February 12, 2025

Podcasting History with Ellianna Thayne

Following the Community Spotlight on Diego Licea, we wanted to shift focus to another Honors student who made their own podcast episode after taking Professor Joseph Janes class, “The Record of Us All,” last spring. Ellianna Thayne has answered a few of our questions to give us more of an insider perspective into creating, producing and thinking about podcast episodes. Read their answers about the experience below:

How/why did you decide to make a podcast episode?

“I can’t take credit for the podcast – that’s a product of Joe’s genius. I took his class, ‘The Record of Us All,’ last spring. It’s a seminar class on…kind of everything?…what we have to document the history of humanity, why we have those records, and what we can learn from them now. We talked about everything from handprints on cave walls to floppy discs. I wrote my midterm paper on the world’s oldest known customer complaint, and Joe approached me about turning that into an episode for his podcast. Documents That Changed the World – that’s his podcast – is a collection of brief windows into history through a variety of documents that have influenced humanity. The more time I spend in academia, the more I care about scientific communication, and assisting in the production of this episode was a fantastic opportunity for me to practice communicating my own research to a wider audience.” 

Would you do it again?

“Absolutely. In fact, I’m working on another episode with Joe right now. This one is about the patents for the first motion picture camera, filed by one Louis Le Prince (yep, not Edison), a brilliant inventor who disappeared before he could exhibit his ‘moving pictures’. It’s a bit of a murder mystery, but we’re trying to stay within the titillating realm of patent law in an era when invention was a hot cake in the pan, ready to be flipped.

I highly recommend giving Documents That Changed the World a listen; the episodes are the perfect length, and they’ll get you telling anybody who will listen about things you never thought were so interesting (even the 1040 IRS Form). Go learn something fascinatingly niche!” 

What was the experience like/how did it challenge you or subvert your expectations (if it did)?

“A big part of the process of converting a paper into a podcast is deciding what sounds right. When you write a paper, you’re concerned with what reads well; when you write a script, it’s all about utilizing phrasing that’s palatable to a listener. Boiling a complex story down into a format that’s easily and quickly digestible forces you to focus on the ligaments that pull those bare bones together. That’s a really useful skill you can use to tinker away at abstracts, book blurbs – the sort. And, honestly, I didn’t expect to love sharing the story of Ea-nasir as much as I did. You can find me at the bar, one drink deep, going on about some random corner of history, so it was a great pleasure to refine my babbling into a sought-out product. I think I’ll keep sharing the things I enjoy via podcast; I’m considering starting my own.”