Here’s a look at a few podcasts being produced 91̽�� departments or people — and an appearance by a faculty member on the podcast “.”

“”

This podcast launched in January 2019 and is produced and hosted by with .

Connors is a lecturer, and Næsby a visiting lecturer of Danish, both in the . With 13 completed episodes, “Crossing North” is about Nordic and Baltic society and culture, and features interviews with authors, performers and leaders from Scandinavia and the Baltic, plus faculty from Scandinavian Studies and the Baltic Studies Program.

include “,” “” and “,” which asks: What does it mean to be a folk musician in a country with no folk instruments?

91̽��Notebook asked a few questions to catch up with this podcast’s journey so far.

What got this podcast started?

Colin G. Connors: There are so many incredible stories coming out of the Nordic and Baltic countries that can help us to better understand the world abroad and here at home. We have some amazing faculty in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, and we wanted to be able to share their research and what inspires them directly with the public.

The department serves a lot of different communities: Our focus is of course on the students in our classrooms, but we also serve the public interest as well. The department sees a lot of artists, ambassadors, and business leaders visiting from Scandinavia, so we wanted to share that direct connection with the public, and especially those in the Pacific Northwest with an interest in Scandinavia.

The world is looking to the Scandinavian countries right now for inspiration on how to approach all sorts of issues, including climate change, affordable health care, effective education systems and gender equality in the workplace. We hope that the podcast is an entry point for a lot of people, and a place where listeners can hear what type of work is being done, right now, here and in Scandinavia.

How long does it take you to record and produce a single episode?��

C.C.: I probably spend between 40 and 50 hours per episode. Many people don’t realize all the skills and expertise required to make a quality podcast, but when you listen you know the difference. That’s why we put so much effort into research, editing, production value, and sound design.

We believe “Crossing North” is a reflection of the university, and we want it to reflect the world-class education one can receive in the Department of Scandinavian Studies.

Who is your audience? Is the podcast finding its audience?

C.C.: Honestly, the show is for anyone who enjoys learning. All the episodes touch on relevant issues in our world. There are lessons to be learned, both good and bad, from the Nordic and Baltic countries. Sometimes those lessons come from unexpected directions because of how distant those countries are from Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, but the podcast also digs into some surprisingly deep connections that reveal how close we really are.

Different audiences have found different ways of engaging with individual episodes. A good example a recent episode, #11, which was an interview with assistant professor of Western Kentucky University about sustainability, green colonialism and Indigenous ecologies. For a lot of our listeners, this episode was the first time they were exposed to the idea of treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty, especially in the Nordic countries, but for the �����-American community here in Seattle (the are the Indigenous people of Scandinavia), the episode was an affirmation of their identities and experiences.

That piece also spoke to larger conversations happening around the world and here in Washington about the rights of Indigenous peoples, so I know the episode was shared by different Indigenous advocacy groups as well. I think that’s the mark of a successful piece of work, that people are able to bring something to it and also take something new and meaningful away.

What is your favorite episode so far? Which might be the best for a newcomer to listen to first?��

C.C.: You can’t go wrong with starting at the beginning. Episode 1, “,” is about the power of music and explores how Latvia’s folk songs helped its people to end the Soviet occupation. The episode has some great music and folk stories.

People might also enjoy episode 10, “.'” I interviewed Marc Smith, Disney Animation’s director of story for “Frozen 2” and we talked about how their research trip to Finland, Norway, and Iceland inspired the film. The answer goes way beyond costume design, and our conversation was a once-in-a-lifetime peek behind the scenes at Disney Animation Studios.

How many downloads have you had so far?

C.C.: We have reached between 200 and 750 listeners with each episode. Listeners these days are more likely to binge a series than to tune in every month, so download numbers are less representative of overall appeal in podcasting than in traditional broadcasting.

With 13 episodes, “” is still in its infant stage right now, so we are less concerned with numbers than with continuing to produce quality content, because we know that the more episodes we publish, the more likely we are to get new listeners.

For more information, contact Connors at colingc@uw.edu.

