Oh, the Humanity(s)!
A STEM Person’s Experience and Struggles with the Digital Humanities
Introduction / Excessively Long-winded Backstory
Let’s just put it this way: the humanities… have never been my favorite. I don’t despise them by any means, but I have always gravitated towards the STEM fields. Even as early as middle school, I found myself enjoying my science and math classes much more than my history and English ones. When I got to high school, I cemented this as part of my identity, embarking on my quest to become either a computer scientist or mathematician. Now that I’m finishing up my freshman year at UNC, I still feel pretty good about my decision. While I’ve also picked up a Linguistics major to complement my CompSci major and Math minor, I am still (mostly) managing to steer clear of the pure humanities as much as I can. In fact, the main reason that I decided to take ENGL 480 in the first place was because I needed a Literary Arts credit, and this seemed the least like a traditional English course that I could find.
Still, I want to make it clear where my aversion to the humanities comes from. I don’t think that the humanities as a field is “stupid” or “useless” or anything like that. To the contrary—I think people who work in the humanities are some of the most important in academia, and I very much value and respect the work that they are doing. Really, it’s just not for me.
It’s not even that I dislike thinking about or discussing humanities topics. I love having hours-long conversations with my friends, talking about the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence or the ethics of the trolley problem. As I’ve grown older, I realized much of my dislike of the humanities was unwarranted. I honestly remember liking the field when I was younger. In retrospect, I think preferring the STEM fields became part of my personality as I was becoming a teenager and trying to find things to latch onto and build an identity around. Now that I’m older—granted, still a teenager, but whatever—I don’t think this avoidance of the humanities is productive or necessary anymore.
However, I don’t want to kid anyone: I still don’t want to study the humanities in the slightest, and I’m actively looking forward to the last true humanities class I have to take. But, I don’t want to make enemies of my many English-major classmates (or my friend/roommate, who is a dual English and Studio Arts major, or my mom, who is an artist and humanities lover). So, I’ll state another thing I’ve realized as a result of taking this class. I actually do enjoy learning about, and thinking about, and talking about the humanities—I just really, really, dislike doing the work associated with it.
And I suppose this makes sense. I’ve actually always been a really good writer, I just don’t like doing it. I can produce really high-quality papers, I just spend forever on them. When it takes me over an hour of extremely focused writing to produce less than half a page, it just becomes something I dread. This ties into another thing I will bring up often in this portfolio analysis: I’m a perfectionist. Now, I feel the need to defend myself when I say that, since people often complain about "how difficult it is to be a perfectionist" in a thinly-veiled attempt at boasting. Still, I would be lying if I said that it’s very much a double-edged sword. In many ways I’m thankful for this trait, as it’s what drives me to strive for academic greatness and be a better person in everyday life. But, at the same time, it is also endlessly frustrating and tiring when I waste hours upon hours fixing a small detail that nobody will ever notice because I physically cannot bring myself to let it go.
For the STEM fields, being a perfectionist is not as big of a deal: there’s usually a single correct answer to a problem, and if I find the answer, then I’m done with the problem and that’s that. However, in the humanities, things aren’t as black and white. There’s never a clear simple answer for something, but I can’t bring myself to be content with this fact. I’m a very type-A individual, so I don’t like it when the intricacies and nuance and subjective nature of the humanities don’t fit cleanly into a box. But, I don't necessarily want to feel this way, since I realize that the world is not black-and-white either (well, at least in terms of human nature; the laws of the natural world are actually pretty black-and-white, but I digress). This is something I’m working on, and I will explain further down this page how exploring the Digital Humanities can help remedy this trait.
Task 1 - DH Project Report
The first major project of the semester was the Digital Humanities Project Report. Now, I initially found this assignment a little stressful for a couple of reasons. First, I didn't have a good idea of what digital humanities project I wanted to write about. I can get overwhelmed when things are too open-ended, and since I had only just learned about DH, there weren't any ideas that immediately jumped out to me.
For a little while, I played around with the idea of studying Twitch Plays Pokémon. I had heard about this phenomenon before and I knew what its basic premise was, but I had never delved too deep into it. However, although it was a highly collaborative and disruptive digital experiment, I wasn't all that convinced that it could truly be considered Digital Humanities. Additionally, there weren't very many (if any) articles about Twitch Plays Pokémon that were anywhere close to scholarly, so I decided to give up on that idea.
