The four episodes of the BBC’s Industrial Radio Ballad – The Ballad of John Axon, Song of a Road, Singing the Fishing, and The Big Hewer – revolutionized how radio producers used radio voices to share more diverse accounts of the working class, using a soundscape undeniably inspired by British and American revivalist folk music. But at the same time, despite its formation of a leadership team and a set of subject voices that seemed to be more “gender diverse,” the project did little to further gender parity in Post-War Britain. Instead, the BBC Radio Ballad can be memorialized as a project that set new paradigms for recording crisp and authentic “actuality,” challenging former barriers of technology and location.
If I were to conduct this project again, I would use a more advanced Python model to identify the specific British dialects presented in each episode. I would then compare the model’s results to classifications of dialects made by a voice and speech coach who specializes in British dialects. I would also create a map in QGIS that places each dialect by region. Website visitors would be able to filter the location layer by the gender of the speaker and their industry.