How to Make a NiSERCast

Published May 28, 2022

It has been a year since the last episode of NiSERCast, and it has been more than two years since the idea of a science communication podcast led by NISER students was initially conceived. Partly for archival reasons and partly for self-indulgent reasons, here are some reflections from my involvement in the project.

For those who don’t know, NiSERCast is an outreach project started by a few NISER students, including myself, consisting of a podcast in which students have conversations with professors about their research and their life in academia. We were only able to release one episode, and when the second wave of the coronavirus hit India, we lost momentum and have unfortunately been on a hiatus since May 2021.

Prologue

It was the February of 2020 when Spandan, who was also my roommate at the time, brought up the idea of a student led podcast based around conversations with NISER professors. As we imagined it at the time, it was going to be like MIT OpenCourseWare’s Chalk Radio, but more informal, less professional, and with lower production values. Over a weekend, Spandan, and I whipped up a very quick and dirty website and configured an Atom feed for the podcast, and then we sent out a wider call for volunteers via the Science Activities Club (SAC).

I must say, I was quite overwhelmed by the initial response. Many people, both my seniors and juniors, were extremely enthusiastic about the podcast. There were meetings and discussions in which the basics were fixed—the division of responsibilities: hosting, production, editing, social media; the basic format; the schedule; and perhaps most importantly, the name. We also talked to professors and made a list of potential guests. Finally, we decided to start recordings in March, after our midsemester exams which were scheduled for the last week of February.

And then, of course, the coronavirus hit.

Nuts and Bolts

We picked up the project again, almost exactly a year later, in March 2021, after social distancing norms were relaxed a little by the institute. Student volunteers fell into two major categories: (1) hosts, who were responsible for inviting professors as guests and, well, hosting the podcast, and (2) people responsible for recording, editing and releasing episodes. Before approaching the Dean of Student Affairs (DoSA) with a proposal, we did the following:

• Hosts approached professors to gauge their interest, and we made a rough schedule for recording the first 5–6 epsiodes. We (very ambitiously) planned to record every weekend and release an episode every two weeks.
• We decided to hold recordings in the Discussion Hall in the School of Physical Sciences (SPS), which was closed at the time due to social distancing restrictions. We talked to the SPS Chairperson and got their permission for using the Discussion Hall.
• We talked to the Student Gymkhana and the Drama and Music Club to borrow their recording equipment (more on this later).
• Finally, we recorded a short intro in the SPS Discussion Hall with the borrowed recording equipment to test our record-edit-release pipeline, and released it as the zeroth episode on the Atom feed.

After making an intro jingle, a small redesign of the NiSERCast website, and getting required permissions from the DoSA, we were ready to start recording.

A rough format for episodes was decided after a discussion among all volunteers. To keep the podcast accessible to laymen—especially high school students who might be considering a career in the sciences—we decided that each episode should have two hosts, at least one of whom should be from outside the professor’s department. Initially, we decided to let the professor and the hosts talk for about two hours, which could then be cut down for a one hour episode. In retrospect, I feel like this was a mistake. With our courseload and other academic engagements, and having only one group of four people to look after recordings, editing, and releases, cutting a two hour conversation down to an hour every two weeks, in addition to supervising the recordings every week, was just not feasible. To be fair, however, these glitches would have probably evened themselves out if we were able to do a few more episodes.

Recording Setup

If you have listened to NiSERCast, you may have noticed that it does not sound like a professionally produced podcast. However, I am going to describe the recording setup we used anyway, for reference.

The technical side of things was handled by Anirudh, Jyotirmaya, Spandan and I. Each of the three participants talked into an Ahuja AWM-490V1 wireless microphone, whose outputs were fed into Audacity for recording via a Yamaha MG10XU mixer and a Focusrite 2i2 Scarlett audio interface. Hosts, professors and the producers also wore headphones to monitor audio levels. We got the mics, the mixer and a few cables from the Drama and Music Club, the Focusrite audio interface belonged to me, we asked hosts to bring headphones, and we had to get things like ¼-inch to XLR cable, aux cables, and a five-way audio splitter on our own to make everything work.

Website and Atom Feed

I rewrote the NiSERCast website, more or less from scratch, in March 2021. It is built on top of Jekyll—which provides an easy templating system and manages the Atom feed—and is deployed with GitLab Pages while being hosted in a GitLab repository.

For the Atom feed, I started with the basic template that a new Jekyll project comes with and added extra tags according to Apple’s, Google’s and Spotify’s feed requirements. To make sure that everything is working as expected before submitting the feed to Apple, Google and Spotify, I used feed validators at Podbase and W3C.

Outreach

After releasing the first episode, we hit a small bureaucratic bump in the road. As this podcast is an outreach activity bearing NISER’s name that is going to be released to the general public, we were also supposed to talk to the NISER Outreach Committee and get their permission separately. This could have been pointed out when we sent our initial proposal to the DoSA, but we caught the Outreach Committee’s attention only after the first real episode was released. The fact that our first guest, Prof. Varadharajan Muruganandam, is very opinionated did not help either.

Anyway, after a period of uncertainty, in which we were not even sure that we would be allowed to continue the podcast, and a few weeks’ delay, we got the clearance to continue as long as we made it clear that the opinions expressed were personal opinions of the guests and did not represent NISER’s views.

Conclusion

When the second wave of the coronavirus hit, almost all of the volunteers chose to return to their homes; because of a variety of personal reasons, and poor management of the pandemic by NISER’s administration, we could not keep producing the podcast. After the campus reopened last December, Jyotirmaya, Spandan and I were halfway into our final year and were extremely busy with our master’s theses and PhD applications, and it became nearly impossible for us to organize recording sessions from scratch again.

If you have made it this far into this post: thank you for putting up with my ramblings. I hope that this has been useful in some way for people who want to continue the podcast, or who decide to start a similar project at NISER. All in all, I am extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish while working with various constraints and limited resources. And I must express my deepest gratitude and thanks to everyone involved in the project.