After thinking for a while more about other potential project ideas, I landed on Wikipedia. It is well-known, it is simple to understand, and it is undoubtedly part of DH, so it seemed like a perfect fit. After doing some preliminary research, I found that many of the scholarly essays published about Wikipedia are actually defending it against the vitriol it receives from the mainstream. These papers pointed out that Wikipedia is in fact much more trustworthy than people think, making it a valuable educational resource. I thought that not citing Wikipedia in this paper for fear of it not being professional enough would be too ironic and undermine my arguments, so I decided to include it as one of my sources. Thus, armed with a combination of scholarly articles and pages from Wikipedia itself, I set off on writing the report.
Here's where the process got stressful again. As I've already mentioned (beaten into the ground, really), I'm not a big humanities person, especially when it comes to writing papers. Unlike some people who are perhaps a little more creatively-minded, I cannot simply do humanities work. You see, for STEM assignments—especially computer science ones I am excited about—if I have work, I can sit down and do it. Sure, sometimes things take longer than I anticipate, and sometimes things get frustrating or challenging, but I always know that I'll be able to do them. I know generally how much time something is going to take to complete, and I can rest easy knowing that if I really focus on something, I can get it done in the time I have allotted for it.
The same, however, cannot be said of humanities work. Even if I intently focus all of my attention on writing a paper, even if I try my hardest to come up with ideas and make connections, sometimes it just doesn't happen. There have been many a time where I sit down to write a paper, and just… don't. It's not even that I necessarily get distracted (which is easy for me to do, since I dislike the process of starting an essay so much), it's more like the writing part of my brain just shuts off and I stare at an empty page for an hour.
I don't want to give you the impression that this happens to me every time I try to write, since it doesn't (and if it did, you wouldn't be reading this portfolio right now). But, it happens often enough that I'm always wary of and anxious about essays, since I can never be confident that I'll be able to activate the elusive writing receptors in my brain and produce a high-quality paper before the deadline.
So brings us to the weekend before this project is due. I try to get started on the paper Friday night, and while I am able to get a little bit done (the introduction and part of the timeline section, specifically), I don't get as far as I hoped. Saturday comes, and I am considerably stressed about the assignment, especially since I have plans to visit a friend. After a while of hanging out with them, the stress gets to me and we decide to go to a coffee shop so I can work. We order coffees and have a friendly conversation. After a bit, I pull my laptop out of my bag and pull up the document in an attempt to work. Surprisingly, I actually get about half the essay done over the course of two hours, and I feel proud of myself for being so productive. Though at first I feel bad about spending some of my valuable time with my friend writing an essay, they tell me not to worry about it. We end up having a nice conversation about what I just researched as we walk back to my dorm, watching the sunset. After a little bit, they leave. Over the course of that night and Sunday, I get the essay done and turn it in on time.
Though this story might not be the most interesting, it taught me a lesson: you can get it done—if the time is right, at least. Even when things are overwhelming, even when you are dreading something, even if you don't know where to begin, just try. If you are feeling productive and can get things done right now, great! Utilize that creative spark while you have it and let it take you as far as it can. On the other hand, if you aren't in a writing mood, don't try to force it. It's not going to work out, and you'll just expend a lot of needless time and energy. Basically, learn to judge when you are in the right state of mind for the humanities, and use it to your advantage.
Similarly, I also learned to give the humanities a chance, so to speak. I really don't hate writing as much as I like to think I do. A lot of times I'm just not in the right mood, and I don't know where to start, so I get frustrated with myself and conclude that I always hate writing with a passion. However, when I actually am in a humanities mindset (such as I am right now, writing much more for this section than I initially intended), I somewhat enjoy writing. Well, maybe I shouldn't go that far, but at the very least I don't hate it. There's a lot of fun to be had in exploring the humanities with your thoughts. I just need to get better at recognizing when I should embark on that exploration.
Oh yeah, the essay. Right. Here it is linked below, as well as a revised version I edited a couple of months later after taking feedback from my peers.
Task 2 - DH Project Video
Creating the video adaptation of my Wikipedia essay was a new and enjoyable experience for me. While I had a fair bit of prior experience with Premiere Pro, I had never created anything quite on this scale, so I was excited to get started.
Producing the script didn’t require much work, since I was already thinking about the video component of my project when I wrote the text version. Thus, I simply had to take my written essay, shorten it a bit, and make the language more conversational. Below are excerpts from the initial and final versions of my storyboard and script; the first is adapted straight from the paper, while the latter is modified to better fit spoken word. The full versions of both are also linked.
Next, I needed to record the voiceover so that I could use it as a base to build the video around. I took my laptop, went into the lounge beside my dorm room, and started recording my lines using the mic on my gaming headset. Now, this shouldn’t have been too difficult, but I learned that I speak really fast when I’m reading from a script, even when I intentionally try to slow myself down. Additionally, due to my perfectionistic nature, I spent way too long trying to get the perfect take, and I ended up with over 100 different recordings for only 13 actual sections of audio.
