Tas-Icons

Team Name

Smart Monkeys

Team Members

Project Description

Tasmania has made a great contribution to Australia and the world. The state’s history is full of legendary individuals, whose stories need to be told to be believed. Now, the Tas-Icon podcast is here to tell them.

We know that stories are the best way to connect with a place, its history and its people. In recent years, podcasts have emerged as a favoured medium for long form stories to be told in immersive, experiential ways, and Australians downloaded over 500 million podcast episodes in 2021. In podcasting, stories are given the time and space they need to give people a deeper, more personal understanding of a topic or person. So, what better way to bring Tasmania’s proud history to a broader audience than a podcast?

Data Story

So how does Tas-Icon use Open Source Data? Primarily, it uses Trove, an incredible open repository of Australian historical newspapers, photos, records and more, as a source for a lot of the stories that will feature on the podcast. It also makes use of the Libraries Tasmania Digitised Archives dataset for source material. For more recent Tassie legends, it uses the ABC local online photo stories dataset and the Tasmanian Newspaper index.