Dan Russell Teaches Us How to Search for Audio Files

Dan Russell, whose book and other work I've referenced dozens of times on this blog, recently published a good lesson on how to find audio files. His post is not a lists of places to find audio files (I have a list of those here). Dan's blog post teaches readers how to locate specific sounds and podcasts. 

There are three parts to the lesson and each one is useful on its own.

• How to locate podcasts about a particular topic across multiple podcast platforms.
  
  
• How to search within the transcript of an audio recording. That part introduced me to a couple of new tools including this one for analyzing audio and video. 
  
  
• How to search for specific audio sounds like the bells of Notre Dame. 

Applications for Education

As more and more podcasts, and useful ones at that, are published they are going to become a good source of information for students to use as part of larger research projects. Knowing how to locate podcasts about a specific topic is going to become an important skill. Furthermore, being able to create transcripts and search within transcripts is a skill that will be important to students who create their own podcasts and videos. 

On a related note, here's a video that I made that shows you how to create a transcript of a YouTube video. 

Whiskers and Transcripts

One of the many things that I love about being a dad to two little girls is all of the questions they ask me. Many of their questions are about things that I haven't thought about in decades. For example, the other night my four-year-old asked about our cat's whiskers. Specifically, she wanted to know why cats have whiskers. My answer was that cats have whiskers to help them feel and sense things near them especially in the dark. For my four-year-old that was a suitable answer. If you'd like a bit more in-depth answer as to why animals like cats have whiskers, SciShow Kids offers this good video lesson.

While watching the video above, I accidentally clicked on the "open transcript" button on YouTube. That reminded me of this tutorial I published about how to create a hyperlinked transcript of almost any YouTube video.