* * *

Other ongoing 91̽��podcasts:

““

Produced and hosted by , associate professor, Information School

Janes studies the cultural impact of documents and documentation and the future of libraries. The title phrase for his podcast came to him in 2012 and he has been producing occasional episodes ever since. In 2017, Janes published a book based on the series titled “Documents that Changed the Way We Live.” Topics across 54 episodes have included the Declaration of Independence’s deleted passage on slavery, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his nonexistent “list” of communist conspirators in government, an early map of cholera contamination and more. A recent, all-too-timely episode was about the . Over 500,000 downloads. Read more at 91̽��News. For more information, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

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College of Education podcasts on coronavirus, early learning, climate change and more

Dustin Wunderlich, marketing and communications director for the college, produces podcasts with faculty members and students to discuss their research or publications.

He has produced podcasts about college sports, disability studies, climate science education, culturally sustaining pedagogies and education priorities in the Washington state Legislature, and other topics. . The college also has published a list of its top .

A recent episode, released in mid-March, was an with 91̽��assistant professor of education, about the coronavirus threatening to increase inequalities in early learning.

For more information, contact Wunderlich at dwunder@uw.edu.

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Events and lectures as podcasts: Jackson School’s Ellison Center ��

Some 91̽��units are recording events and lectures and making them available in podcast form.

Among these is the in the Jackson School of International Studies. Their most recent recording , is about “Russian Grassroots Activism for the Environment and Beyond.”

For more information, write to reecas@uw.edu.

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‘Don’t disturb the soil’: UW’s David Montgomery discusses ‘regenerative farming’ on ‘Undark’

, 91̽��professor of earth and space sciences, was part of a discussion of soil health and “regenerative farming” on the podcast “.” In each episode, the series explores a topic at the intersection of science and society. This episode was titled “.”

The discussion in January with podcast host Lydia Chain and Seattle-based journalist Eilis O’Neill focused on how regenerative farming practices can improve the health of soil on farms. Scientists, policymakers and manufacturers, they noted, not only disagree on what regenerative farming can accomplish, they even disagree on its exact meaning.

Montgomery defined it with three central rules. First, he said, “Stop tilling, stop plowing. …When you plow a field, it’s highly disruptive. Think, you know, if only of what it does to the worms in the soil to plow them up.”

Second, he suggested farmers should always be growing something, to keep a living root in the soil. Finally, they should plant diverse crops, either in rotation or all at once.

“That combination is the recipe for building up soil organic matter, building up life in the soil,” Montgomery said.

His last book, on the same subject, “,” was published in 2017.

For more information, contact Montgomery at bigdirt@uw.edu.

91̽��Notebook is a section of the 91̽��News site dedicated to telling stories of the good work done by faculty and staff at the 91̽��. Read all posts here.

offers a quick chuckle, then gets to the business of exploring the 105-year history of IRS Form 1040 — the most infamous of tax forms — in a new installment of his popular podcast series, “.”

Janes, an associate professor in the 91̽�� , has been producing installments of the occasional series since 2012. In the podcasts, he explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents both famous and less known.

In this new podcast episode on what he calls “one of the American rites of spring,” Janes briefly reviews the history of American income taxation itself before turning to Form 1040, “the dullest and most mundane of documents … so deeply ingrained into the national psyche that the mere mention of its number evokes fear and dread.”

The first proposal for an income tax in America was made during the War of 1812, Janes writes, and the first successful implementation came during the Civil War. But Form 1040 didn’t debut until 1914, taking up all of page 3 of the New York Times with a full reproduction — complete with comma — as Form “1,040.”

Along the way, Janes briefly explores the history and meaning of what a “form” is, as well as why we use the terms “return” and “file” in our tax preparations.

All of the Documents the Changes the World podcasts are available on the school’s as well as on — where the series has attracted 460,000 downloads in all. In 2017, Janes turned the series into a book, called “,” published by Rowman & Littlefield.

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For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Forty years ago this month, Planet Earth said hello to the cosmos with the launch of the two probes that used gravity to swing from world to world on a grand tour of the solar system. Each bore a two-sided, 12-inch, gold-plated copper “Golden Record” of sights and sounds from Earth and its people — and a stylus to help play the record.

