Things I Have Learned

I learned a few important things about multimodal compsoing these past few days. Well, I learned a lot, actually. More importantly, however, I also remembered a lot of things I had forgotten about composing in general. There'a a lot that I have come to take for granted composing in print. Before I get some much needed sleep I want to get some of this down. Here goes:

• I wasted a ton of time with experimentation. Having an outline would have helped a lot. I do a lot of the work of invention while I write my papers and arrange as I go. Either I'm just more practiced with this technique in print composing or outlining is more essential when composing multimodal texts.
• If I ask students to do this kind of work, I'm going to have to give them a lot of time and reinforce the fact that 11th hour work is really difficult.
• Writing (or composing) an abstract helps a lot. While finishing this thing up tonight I realized that the paper I hope will grow from this "trailer" will be much better for the work I've done here.
• Richard and Paul were correct: working with problematic assets takes time. I need to learn how to interview better and come to the interviews with a very clear idea of what I need as far as assets.
• Trauman's mp3/DV camera hack (hooking the Edirol to a splitter and then running it though the microphone input on the camera) was excellent. The sound quality was almost unbearable in the DV clips, so having the mp3s was infinitely helpful.
• Side note: The Edirol/DV hack let me cut down long responses to interview questions. I used Audacity to edit the "ums" and "ahs" out of middle of the audio and synced up video clips with uncut audio at either end.
• Shooting long interviews give you a lot of interesting things to work with, the problem is working with them.
• Splitting clips first and then keeping the split clips in iMovie is essential. Trying to drag long clips into the timeline and then splitting them here caused all kinds of problems.
• iMovie really is a drag in a lot of ways but it would have been easier if I had taken the advice I hand out all the time: RTFM.

So, that's it. I hope you like the project!

Recommended RSS Feed--The Chronicle's Wired Campus

From today's Chronicle:

New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers Find Online Tools

A new wiki provides a directory of online tools for humanities scholars. The site, which uses software that lets anyone edit or add to the material, covers more than 20 categories, including blogging tools, specialized search engines for scholars, and software programs that can record what is on a user’s screen.

The site, called Digital Research Tools, or DiRT, is run by Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University runs a similar collection of resources called Exploring and Collecting History Online, or ECHO—Jeffrey R. Young

Um, did you forget the URL? Yes, yes you did. In a news piece about a new online site. Wow, that’s just hardcore!

— Jeff McNeill Jun 6, 06:52 PM #

URL seems to be
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/

— Liz Jun 6, 06:59 PM #

Recommended RSS Feed--The Chronicle's Wired Campus

From today's Chronicle:

New Wiki Helps Humanities Researchers Find Online Tools

A new wiki provides a directory of online tools for humanities scholars. The site, which uses software that lets anyone edit or add to the material, covers more than 20 categories, including blogging tools, specialized search engines for scholars, and software programs that can record what is on a user’s screen.

The site, called Digital Research Tools, or DiRT, is run by Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University.

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University runs a similar collection of resources called Exploring and Collecting History Online, or ECHO—Jeffrey R. Young

HELP WITH GEOMAP!

Shannon and I are trying to create a Google interactive map as an element in our collaborative DMAC project, but can't figure out how to upload images to the google map -- we have images on Flickr, this blog, and the desktop, but none of these locations seem to be transferring the image. Flickr and Yahoo seem to work together to create a geomap, but Yahoo isn't as aesthetically appealing as google -- and so google's the goal.

Any help would be greatly appreciated -- via this blog, via e-mail (arounsa@u.washington.edu), or in person tomorrow morning.

1000 thank yous,

Angie and Shannon

testing for geomap. (please ignore)

No failure? Well... no guilt, maybe.

For any of you who talked to me last week, I came into DMAC wanting to continue my research on digital identity, to create a model text for my students in the fall, and to learn to create kinetic typography animation in hopes of teaching it.

Two out of three isn't bad. If this was baseball, I'd be a heavy hitter.

This is Kinetic typography (and no, I didn't make it :)):



I tried to create something similar. I worked on this on-and-off all week (I didn't get much time to work with it while gathering assets, but I'd say I put in four hours). I spent what I believe was eight hours yesterday, and I came up with a sort-of-disappointing 26 second introduction for my video.

I learned how to do it, but I'm bad at it. I also learned-- in a much more valuable way-- that students couldn't ever be asked to do this in a comp class. It's too time intensive and requires jumps to at least two different programs.

I was ready to throw my hands up and say "well, $#!@! I wanted to try to do an extended piece like this and I've failed." But then I realized how good this was for me. I'm scared to death of the phrase "digital native" (see me and Doug ranting to hear more about that), but I believe I'm what people mean by that. I've always had a computer around, and video games, and gadgets, and I pick up technologies quickly and tend to be productive within a few days.

What I went through making that chunk of animated text (which you'll all get to see on Tuesday, or you can see tomorrow if you come looking for me) is a constant reminder of the frustrations that can result when you see the project clearly in your head but cannot execute it.

I accidentally put myself in the "oh no! The tech is ruining my life" position, a place I haven't been since I first learned Photoshop using a library book back in the 90s.

I'm glad, though. I would rather, of course, have mastered After Effects and Flash and made a totally amazing project (I do have hubris, after all :)), but I think going into a semester of teaching digital composing-- after a year off-- it was good for me to know frustration.

And I'm positive now that I wouldn't teach with Sophie as it is. I would never subject students to the level of frustration I had last night if the frustration was coming from the technology and not the composing.