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Description
The project will consist in creating a series of podcasts concerned with the reflection of the current world and individual problems in literature. The purpose of the project is to inform about literature in an enticing way and attract a new audience (from Generations Z and Alpha) to reading literary works. For experienced readers, the podcasts will present another opportunity of staying up to date with today’s literary scene. The form of a podcast has a great advantage, compared with written text – to follow podcasts one does not have to focus on reading, and it enables putting a better emphasis on the core of the message.
Topics: The podcasts will bring information about literature and about how closely it is connected with our perception and understanding of general problems. We will not deal with bestsellers but with books that do not shy away from problems and lead us to reflection, let their authors come from Czechia, Taiwan, Belarus and Israel. We will therefore call attention to works concerned with the issues of minorities, climate change, social inequalities, new forms of human and family relationships, and human rights.
People involved: Experienced editors of the iLiteratura journal will act as hosts. The guests will be also sociologists, natural scientists, doctors and political scientists, including guests from abroad. They will provide another context and broader framework for literary works.
The advantage of a podcast is that it can reach beyond large cultural centres, to communities where literature does not belong to common topics of everyday life or where it is not so accessible. The renown of the iLiteratura journal guarantees the podcasts will find their audience. They will be attractive because of their broad scope, erudition and interdisciplinary approach.
The iLiteratura journal has not yet created podcasts, therefore the project includes an internal training course in the form of two workshops.
Summary of project results
The project contributed to the promotion of book culture – showing that literature is attractive to other social and scientific disciplines, has a social impact. The podcast format proved to be a good communication channel to not only reach but also engage Generation Z and Alpha.
The project team gained valuable skills as well as confidence in a new area of activity. The podcast contributed to the promotion of association activities in general.
As planned, a podcast was produced containing the total of 21 episodes. Their topics were varied in order to reach a wide audience (gender, generational, interest and social diversity). In order to open up the standard audience to issues that are not always preferred, more universal topics were chosen (the attractiveness of reading for children, maternal and paternal roles vs. literature, Nordic myths and legends in today''s world, the future of libraries, the EU as a literary topic) alongside these more specialized issues (LGBT+ people, the accessibility of literature for Roma audiences, sexual predation in literary portrayals, the climate crisis).
The uniqueness of the project lied in the fact that the debates about books and their topics did not take place in a closed bubble of literary traffic, but also experts from other fields were invited (political scientist, psychologist, historian, natural scientist) and representatives of the youngest generations Z and Alpha to talk about them.
The output is the podcast, available from podcast applications and also from the website https://www.ilipodcast.cz/. The purpose (training of the implementation team, preparation and implementation of the podcast, publicity) was fulfilled. There were no unintended effects, only a positive result: the listening rate exceeded the expectations, reaching 7118 downloads to date. Thus, the expected risk - that the podcast will not be successful in competition with others - has not been confirmed.
The intention was to create a podcast about book production that is not visible enough in the Czech environment – we mainly focused on foreign (translated) literature and confronted it with experts outside the literary profession. The bestsellers with a light-hearted tone were avoided and books that make readers think about the problems of today''s world were promoted.
The podcast format allowed to reach out to and also really engage the youngest generation (students between 10 and 25 years old).