About 20 billion kilometers (about 12 ½ billion miles) from home now, Voyager I has since become the most distant human-made object in space. Voyager 2, in clear second place, is now about 17.2 billion kilometers away.

You could call the Golden Record a sort of intergalactic greeting card, love letter, map or time capsule — even humankind’s most epic mixtape.

“It may also be the last surviving human artifact and thus perhaps an ark,” says 91̽��Information School associate professor in a new episode to his ongoing noting the Voyager anniversary.

“It’s all these things and more,” Janes adds. “Though for me the best metaphor is a message in a bottle — likely the ultimate message in a bottle.”

In the podcast series — — Janes explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents both famous and less-known.

In this new, Voyager-inspired episode, Janes discusses the planning and creation of the Golden Record, which was the brainchild of , the world-famous Cornell University physicist who led the group that built two records and decided what information they should carry, to represent Earth to the universe.

Janes is a longtime fan of Sagan and his work: “I saw Cosmos on PBS in 1980 and was hooked, both on the mysteries of the universe and our presence in it,” he says, discussing the podcast episode. “And on the whole idea of public intellectualism — that it’s OK to be smart and articulate and thoughtful and forceful, in not only educating but advocating for science and reason.”

Sagan’s group, he says, decided early on that the language of science would be the best common means of communication, and so included on the records images to reflect basic scientific concepts and symbols “to establish mathematical and physical bases, then images of the sun and solar system.

“The first image, meant to help in the decoding process, is a circle, which I don’t think the designers ever fully appreciated for its beauty, simplicity and unity,” Janes says.

Music and sounds sent include Bach, gamelan music, Senegalese percussion, a Pygmy girl’s initiation song, Australian Aboriginal songs, and more. Rock and roll was represented by Chuck Berry’s guitar-fueled classic, “.”

The organizers were nearly all Western, Caucasian men.

“The choices they made are imperfect, as they would be in any case,” Janes says. “But they also bear the stamp of a small group of people who genuinely wanted to do well in encapsulating the human experience for anybody who might care to listen, beyond the stars or here at home.”

Even Sagan may never have dreamed that the records would really find aliens. But we can hope. And as Janes says in the podcast, “Bound up in the attempt is one of the most basic of human desires — to be remembered and understood.”

The Voyager spacecraft, not aimed at anything in particular now, continue to speed away from Earth at about 40,000 miles per hour.

And so the Golden Records take their place among Janes’ Documents that Changed the World.

Will they go on to become documents that change other worlds?

Only time — “billions and billions of years,” as Sagan might have said — will tell.

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For more information about Janes or his work, contact him at jwj@uw.edu.

• .
• .
• Learn about the PBS documentary ““

A popular podcast by of the 91̽�� Information School is now a book. “” is being published this month by Rowman & Littlefield.

Since 2012 Janes, an associate professor, has written and produced episodes of a podcast about the origin and often evolving meaning of documents. The podcast, “Documents that Changed the World,” has prompted about 350,000 iTunes .

In the podcasts, Janes explored documents as disparate as the , the , Florida’s , Webster’s , Alfred Nobel’s and President Barack Obama’s only . His inquiries go back to 2300 BCE and are as recent as Pope Benedict XVI’s , in 2013.

“What will you learn here?” Janes asks in his introduction. “Who can say, though I can tell you what you’ll find.” Readers will discover, as Janes did in his research:

• Why we use Roman numerals for Super Bowls, royalty and Olympiads
• Why every kitchen store sells measuring cups and spoons
• Why an attempt to help people vote more easily in one community may have altered the entire history of a nation
• Why about 5 percent of all the research projects you hear about aren’t what they seem to be.

“There is evil here, too,” he adds, “lurking forever in the shadows of the ‘ and of communists in U.S. government” — the latter being an example of a life-changing document that never actually existed.

Janes is clear that he approaches his topics as an educator, librarian and information scientist — but not as a trained historian or journalist.

“I know about documents. I swim in them daily,” Janes writes in the introduction. “I look at the world through information-colored glasses.

“So while most people would see the Rosetta Stone as a monumental object that has survived the centuries to represent its culture, I want to know what it says, how it got written and what happened to it.”

