Month: October 2023

Learning to use WeVideo was probably the easiest tool so far. I think that’s in part because I have some experience with video editing, and WeVideo is structured very similarly to iMovie. There are some things that are strange to me, though. The audio editing was pretty unintuitive, and if there was a way to add multiple audio tracks at once I couldn’t find it. Still, I think I would be pretty confident in helping students with this.  It’s a very simple editing tool that wouldn’t take to much time to learn in-depth.

Despite the theater department archive project only being a thing since the start of this semester, I feel my leads and I have covered a lot of ground. I would say we are still in the planning stages for the project, since we do not have any direct courses of action as of yet, but we are working on ways to accomplish our major goals. Those being figuring out where to put the images, and digitizing the images that need it. As of now, we are looking into potential technology to digitize the photo slides we have available, and we’ve narrowed down our options to the specifications we need. It’s just a matter of finding one that works and purchasing it, which I think shouldn’t take long at all. However, the other goal I mentioned isn’t quite as in reach. Finding a suitable way to host the archive was one of my first tasks when I joined. We figured our best bet was hosting the archive through the communications and marketing department, since they also take a lot of the photos in productions. However, after meeting with the campus photographer, things with that department don’t seem too suitable for us at the moment. That can change with the possibility of them moving to a new content manager, but a goal like that is not guaranteed. As of now, this endeavor has been put on hold and we shifted our focus to digitizing. Our next steps will be going through and digitizing the slides we have once we have our scanner. We still have to work out a place to save those digital copies, but I think OneDrive is our go-to at the moment.

During this exercise, I realized documentation really prioritizes accessibility for outside participants in the project over just recording the project over time (though of course this is important too). This method of documentation really serves to make sure other people can continue a project without worrying about the proper methods to continue the work. For good documentation to happen, it’s important that all members of the project understand their needs and methods of organization when they do documented. In the event that someone still has questions, the project managers or other contributors can step in to clarify and even edit the documentation if needed.

Currently my project is relying a lot of researching methods to help complete project tasks. If anything, I would need to document my ideas and sources for these methods so when it comes time to pick the best route, I have all the possibilities in hand. Later on, as we move toward digitizing and gathering metadata, we would need to work on documenting what metadata we’re saving and how to save it.