About

Se presenta acá una topografía
de la radio en español.
Más bien, La TopoRadio.
El topo, nuestro símbolo,
husmea a través la tierra
como nosotros en los libros y artículos.

TopoRadio maps books and articles about the history of Spanish-language radio in the United States according to the locations of the radio stations that each examines. Through this visual bibliography, researchers can identify publications that focus on a specific radio station, community, city, or region.

Spanish-language radio has been part of the U.S. broadcast landscape since the dawn of the radio era and continues to expand its audience, geographic reach, and market share--even while the popularity of English-language radio wanes. However, it remains invisible, inaudible, and ignored within mainstream radio history. TopoRadio encourages a more robust representation of Latino and Hispanic broadcasters and their contributions to media and culture.

Read about the creation of TopoRadio.

How to Use TopoRadio

Short animation of how to navigate the map.

Explore stations and publications at the click of a mouse. Stations with more than one publication will enable you to review each. Check out the station and publication links for more info.

Short animation of how to use the search feature.

Search keywords such as locations, programs, or broadcasters.
Look through the entire dataset (All), or limit to stations, publications, or archives.

Development

The project was developed by Eric Silberberg in 2021, but it would not have been possible without the collaboration of the Spanish-Language Caucus of the Radio Preservation Task Force, who provided subject area expertise and recommendations for the main bibliography.

To create the map, the project assigns geographic coordinates to books and articles according to the address of the radio station studios they profiled. If a publication does not provide a station’s location, the Federal Communication Commission’s Public Inspection Files, fan sites, and QSL cards are consulted to determine the studio's address.

When station-address-publication triplets are plotted with GIS software, the result is a map that demonstrates the regional dispersion of research content and subject overlap among publications in the field. Furthermore, the project identifies deficits among the publications--blank spots on the map--where further research is required.

Of the publications currently geocoded on the map, 70% are by women authors. This is also a current area of study as one third of publications were written the last five years (2016-2021), 74.1% from the past decade (2011-2021), and 96.3% since the year 2000.

Downloads

Radio stations dataset

Archives dataset

Acknowledgements