A main motivation for the book, he writes, is “to help people understand the breadth and reach of what documents are and can be and are becoming, and the power they have in our lives individually and as communities and societies.”

Janes answered a few questions about the book, its origins and mission.

How did Documents that Changed the World, the podcast series on which this is based, come about?

This is a great example of an idea that was probably swimming around in my head for a couple of decades before it finally emerged whole a few years ago. I’ve long had an interest in the forms and genres of information, how they change, evolve, emerge and fade away, and the podcast (an intriguing documentary form in and of itself) seemed a great medium for telling those stories in an engaging and accessible way.

You expand the definitions of a “document” here, to include such items as the famous 1963 Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination or even the 1987 AIDS Quilt. Why do you see these, too, as documents?

As someone trained both as a professional librarian and as an information scientist, I’m used to thinking very broadly about what a “document” is, or can be, but not everybody does.�� Say “document” to most people and they’ll think something grandiose like the Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, or something everyday like a memo or contract. All of which is true, but there are lots of things that “document” something, either intentionally or unintentionally, and those all form part of the record of us individually and collectively.

So yes, the Zapruder film and the AIDS quilt, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the sketch of the Space Needle that everybody knows about but nobody seems to have, or even Joseph McCarthy’s “list” — that never existed — of communists in the State Department; they’re all part of the document story.

How far do you think the definition of a “document” reaches — or may reach — here in the digital age?

The idea of what a document is or can be continues to change with technology, as we moved from clay to papyrus to print to film and vinyl and magnetic media and now progressively digital. So many of the documentary forms I cover in the book began as analog (the X-ray, the scholarly journal, the dictionary, maps, letters, telegrams, checks and so on) and most if not all of those now have digital versions which are superior and increasingly frequently used.

And yet many things persist in print.�� Alfred Nobel’s will, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Catherine Brewer’s diploma, are all physical objects, and it’s difficult, so far, to comfortably think of those kinds of things being digital-only, for reasons legal, sentimental, and otherwise.

Of all the episodes that became chapters in your book, what are some favorites, and why?

Who can pick a favorite? Well, hard as it is, there are some I’m particularly proud of.�� The not-real “letters of transit” from “Casablanca,” not only because I’m a classic film fan, but also the rich history of travel documents I got to dig into. The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, for her surprising backstory, and because I used my grandmother’s 1906 second edition as inspiration. The “We Can Do It!” poster, universally assumed to be Rosie the Riveter, but she isn’t — except she now is.�� And perhaps the one that stays with me more than others is the very first, the oldest one: the , a 4300-year-old Sumerian hymn composed by the high priestess Enheduanna, who is widely considered the first known author; a breathtaking concept.

What has been the listener reaction to the podcast since you started in 2012?

Very positive; I love hearing from people who discover these and then start binge-listening.�� I’m struck by the ones that have become the most popular, “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Book of Mormon, and also by the one which freshmen students voted for in two different seminars as the one they most wanted to dive into:�� the 18 ½-minute gap from the Watergate tapes.�� Maybe they were onto something.

What do you know now that you didn’t know before you started this project five years ago?

Besides how to record and edit a sound file, and compose digital music, and make something I do in my office at home sound terrific? After exploring several dozen of these documents and forms, some patterns emerged:�� the importance of individual people (who gave us Robert’s Rules and the Richter scale and the 1854 cholera map and the year 2000 “butterfly” ballot) for their persistence and vision and occasional mistakes which profoundly changed so many parts of our lives.

Each of these documents is created or used for some reason, to fulfill some social role, to exert some kind of power, and that shoots through all of human history in ways large and small, every minute of every day.

What would you hope readers will take away from this book?

I hope people come away feeling that they learned something important and valuable – and enjoyed themselves. I’ve been trying to achieve that in my teaching for over 30 years, and this project feels like yet another way to do that.

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For more information about “Documents that Changed the Way We Live,” contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Timing is everything, they say. In the latest episode of his podcast series, of the 91̽��Information School explores how an overload of critical information helped trigger the stock market crash of 1929, and thus the Great Depression.

“This is a story about fortunes lost, lives ruined, a world plunged into a decade of depression, the end of an era,” Janes says in the podcast. “And, a story of infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, nobody pays any attention — until it goes wrong.”

