Broadcasting Humanities Research in the Digital Age: Best Practices

In this seminar Thomas Dabbs will discuss various digital platforms and strategies that can be used to communicate and broadcast academic research.

Though researchers for some years have been using academic portals to make their work available online and social networking sites to draw attention to their research, recent developments in tech have made it much easier to build audio/video channels for outreach that can immediately engage other specialists, students, and people from the general public.

Dabbs will begin by taking a quick view of his own ongoing series of online talks, entitled “Speaking of Shakespeare,” which was established in October of 2020 and is currently available on YouTube and as an audio podcast on major podcast platforms.

Though the topic is Shakespeare, the approaches taken in this podcast are transferable to other types of digital broadcasting in the humanities that can be set up easily. This discussion will cover do’s and don’ts concerning digital broadcasting that are based on observation and experience. Also ways to catch the attention of algorithms and to use new AI chatboxes will be presented.

Thomas Dabbs is a professor in the Department of English and American Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, where he teaches Shakespeare and the Bible. He is the director of the AGU Digital Access Project and has researched digital scholarship and pedagogy under major grants awarded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and other grant agencies. From 2020 to 2024, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the peer-review Journal for the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities (JJADH). Dabbs has also published on various literary and pedagogical topics throughout his career with a primary focus on Shakespeare and early modern literature.