Episode 121: Youtube and Historical Sources Discussion

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:09)
Hi, Sunstone listeners, this is Lindsay Hansen Park, and I'm giving you an intro because we're doing something different today.
If you've been following my Facebook, which is really the only social media that I engage in these days, I'm just really not a fan of social media, you'll know that Bryan and I tried something new. We did an actual video recording of ourselves. Bryan and I don't like being on video. I know that's a weird thing to say for someone who's, like me, who's on camera and documentaries, but I really don't like it as much as I probably should. It's hard to be on video, it's uncomfortable, it's awkward for both of us. At the end of the day, we're both awkward people. And we just really like the history. We want to hide behind our microphones and talk about the history. That's what we're most interested in. But we understand that the world is changing and we're trying to adapt to that. So we are occasionally releasing videos for the podcast.
And they're not always going to be the same. Today, it is. Today is the audio of the video that Bryan and I did. So you can get it here, kind of check it out. See if you want to watch it. If you do want to watch it, I'll throw the links in to the podcast notes. But you can go to our Sunstone Foundation YouTube channel and subscribe. We've had it for years. We haven't really done anything with it. We don't have very many subscribers. It's not something we have spent a lot of time doing. Again, Sunstone is a shoestring operation. We have a very small staff. There's three of us, but we put on this big symposium every year. So I think people think that we're bigger than we are. We just work day in and day out to preserve these stories of Mormon history, to preserve the history, to preserve an archive that is now reaching 50 years old. Sunstone is almost 50 years old. And when I inherited it, I decided to continue the responsibility of preserving this archive of incredible voices.
Any Mormon scholar or historian with their salt has passed through its doors at some point, has read its articles, has relied on the scholarship there. So it's a really important legacy that we're trying to keep up.
But we're a small nonprofit, so that's why we're always hustling, asking for donations. This year, our big initiative is to get recurring donors. You can help if you're listening and you have a few bucks to spare every month. It doesn't have to be a lot. It can be a dollar. It can be $5.
It can be more than that. We would love it if it was more than that, but every little bit helps. We have a goal to get a bunch of recurring donors for Sunstone to help pay for this stuff. Now that we're doing YouTube, to get the quality up, it's gonna take some work. It's gonna take some extra effort, extra equipment, extra technology. So I don't like asking for money. It's irritating. It's not what you want to hear when you're tuning in to the podcast, but that's what we need. That's the reality of the world that we're living in. And in a Mormon community, we're so used to doing everything for free, but the realities of our lives are, we need your help and support to keep this going. So if you can, please go to sunstone.org, go to our donate link and become a recurring donor. It doesn't have to be very much, but that would really help us meet our goals and help keep the podcast alive. Today, you're gonna hear audio from a video that Bryan and I did. Again, I'm gonna link that, so you might prefer to watch the video, but we're gonna give you a taste of this. We're gonna do this twice. We're also going to do a video of us coming up with Christina Rosetti about her book with Joseph Musser. So that will be in our next episode.
And we'll also have a video for that. But then what we decided to do is we're just gonna keep going. We're gonna do our history audio here. And then when Bryan and I have a lot of historical topics that maybe don't go in chronological order, which is a lot of stuff, or if there's something sort of topical or timely, or we wanna have a discussion where we don't have a script, where we don't have to cite all of our sources, we're gonna do video. So you can have both. So check us out at both. Sometimes there will be crossover like there is today.