In the podcasts, Janes, an iSchool associate professor, explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents both famous and less known. 91̽��Today presents these occasionally, and all of the podcasts are available online at the iSchool .

Janes focuses here on the information itself, as provided by the stock market ticker tape. Introduced in 1867, the ticker tape was just a specialty telegraph printer for stock transactions. Its use skyrocketed, and by 1887, fully 87 percent of Western Union’s total revenue came from stock traders and, in a suitable pairing, racetrack gamblers. With the ticker providing near-real-time updates on transactions, Janes says, “financial information was now in the hands of the many.”

By the late 1920s, however, it was becoming apparent that this technology, moving at 300 characters a second, could not keep up with dramatically increasing trading volume, which reached into the millions daily. People knew that the ticker was suffering delays and unable to keep up — but with profits pouring in, it was hard to care.

“On October 21, things started to turn,” Janes says.

“When it started to fall, and the ticker fell behind, and then when it became clear that things were getting worse fast, it was the not knowing — and moreover not knowing what you didn’t know — that helped to fuel the panic,” Janes says in the podcast.

The stock ticker ran 152 minutes late on Oct. 29, 1929, the day most associated with the crash. The crisis deepened over the months until a share of U.S. Steel bought at $262 in the high times of summer 1929 was worth all of $22 by the summer of 1932.

Janes said the episode was inspired by his reading of ��John Kenneth Galbraith’s book “,” where he learned of the ticker tape delays
“and how that helped to feed the growing sense of panic.” The book served as a starting point for his research.

In preparing the podcast, Janes said, he was surprised how even in 1929 there was such a focus on “immediacy and timeliness of information in the market.” An effort was underway to speed up the transmission of information, he adds, but it didn’t get there in time.

All of which makes this, as he says in the podcast, “an unusual example of a document that is likely simultaneously the record and cause of events.”

So, this is a story of infrastructure, but also, Janes says, “a business story, a technology story, even a psychology story. To me, though, the critical aspect here is the information itself, the numbers and symbols tumbling out on the little strip of tape spelling doom for a way of life for so many.”

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To learn more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

The subject of latest is close to the heart of many academic researchers: the threshold for “statistical significance” — and the man who, in a “surprisingly offhand manner,” set that mark for ages afterward at 5 percent, no more no less.

The man in question is English statistician and world-class evolutionary biologist , and the document is his 1925 book, “Statistical Methods for Research Workers.” It embraces the question: How certain of something do you have to be in order to say it is likely so; or as Janes writes, “How much likelihood, what probability of a result being wrong, we should be willing to live with.”

Modern researchers, he said, would refer to the threshold as “as a p level of .05, a 5 percent probability that a research result doesn’t indicate a real effect but rather comes from some random source.”

In the podcast series, Janes, an associate professor in the 91̽��, explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known. All the podcasts are available online through the iSchool , and on , where the series has more than 250,000 downloads.

Janes, who has taught statistics and quantitative methods courses for many years, said he knows the topic so well he found the episode challenging to craft without overwhelming the listener or skipping “what I thought were important details.”

Still, even he found more to know about Fisher: “I didn’t know all the fine details and particularly the rather offhand nature of how his musings wound up becoming hard and fast strictures in the emerging field of statistical analysis,” Janes said.

Crucially, Janes notes that “when you have a hard and fast rule, it’s hard and fast, so a study result that just makes it across the line, winding up with a p value of .0499, gets to be called ‘statistically significant,’ and one that falls just short, with .0501, doesn’t.” Though he quickly adds that studies in the medical and pharmaceutical fields often have much more stringent thresholds, at 1 percent or even a tenth of a percent, because they involve the health and safety of the public.

Listen to the podcast to learn more about the man, as Janes writes, “whose work and ideas you’ve probably never heard of but who has had an effect on nearly every statistical study — and the way we understand the way we understand the world — for nearly a century.”

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To learn more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

It’s twilight time for printed dictionaries, whose word-filled bulk weighed down desks, held open doors and by turns inspired and intimidated writers searching for the perfect word.

Lexicography — the making of dictionaries — has gone digital. Though a few are still published, the dictionary’s time as printed, bound documents is almost up.

