Le Show Transcripts and Metadata Project: Toward a Character Machine

Principal Investigators: Dr. Rosa Eberly (PI), Dr. William Aungst, Michael J. Delayo, Dr. Jennifer Isasi

Contact: Dr. Rosa Eberly rae2@psu.edu

“Le Show Transcripts and Metadata Project: Toward a Character Machine” has the potential to make significant contributions to sound studies, digital rhetorical studies, and the digital liberal arts by exploring the spaces between transcripts and sonic data to begin the process of discerning figures of speech from figures of thought. This is significant because of the relative size of the Le Show archive, because of the cultural reach of Shearer’s work, and because of Shearer’s rhetorically rich use of language, including song, on Le Show.

The sonic corpus-in-progress of Le Show is larger than most single-creator sonic archives: from December 1983 to the present, with the exception of 6 months when he was in the cast of Saturday Night Live. Shearer has written. performed. produced, recorded and broadcast/oodcast a weekly Le Show many of them live in studio: the current total of extant 59-minute episodes exceeds 1900. If for no other reason, the program is significant in the history of radio and podcasting for its longevity.

Recently featured in the CAS 2023 Summer Symposium at Penn State.