An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously

A significant impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on academic life has been the way in which it has necessitated almost all traditional features of academic work to be mediated via screens. What is less frequently remarked on is how this ‘pivot to digital’ may also be shaping research via other media, specifically the rise of audible research content, such as podcasts. In this post, Mark Carrigan, reflects on how research listening has shaped his own practice and how an implicit assumption of its secondary relationship to reading, may limit our appreciation of engaging with research in a multi-modal fashion.