In this meantime, turns the attention of his podcast series to the man as firmly identified with dictionaries as Hershey is with chocolate, , and the 70,000-word “American Dictionary of the English language” he published in 1828. It was one of the last dictionaries to be compiled by a single person.

In the podcasts, Janes, an associate professor in the 91̽��, explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known. All the podcasts are available online through the iSchool , and on , where the series has more than 250,000 downloads.

Webster, who lived from 1758 to 1843, was at times a failed farmer, an uninspired teacher, a state representative, a co-founder of Amherst College, a copyright advocate and a friend of George Washington once dubbed by biographer as a “forgotten founding father.” He was also a Federalist and dedicated revolutionary who deeply loved his country.

Though the first English dictionary dates back to 1604, it was Webster and his 1828 volume that was credited with capturing the language of the new nation. Janes said, “This dictionary was the first serious articulation of American English as it was growing increasingly distinct from the British variety.”

And that was clearly Webster’s intention, as stated in the dictionary’s preface: “Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.”

Webster was also enthusiastic about spelling reform, Janes notes. “He had more luck there than most; we have him to thank for Americanized spellings of ‘favor,’ and ‘theater’ and ‘defense'” as well as the word “Americanize” itself,” Janes says. “But he didn’t get away with ‘tung,’ ‘ake’ or dropping the final ‘e’ from words like ‘doctrine.'”

Words define languages, Janes says, and in turn languages help to define cultures and societies.

“And people define words, as the last man who tried to define them all himself knew — in the process trying also to define and distinguish his developing nation.”

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For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series

With the Florida presidential primary a day away, is recalling the time of butterfly ballots and “hanging chads” — the presidential election of 2000 — in the latest installment of his podcast series, Documents that Changed the World.

In the podcasts, Janes, a professor in the 91̽��, explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known.

“This one has been on my list for a long time,” Janes said. “But now that we are officially in The Wackiest Election Year Ever, it seemed an apt time to look back at the last one to hold that title. Having lived through the seesaw of late 2000, I was surprised at a couple of critical details that somehow I never remember hearing about.”

To briefly review that election: Bill Clinton’s two presidential terms coming to their stormy end, Vice President Al Gore ran against George W. Bush, Texas and son of George H. W. Bush, our 41^st president. The election was so close it hinged on the state of Florida. Recounts and litigation took the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on Dec. 12 — more than a month after the national election — decided in favor of Bush. Gore had received more votes nationwide, but it was Bush who moved into the White House.

In his podcast, Janes reintroduces us to , the longtime elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, Florida, who designed the controversial ballot. LePore’s good intentions toward seniors led her to increase the font size of the candidates’ names, thus spreading them across two pages of the Votomatic punch-card ballot instructions.

“In her desire for readability, she sacrificed — almost everyone believes inadvertently — another key design principle: usability,” Janes says in the podcast. Subsequent analysis would suggest that thousands of people may have mistakenly voted for ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan due to the ballot confusion.

Things, as perhaps you remember, devolved from there.

Soon the mechanics of paper hole-punching — and “chads,” the bits left over afterward — became national news. Photos of elections officials inspecting ballots with magnifying glasses hit front pages everywhere (one pair of which, Janes notes, is now in the Smithsonian Institution). All America suddenly learned about hanging chads as well as dangling ones, dimpled ones, and even pierced, pregnant or swinging ones.

Janes notes that in elections that are not close, such issues as ballot design and error have less impact. “Decidedly not the case in 2000,” he adds. But it’s also true that the American electoral system is a “highly decentralized patchwork … where critical decisions are made at the state and county level.”

Almost no one pays attention to the obscure details of voting booths and ballot-tallying, Janes says, “unless something goes terrifyingly astray and then people freak out until they forget about it all over again.”

Sample ballots had been sent beforehand to officials throughout Florida, Janes says. “It wasn’t until people tried to actually vote — to actually punch holes — that it all started to go wrong.”

Janes feels it appropriate to give the long-since-retired LePore the last word.

Someone asked her, “Who do you believe won Florida?” That is, who was the rightful winner of the 2000 American presidential election?

