you don't pay attention
00:41:09.960to history, you're doomed or repeated, of course. And that's something that I think we're realizing
00:41:15.100today that we are experiencing because we haven't paid good enough attention.
00:41:22.960We haven't paid attention well enough to what's happened in the past and what's been done in the past.
00:41:29.720And, you know, that's an important thing to do.
00:41:32.440So, you know, 100 years from now, I wanted to start with the HBCUs,
00:41:36.680but I'm also hoping that the model that we set through the projects that are about preserving radio material
00:41:46.080from historically black colleges and universities, it was a model for others to follow
00:41:52.500And that other marginalized and, you know, others whose voices have been left out of the American dialogue have a template to follow so that they too can preserve their voices.