9/8/16
Fraser argues that the public sphere is distinct from the official economy, meaning that it is not an arena of market relations but rather for debating and deliberating not buying and selling. It is a valuable resource for the production of critiques of the state. In the public sphere people are able to express and generate ideas and then circulate and reconstruct those ideas. In regards to politics, the public sphere has a lot to do with how we shape and form democracy. Exchange and shaping meaning about how our government works. For culture, Fraser critiques that the public sphere brings to light societal inequalities. The public sphere operates to the advantage of dominant groups rather than subordinate groups. These members have no means to express themselves and voice their opinions. Historically these groups would be women, workers, people of color, and the gays. The public sphere generally hasn’t been a place for these groups to express themselves as freely as the dominant groups.
9/12/16
The first thing I took away from the reading in the Radio text book is that in order to have a successful and engaging radio show you must lead off with an annecdote, follow with a sequence of events, and end with a reflection of those events. By doing doing so, you engage the audience and leave them wanting to know what happens next. You also must make sure that the interview process is well executed. In order to do that you must structure the interview so the interviewee is easily able to answer your questions. You should prompt the interviewee to tell the events in order to make sure you get their real life response and reaction as if the event is happening all over again. Then at the end of the interview you need the interviewee to reflect on those events. Another thing for a successful radio show is to take good notes during the interview so you can build an outline that will successfully encompass everything you want listeners to hear when they tune in. Once the outline is complete, run it by someone else for critique. One of the last things I took away from the reading is that when taping the interview you need good equipment. A microphone, digital recorder, and headphones are essential parts of the interview process. Also, make sure you're in a quiet location without outside noise to be picked up on the recorder.
9/15/16
The biggest challenge I faced when writing this poem was not knowing where to begin. Every time I go to write an essay, poem, etc. the biggest challenge I face is writing down those first words or sentences. However, once I get going I have no problem writing down what comes to mind. However, I noticed that I don't like to put intimate details of my life down on paper or reading them outloud to big groups of people. So while other students in the class had more personal poems, mine was more vaugue and general than I'm sure the assignment called for. Perhaps the most personal details I put down were about the grandmother and aunts who I have lost and the "It's see you soon, not goodbye". Losing loved ones is something we've all experienced before but the stories behind their passing are pretty intimate and personal to me.
9/19/16
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How hard/easy is it for you to share such a emotional story with other people?
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Do you ever get embarassed if you start to show emotion while sharing like your eyes water, your voice cracks, etc?
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Do you think that sharing your story will influence and educate others on this topic?
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How often do you share your story?
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How did you make your story known to the public?
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Are there certain things that you make sure to share?
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Are there certain things that you leave out when you share your story?
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Is there anything you find to sensitve or personal to share?
10/13/16
In chapter 4 from Out on the Wire, the author describes different aspects on whether or not you should keep a story or kill a story. In order to keep a story you must have structure to it. As described in the book cutting and putting together multiple clips can be very difficult. So when doing this you must make sure your clips are in chronological order. If they're not, the story doesn't make sense and you can't use it. However, stories don't always start at the beginning. Sometimes the ending audio is a great clip to put at the beginning. If this is the case, you must make sure that the following audio coincides and makes sense with whatever clip you start with.
Since my group has yet to conduct our interview, this chapter has made me rethink the way I would like the interview to go. Over the weekend I probably will rephrase the questions so that my very first question and ending questions are strong in order to have a strong start and a strong finish to the audio clip.
10/24/16
In chapter 4 of Out on the Wire, Abel metaphorizes sound as the "Deep Sea". In the depths of the ocean there are many sound waves vibrating through out the water contributed by different animals and objects. The same thing applies when telling a story over the radio. You can't see what is happening during the broadcast so your senses are heightened to the multiple sounds going on like the deep ocean. Adding different sounds can increase the attractiveness of the story in order to make it work. In regards to the video stories, having other sounds besides the audio we captured can add to the nature of the story. It will allow listeners to fully immerse themselves into the story even though they weren't there for the original interview.
11/3/16
The primary purpose of the edit is to essentially cut and paste whatever audio/video clips you have together in order to make a cohesive story. It starts out with listening or viewing everything you've gathered in your interview. Then you need to decide what key points you want to show in your final product and determine where you want to make your cuts. Whatever audio/video you are left with should be the clips that directly relate to the main points you want to make and put into the final product. You need to listen or watch the clip multiple times to make sure the edits you've made work, your story makes, and the sequence flows throughout the entire time its playing.
Framing is when something is presented to the audience and influences the peoples choice on how to process the information being given to them. So when framing a story you're essentially predetermining how you want your audience to feel and think when they're listening/viewing your story. With signposting, you're using words and phrases to guide the listeners/viewers through the content you're delivering. So framing is the way you position your story, but signposting is the actual meat of how you are going to make the listeners feel by using certain words and phrases that will evoke emotion out of the listeners.
11/10/16
The main message my group got across from the feedback we got in class was that our video needed to be cut down a lot, which we had planned to do anyways. Since my group is behind the first draft was a really rough edit of information we wanted to include we just didn't quite know which direction we wanted to go in. After reading the rest of the feedback from the class we got a better idea and cut down an additional nine minutes on our video. We decided from feedback that we wanted to start out with Carolina's explanation of why she didn't view herself as a refugee as we thought that would be a good way to set up the project and then go into her experiences in Colombia and the process of leaving. We got to this conclusion through the class' feedback saying there was a lot of information but the narrative arc needs to be better defined since in the first draft it wasn't always clear. We also felt that including the role of the boys and girls club in Carolina's transition important because the class mentioned that it seemed to be something she talked about a lot and was passionate about.