Still, I got the voiceover done, pieced together the different takes in my Premiere timeline, and moved on to assembling the video. I started with the parts where I already knew concretely what I wanted to show on screen, such as when I talk about the founders of Wikipedia or list the different Wikimedia projects in succession. These sections utilized a lot of photos, and in order to make the frame more visually dynamic, I learned how to use the keyframe feature of Premiere Pro to slowly zoom in and pan across the images. I also used this feature to adjust the size and position of the different Wikimedia logos in order to make them more similar, since the original images were wildly different sizes.
Next I decided to address the sections where I wanted to display a long webpage. Since I couldn’t show the whole page at once, I decided to use the “scrolling capture” feature of Snagit to capture the page in a single tall image. Then, I simply made use of keyframes within Premiere to simulate fluidly scrolling down the page. For the remaining sections, I simply used Snagit to record myself accessing Wikipedia and other relevant sites, and imported this directly into my timeline.
I added a couple of additional flourishes to my project, such as fade-ins and fade-outs, a title at the beginning (complete with the official Wikipedia font), and some Gaussian blurs whenever I show an image on top of a video. All that was left to do now was to watch through the video one last time and turn it in, which is exactly what I did.
Draft:
Overall, I felt pretty good about this project. Though it got frustrating at times (mostly due to my own faults), I really enjoyed working within the medium of video. In retrospect, there were two main lessons I took away from this experience. The first is to "take a breath", both literally and metaphorically. While recording my voiceover, I started to speak faster and faster and take fewer and fewer pauses. This threw off the pacing of the video somewhat, and it didn't give the audience enough time to digest the information I was throwing at them. Though this may just be my nature when reading something off of a page—it happens when I'm reading aloud normally too; perhaps it has to do with trying to get through readings faster for school—it wasn't helped by the fact that I kept messing up and getting frustrated with myself. The more I messed up, the more I kept checking my watch because the recording session was taking a lot longer than I wanted it to, and thus the more I sped up so I could finally be done with it. It became a vicious cycle of sorts. Because of this, the importance taking a moment to breathe—both to slow down my speaking and to distress and unwind—is the first major thing I learned from this project.
The other big lesson is to fight against my perfectionistic side as much as possible, at least when it comes to the humanities. Nothing about the work I was doing for this assignment—looking up images, recording my screen, playing around with Premiere, etc.—was inherently boring or unenjoyable. In fact, I actually really enjoyed it. All of the frustration that I experienced while working on this project came from me being unhappy with what I had done, and repeating it ad nauseam until I had gotten even the most minute of details absolutely perfect. I did several takes of each line when really the first would have been completely fine. I made sure that every single transition and keyframe was on the exact millisecond that I wanted it to be. I even spent hours manually adjusting individual audio levels at different points within a single clip, so that every fade in and fade out would be perfect and nobody could ever tell that there was an "um" that I cut out between two words.
Now that I'm in the future, and especially now that I've revised this same project, I realize that all of this was unnecessary. I just get so caught up in making sure things are perfect to me that I forget that nobody else is even going to notice the changes I'm making. Despite all the hours of work I put into this project, it still wasn't great. It wasn't bad by any means, but it could be so much better (which is why I chose to revise it). When I went back months later to record a new, slower voiceover, it made the entire video so much better. But the thing is, it actually took significantly less work than the one I recorded the first time.
Working on this assignment has taught me that it's okay to be okay with imperfection. The video doesn't have to be technically perfect in order for it to serve its purpose and convey my ideas and arguments. In fact, it's never going to be perfect, since I'm not a professional video maker. So, I should let my guard down some and do the best that it's reasonable for me to do. That way, I am able to enjoy the world of the humanities, instead of frustrating myself with the meaningless details.
Task 2.5 - Group Podcast Session
Though not a full project per se, the next significant undertaking in the class was the group podcast. After brainstorming and discussing some potential digital humanities-related topics of interest, I decided to join the Surveillance, AI, and Algorithms group.
For the next couple of class periods, my group and I discussed various aspects of security, tracking, and data. After researching the topics online and finding some interesting articles and videos, we laid out a brief outline of the things we would talk about.
Although we didn't have the opportunity to practice a full run-through of the podcast, I think the in-class recording went well. We ended focusing on surveillance the most, only touching on AI and algorithms when they intersected with surveillance in some way. Still, I felt pretty good about our final result, as I think it made for an interesting, insightful, and topical conversation about how our actions are always being tracked and monitored in this digital society that we live in.
