I’m Jeremy Morris and I’m currently based in Madison, Wisconsin (though I grew up on the east coast of Canada and spent time in Montreal and Toronto before landing here). I’m a prof in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I teach classes on the history of the Internet and on Podcasting. My research focuses on new media used in everyday life, specifically what’s happened to the music industry over the last twenty years as a result of digitization. I’m particularly interested in what these “new” formats (e-Books, mp3’s, streaming video, apps, etc.) mean for the ways we make and use the media we love. I’ve also loved writing about (and using) music technologies and their role in helping with the issues facing today’s artists. Outside of school/work at the university, I was also the host and producer of a podcast for 5 years about the music scene in Montreal. The podcast was for a popular website devoted to local music, arts, culture and food called Midnight Poutine, and even though the site is now shuttered, I am still in love with both the music in Montreal and the poutine.
Right now I’m working on a big project to try and index/archive a large database of podcasts, in order to make them more searchable, researchable and preservable for anyone wanting to study all the great audio that’s taking place in podcasting. Called PodcastRE (short for Podcast Research, but pronounced podcaster), our database currently has over half a million audio files and the metadata associated with them. We’re still in beta with the website, but I’m hoping to hear more from MTFers about what features would be useful for a database such as this. I’ll be taking part in the MTF Research Symposium activities on Thursday and Friday and looking forward to a bunch of great discussions (especially those on the Curated Music Exhibitions and Digital Archives theme).
I hope my work, with its concern for artists as creators and sound workers, helps contribute to healthy and vibrant local cultural scenes. I also hope it helps users make better sense of the role new media and sound technologies play in their everyday lives.
See you at MTF Stockholm!
