PodcastRE: Preserving Podcasting Through Digital Media By Brady Houser
Podcasts have become a major part of modern media, but they are also much harder to preserve than something like a printed book or newspaper. Episodes can disappear when a creator stops paying for hosting, removes an RSS feed, or when a platform changes the way it operates. PodcastRE is a digital humanities project that tries to solve this problem by creating a searchable archive of podcasts. The website describes itself as “a searchable, researchable archive of podcasting culture” and gives users the ability to search podcasts as well as use different visualization tools (PodcastRE, n.d.). Overall, PodcastRE is an effective digital humanities project because it preserves a form of media that could easily disappear while also giving researchers ways to search and analyze podcast history. However, the website is clearly designed more for research than casual browsing, and some parts of its design and accessibility could be improved.
PodcastRE is mainly an archive and database, but it also includes tools that make it more than just a collection of audio. The home page is fairly simple. There is a main search bar along with links to an advanced search, a keyword word cloud, and a term-frequency graph. The navigation also includes pages for information about the project, visualizations, help, submitting a podcast, and logging in. This setup makes the purpose of the website clear almost immediately. Instead of having a homepage filled with unnecessary information, the search function is placed right in the center of the project.
The size of the archive is one of its biggest strengths. PodcastRE began as a much smaller project in 2014, but a 2026 article about the project reports that it has grown to more than 30,000 podcast feeds and about six million individual episodes. The collection includes podcasts from the early history of the medium through the present and includes shows from several countries (Pettis & Morris, 2026). This is important because no individual researcher could realistically listen to millions of podcast episodes. PodcastRE uses digital technology to make that amount of material manageable.
The project is built heavily around RSS feeds. RSS is one of the technologies that allows podcast applications to automatically find and update episodes from creators. PodcastRE regularly checks these feeds, saves information about new episodes, and puts the metadata into its database. That metadata can include things such as titles, descriptions, keywords, dates, and creators (Hoyt et al., 2021). This makes PodcastRE a good example of why the digital format matters. A normal physical archive could store recordings, but it would be much harder to instantly search millions of records or compare patterns across thousands of different shows.
One of the more interesting features is the visualization section. PodcastRE includes an Associated Keyword Cloud. A user searches a word, and the website shows other words that frequently appear alongside it. Larger words in the cloud mean that the terms are associated more often. Users can then click a word to see podcast results related to both terms. This could be useful for researchers who want to understand how different topics are connected within podcast culture. For example, someone researching sports podcasts could potentially look at what other subjects are commonly associated with a specific sport or league.
The Term Frequency Line Graph is another useful tool. It allows researchers to enter a term and see how often it appears in PodcastRE’s metadata over time. Users can organize the results by month or year, select a specific time period, normalize the results based on the number of episodes in the database, and choose between different graph styles. This is something that a traditional archive could not easily offer. Instead of manually going through thousands of episodes trying to find when a subject became popular, a researcher can use digital data to identify patterns first and then investigate the individual podcasts.
At the same time, the data has limitations. Hoyt and the other researchers behind PodcastRE explain that podcast metadata can be inconsistent because creators control much of the information placed inside their RSS feeds. One podcaster might give detailed descriptions and keywords, while another could provide almost nothing. Some creators also change titles or use keywords to make their podcasts easier to find online. Because of that, a graph from PodcastRE should not automatically be treated as a perfect measurement of everything that was being discussed in podcasts at a certain time. It shows patterns within the information PodcastRE has collected. This is an important bias to understand when using the site for academic research.
There is also bias in what gets archived. Earlier versions of PodcastRE automatically collected popular shows from Apple Podcasts charts while researchers also worked to intentionally include podcasts from women, Indigenous creators, people of color, and other voices that might not appear on mainstream popularity lists (Hoyt et al., 2021). The website also lets users submit an RSS feed themselves, and there is a separate option for contacting the project about older podcasts that are no longer available online. This is a smart feature because it allows the archive to grow beyond whatever an algorithm decides is popular. Still, PodcastRE cannot represent every podcast that has ever existed, especially podcasts without accessible RSS feeds.
The website’s user experience is mostly straightforward. The simple navigation and large search function make it fairly obvious where a new visitor should begin. In that sense, the site does not make the user think too hard about basic navigation. However, once users move into the analytics tools, the experience becomes more academic. Terms such as metadata, normalization, RSS, and associated keywords may make sense to a digital humanities researcher but could be confusing to someone visiting the website for the first time. More short explanations, examples, or tutorials directly beside the tools could make the site easier for new users.
Accessibility should also be considered. The basic parts of PodcastRE rely heavily on text, forms, and clearly labeled navigation, which can help make the website easier to move through. However, the word cloud and line graph depend heavily on visual information. The size of a word represents frequency in the word cloud, while the position of points on a graph communicates changes over time. Users with visual disabilities could have difficulty receiving the same information if there is not an equivalent text or table version of those results. Since PodcastRE is an academic resource, offering downloadable tables or clearly described alternatives alongside every visualization would improve accessibility and could also benefit researchers who need exact numbers instead of graphics.
One of the biggest successes of PodcastRE is its use of the digital medium itself. The University of Wisconsin–Madison describes the project as an attempt to aggregate, search, analyze, archive, and preserve podcast material before it is lost. This is important because media history has already shown what can happen when preservation is not taken seriously. The university points to the massive loss of early film and radio recordings as one reason for preserving podcast culture now instead of waiting until later. PodcastRE is therefore not simply a website where people can discover something to listen to. It is attempting to build a historical record of a medium while that history is still being created.
Overall, PodcastRE is a strong example of what a digital humanities project can accomplish. It takes something as large and difficult to organize as podcasting and gives researchers ways to preserve, search, compare, and visualize it. Its search database and analytical tools accomplish things that would be extremely difficult through traditional forms of research. The project still has limitations involving incomplete metadata, the podcasts included in its collection, accessibility, and the learning curve of some of its research tools. However, those limitations do not take away from its main value. PodcastRE shows how digital technology can be used not only to create new media but also to make sure that today’s media does not disappear before future researchers have a chance to study it.
References
Hoyt, E., Bersch, J. J., Noh, S., Hansen, S., Mertens, J., & Morris, J. W. (2021). PodcastRE Analytics: Using RSS to study the cultures and norms of podcasting. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15(1).
Pettis, B., & Morris, J. W. (2026). Subscribe, follow, save: Podcast preservation in the platform era. Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2026.2676597
PodcastRE. (n.d.). PodcastRE: A searchable, researchable archive of podcasting culture.