Unfortunately since my group is behind on this project I was unable to show a member outside of the class the second draft. We were in the Mac Lab late last night making edits and trying to figure out music to go along with the audio. For unknown reasons with the export some of edits weren't transferred properly onto our external drives so the member would have been shown an incomplete video. However, I have told my roommates and family members about the work I'm doing with this project and they are excited to watch what I've been working on. I'm hoping to get the missing pieces of the video back into it and get feedback over the weekend.
11/14/16
In my mind oral history is a spoken story that has occurred in real life. In the case of the Olive Project, the story was about the speakers experience with her grandmothers story. The author collected video and sound recordings in order to shape her project around her grandmother. In doing so she shares with us, the listeners, her experiences and feelings about the entire project and her connection with her grandmother. From the background information on the Olive Project it seems that in order to orally tell someone else's story is a difficult task. The author struggled with compiling her grandmothers 78 years of life into one video. That's 78 years of memories, tears, laughter, and story to tell to an audience who for the most part don't know her grandmother. The hardest part to me about conveying oral history to your audience is capturing the essence of your subject. I feel like this relates to the Quest For Refuge project because we're trying to tell the story of another person's lived experience. How do we accurately tell this person's story? How do we capture who they are as a person? These are questions that I have every time I work on the project and I'm sure the author of the Olive Project had as well. At the end of this project I want to have created a product that I'm confident in how it represents Carolina, but I also want the final product to be something she is happy with as well because this is her story.
The Olive Project makes me realize you can tell a story in more than just one way. There's the obvious written story, audio story telling, and video story telling. However, this project combines, written, pictorial, and audio story telling all in one to create her grandmothers story. It's a very unique format in which to tell a story that I haven't come across before. She puts thoughtfully puts these stories and pictures in a timeline format that you're only able to scroll through if you click on the red text in the middle box of whatever page you land on. When you first land on the page you're able to see three pictures, but underneath the middle picture is an audio recording of her grandmother. It seems that whatever red text you click on will scroll you through to another audio recording that tells a cohesive story. This method allows you to chose what stories you want to hear by giving you the option to keep clicking and not really be lost in the overall story. However, with audio or video you have to keep watching continuously otherwise you miss the overall narrative arc of the story.
The way the author has the project set up is that her grandmothers story kind of tells itself. You can see her life and what she did throughout her 78 years just by looking at the pictures, but by giving the option to listen to her grandmother share a story it adds so much more to the project. I think the author did a good job by conveying the essence of her grandmothers life. The grandmother even said the story will be short, even though it's not, because she was a mother, a homemaker and a grandmother which is a theme I could see throughout the project that she is a very loving and family conscious person. When sharing someone else's story you have to envision the tone that person would take if it was themselves telling their story. You have to include the aspects of their life that they think are important.
11/17/16
The purpose of the article is to examine how multimedia and multimodal are used in different contexts, for example academic and non-academic purposes. It breaks it down into different sections in order to explain the authors journey into defining these terms. First, the author dives into the contributors that helped the author form these definitions and context of the article. They interview a range of experts that give them a lot to think about in regards to the project and wanted to include multimedia, multi modal, new media, and digital media. The whole project is reference to a famous line in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet "What's in a name", meaning that because we call something one word doesn't mean that word dictates what it actually is. So the whole project is to research and define how these terms like new media, digital media, etc. and how they differentiate.
One concept I find interesting is in the contextual category by Anne Wysocki. She says that she views a lot of the writing today as multi modal and not new media. A lot of the times multi modality is mistaken for new media since it incorporates a lot of online aspects. But for how long can this media be new? Another concept that was interesting to me was in the audience-orientated category by Scott DeWitt "Why digital media works". DeWitt says that what reallly gets peoples attention is digital media because it gives something for people to grab onto and really understand. People understand what media is and digital so they already are set up to know what they will be doing or observing will be on a screen.
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11/21/16
Throughout this entire process I felt that my group has split the work pretty evenly. We all get together to work on it and to make edits and decide what stays and what goes. It's hard to assign different jobs on a project like this since it heavily relies on collaboration. However I did introduce the Adobe Premier to the group since we weren't sure which program would be best and I have some experience using this software from some other classes I'm taking right now. So when my group does get together I usually am the one making all the physical cuts and additions, but we all make the decisions together.
Even though the video is not finished yet and there are still changes that need to be made I am happy with the direction the video is going in. I'm probably the most pleased about the information Carolina gave us since there is so much to know about her and her experiences. I just wish we were allowed more time in the video to completely encapsulate who she is and what she has gone through. That being said what I dislike the most about the video is the transitions between clips. Because Carolina had so much to share with us a lot of her sentences were long and strung together so clipping them got tricky so a lot were cut in the middle of sentences to get the most important pieces into the video. I tried my best to make it the most natural sounding, but we would either have to make it cut short or you would hear her continue with her sentence while we were trying to transition into the next clip.
If I had to do this project over again I'd probably rethink all the questions we asked Carolina. Even though my group had to interview her a second time I think there still could've been an improvement on the questions that were asked. I wish we had used the information we already knew about Carolina to create a narrative story in our heads and then have structured our questions around what direction we wanted to go in. I feel like that would've eliminated the problem we have with having to cut in the middle of her talking because we already would have had set a story beforehand that hopefully she could have just talked in sequential order.