Listen to the podcast for her answer.

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For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu. All the podcasts are available online at the iSchool , and on , where the series has more than 250,000 downloads.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series

In his Documents that Changed the World podcast series, 91̽�� Information School professor explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents, both famous and less known.

But in his latest installment, Janes might make you wonder how differently American history might have unfolded, had 168 powerful words not been excised from the Declaration of Independence at the last minute.

“I wanted to tell the story of the passage itself and the great void its absence left,” said Janes, “and dig a little deeper into the process of its removal by the Second Continental Congress in 1776 and how little we know about it.”

The — beginning with “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him …” — were a condemnation of George III, “the Christian King of Great Britain,” and his participation in and perpetuation of the slave trade.

“Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold,” the lost passage continues, “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”

In his podcast, Janes takes the listener through what’s known — and still unknown — about the removal of the passage, which was but one of dozens of edits to the Declaration. Jefferson himself, years later, claimed the words were “struck out in complaisance to South Carolina & Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves.”

Janes, long interested in doing an episode on the idea of deletion, was reading the website when he was reminded of the lines cut from the Declaration. The site, the creation of 91̽��history professor , is a 13,000-page online reference center dedicated to providing information on African-American history, “and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world.”

Janes also notes Jefferson’s own “deeply conflicted position” on the subject, as the founding father owned 180 slaves at the time, and 87 more by 1822 — none of whom were freed upon his death. “There are few clean hands here,” Janes writes; “at least a third of the signers (of the Declaration) were slaveholders and even in northern states abolition was gradual.”

He said, “It’s not an original thought, but it has always struck me as a dark bargain: Leave the clause in and the Declaration fails (though perhaps not independence itself; that was agreed to two days earlier), take it out and it succeeds but at the cost of a quarter of a millennium of kicking the can down the road — as we still are today.”

The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is also available on , where it has now passed a quarter of a million downloads so far.

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For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series

A glance at his kitchen bookshelf gave 91̽�� Information School associate professor the idea for the latest installment of his Documents that Changed the World podcast.

What he spied was his grandmother’s 1915 second edition of “The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook,” more popularly known as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. By far the most famous cookbook of its era, it is a document, to be sure, that changed the world of food preparation.

In the podcasts, Janes explores the origin and often evolving meaning of historical documents both famous and less known. 91̽��Today presents these occasionally, and all of the podcasts are available online at the Information School .

“I had ‘recipe’ on my list of document types to look at for a long time,” Janes said, and seeing that book “made it click. And Fannie’s story is remarkable, given her background.”

As Janes describes in the podcast, Farmer was of a piece with the “domestic science” movement of the early 20^th century, which brought greater attention to food and nutrition to the quickly urbanizing country. She was 30 years old, a likely childhood polio survivor, when her employer paid for her enrollment in the Boston school with the hope she might become a teacher of cooking.

“And did she ever,” Janes writes. Asked to stay after graduation, Farmer took over the school and ran it for five years before starting her own.

She published her , containing some 1,800 recipes. Publisher Little, Brown lacked confidence in the work and made Farmer pay for printing the first run of 3,000 copies. She wisely retained the copyright, however, bringing her a handsome profit as the book went on to sell in the millions.

The very “structure and form of what we think of today as a recipe” owes much to Famer’s influence, Janes writes. She stressed the importance of exact measurements and of being methodical and purposeful in cooking, “and yet makes it all seem engaging and easy to prepare.”

Farmer’s stated aim, Janes notes, was “to elevate cookery to its proper place as a science and an art.” And in that, she succeeded magnificently.

Of course, recipes now come via apps and smartphone videos as often as they come from actual books. Janes, something of a cook himself, said, “Every time I struggle with a new recipe or technique, I wonder if there’s an instructional video that might help to supplement the written word — which I think Fannie would have heartily embraced.”

But he added, “I’d like to think her New England upbringing would draw the line at Facebook posts of meals — yikes!”

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• The Documents that Changed the World podcast series is also available on , and is approaching a quarter of a million downloads so far.
• For more about this or any of the Documents that Changed the World podcasts, contact Janes at jwj@uw.edu.

Previous installments of the “Documents that Changed the World” series