It is possible to communicate academic thought without being reductive, but that rarely happens in U.S. news media. Instead, academia is mined to produce journalistic edutainment: a media product that turns information into entertainment. Edutainment is pervasive, particularly in U.S. public radio and podcasting, the medium in which the authors work. A major reason edutainment dominates audio is that it is difficult to convey complex ideas in sound. Listeners, unlike readers, cannot control the speed at which they engage with material, which puts them at constant risk of getting lost. In U.S. public radio, the default solution is to make information entertaining. This approach has encouraged strict rules about everything from the length of stories and use of sound to the tone of narration and narrative structure. These rules all but ensure the production of edutainment. It does not have to be this way. Audio can be a powerful medium for academic work. To succeed, one must not pander but instead challenge the rules and explore new formats that honor the complexity of academic work. This is the story of our attempt to do just that with a new audio show, Ways of Knowing.

This study investigated how semantically relevant auditory information might affect the reading of subtitles, and if such effects might be modulated by the concurrent video content. Thirty-four native Chinese speakers with English as their second language watched video with English subtitles in six conditions defined by manipulating the nature of the audio (Chinese/L1 audio vs. English/L2 audio vs. no audio) and the presence versus absence of video content. Global eye-movement analyses showed that participants tended to rely less on subtitles with Chinese or English audio than without audio, and the effects of audio were more pronounced in the presence of video presentation. Lexical processing of subtitles was not modulated by the audio. However, Chinese audio, which presumably obviated the need to read the subtitles, resulted in more superficial post-lexical processing of the subtitles relative to either the English or no audio. On the contrary, English audio accentuated post-lexical processing of the subtitles compared with Chinese audio or no audio, indicating that participants might use English audio to support subtitle reading (or vice versa) and thus engaged in deeper processing of the subtitles. These findings suggest that, in multimodal reading situations, eye movements are not only controlled by processing difficulties associated with properties of words (e.g., their frequency and length) but also guided by metacognitive strategies involved in monitoring comprehension and its online modulation by different information sources.

In this article, Angela Butler explores postdigital community through an analysis of Complicité’s The Encounter. All facets of personal and civic life are permeated by the digital to such a degree that we are living through a period termed ‘the postdigital’. Postdigital communities are commonly formed, and nearly always sustained, through online networks. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s utopian performative and Victor Turner’s communitas, the article argues that rather than acting as an ancillary commentary platform, postdigital communities are now a principal component of certain theatrical experiences. With increasingly isolated lives, there is an evident appeal to work that taps into the joy of being alone, together. Angela Butler is an independent scholar based in Dublin who works in the technology sector. Cultural transformation is the central pillar of her ongoing research. With an eye to new and future technologies, her work is concerned with posthumanism, identities in transformation, and affective encounters.

Do judges telegraph their preferences during oral arguments? Using the U.S. Supreme Court as our example, we demonstrate that Justices implicitly reveal their leanings during oral arguments, even before arguments and deliberations have concluded. Specifically, we extract the emotional content of over 3,000 hours of audio recordings spanning 30 years of oral arguments before the Court. We then use the level of emotional arousal, as measured by vocal pitch, in each of the Justices’ voices during these arguments to accurately predict many of their eventual votes on these cases. Our approach yields predictions that are statistically and practically significant and robust to including a range of controls; in turn, this suggests that subconscious vocal inflections carry information that legal, political, and textual information do not.

In this second of a series of two articles, Daniel Bates considers some of the most popular online platforms which are available to host and promote audio and video content for purposes including knowledge-sharing, teaching, research dissemination, and profile-building.

In his first of two articles, Daniel Bates explains the process for creating high quality audio and video recordings to capture knowledge or experience in your organisation, either for internal or external consumption. The article arises from a paper delivered at the 2015 BIALL Conference. The second article will consider the online platforms which are available to host and promote such content.