Month: September 2024

I was a little nervous about learning the new interface for ArcGIS at first. More often than not, I am very bad at getting a handle on massive changes to a program’s UI, especially with how comfortable I am with the old one. However, I think the new map viewer for ArcGIS is a lot easier to navigate to me. It may be because of the separate layer panes, since that setup reminds me of the digital art and editing software I’m accustomed to. I also like the addition of the popups tutorial in this version of the training (even though it might have been in the original training and I’m just forgetting). I will say that revisiting ArcGIS and learning new features has been pretty enjoyable. I like learning new aspects of a program, while still being able to connect the new stuff to the older aspects that I already knew before.

I decided to revisit the Gale Digital Scholar Lab training today. Last year, I had trouble with the software because of the difficulties navigating it and the unexpected results from a lot of the text analysis. I didn’t really understand the difference between the text analyzers and the OCR, or that the OCR was actually causing most of those problems. These issues still persisted to an extent, but I understand now that the OCR isn’t perfect, and besides that Gale does a great job with analyzing text that is already correct. I would like to gain a deeper understanding of OCRs and software similar to it, if anything for my own curiosity, but it could help for my current project given our reliance on scanned images.

Audacity is a tool that I’m already pretty familiar with. I have a lot of experience using other audio tools, mainly ones for making digital music, but they have a lot of overlap with Audacity. In the past I’ve only really used Audacity for making quick edits to a single, short audio file. Working now with multiple audio tracks in this program was new to me, but it wasn’t that foreign since the setup is very similar to the audio program I mainly use. If anything, I find Audacity to be a bit clunky to use and frustrating to navigate sometimes, but that’s just because I’m more used to my other program. Overall, I think I would be pretty confident in teaching Audacity, or at the very least some general audio editing tips.

After working on a year of Vivero trainings, I think my advice to new fellows would be to experiment with everything you have access to. The given trainings serve as a guide, but there is always more to explore in a program. Read the program’s documentation if it’s available, or just play around and press buttons until something interesting happens. There’s a good chance to find something that would be useful to your project or to somebody else’s projects.