Final Product:
Task 3 - Individual Podcast
The third major assignment I had to tackle was to cut down the raw audio of our group podcast and transform it into something of my own creation. There were several specific options I could choose from: removing the less important parts of the podcast and cleaning up the audio, adding my own narrative thread through narration, incorporating outside research, or providing insight into the process of creating the podcast. I decided to go with the first option, since I have fairly extensive prior experience with audio editing and thought it would be the most enjoyable. I have used Audacity numerous times in school, most notably in an Audio and Digital Music Production class I took in high school, where I created several song mashups and a spoken-word piece complete with matching sound effects. I also am familiar with Audacity’s white-collar bigger brother, Adobe Audition, and worked with it over the summer to condense one of my favorite albums into a single 10-minute track as a personal project. So, I knew technical challenges probably wouldn’t come into play for me.
Even still, I was a little overwhelmed at first, as I wasn’t quite sure how to approach editing the podcast down into its most important pieces. I felt like if I just started cutting pieces out, I would accidentally cut too much out or make it not flow as well. So, I decided to start by listening through the whole podcast and dividing up the different sections with markers based on the topic and the person currently speaking. Then, I listened all the way through again and made a copy of the audio track, cutting out the pieces I felt were least important to the overall discussion. I moved the remaining segments onto a separate timeline, stitching them together. I then downloaded the audio track we used for the intro and outro and replaced those segments with the downloaded version to increase their audio quality.
After this, I applied several techniques (both automatic effects and manual manipulation) to the audio in an attempt to decrease background noise. While this was fairly successful, there were still several loud background noises that I was not able to fully remove. Since different people’s audio were at different volume levels, I tried as best I could to even everything out by hand. I also spent a considerable amount of time carefully listening to the audio and removing long pauses in speech and filler words like “um”. While this did make the overall feel of the edited podcast a little snappier, I’m not sure it was the right decision. Just as before, my perfectionistic nature got in the way of my honest judgment of what I was doing. Once I started removing pauses and ‘um’s, I became determined to remove all of them and make the transitions seem as smooth as possible such that it’s hard to notice anything was cut out. I spent a good couple hours on this task alone, and I became frustrated with myself for doing it because it’s not really that big of an issue and nobody would notice anyway. Still, I think the edited version sounds good, and I am happy with how it came out.
Overall, I thought this assignment was the easiest to complete for me personally. The editing of the audio itself wasn’t a challenge for me, though some of my own decisions were. I think the most important lesson I learned here was that even if you are overwhelmed and don't know where to start with something, it's never impossible to do. Just take a step back, think briefly about what would work best, and force yourself to start. Once you have your foot in the door, it becomes so much easier to keep going and making progress.
Final Product:
Task 4 - Pinterest Video Report
The next project on the list was my Pinterest Report. Most of my process is discussed in the video itself, so I will only briefly recap it here. As I explain in the video, I had never used Pinterest before embarking on this assignment. So, I signed up with my Google account. I also used a temporary email to create a second account, in which I listed myself as a 37 year old woman who spoke Australian English and lived in Germany. My plan was to use this second account just as I would use my own account, so that Pinterest would receive my personal usage habits but attribute them to an older female user. I thought this could potentially be illuminating, and it was!—from the get-go, Pinterest didn’t let me choose the same topics of interest with this new account as I had chosen earlier. The more technology-centric topics that I selected with my personal account were not made available for me to choose from when I listed my age as 37 and my gender as female. This was pretty shocking to me, and very relevant to the project at hand. So, after spending some more time on the site and scraping the data, I began on the video portion of the project.
Using my experience creating the Wikipedia Video as a guide, I began with recording the voiceover and using that as the base for the video. I intentionally decided to not use a script for this project. This might seem strange, as organization and planning is generally regarded as a good thing in the writing world. And sure, it is somewhat strange. But for me personally, I never find outlines or preliminary drafts useful (much to the dismay of my teachers). It’s just so much easier for me to start writing and get my ideas out. Additionally, I wanted to take my own advice that I mentioned when discussing the Wikipedia video: take a breath. I have learned while creating these projects that if I read off a script, I read fast. Even when I try not to, I get so nervous about messing up that I end up speeding through my lines in an attempt to get to the end before I have the chance to make a mistake. Thus, I decided not to read off of a script, and instead just talk into the mic as if I were having a conversation. That way, my lines would flow better and be more organic.
Now that I had a plan, I needed a way to record my audio. For the Wikipedia project, I had just used the mic in my gaming headset to record my lines. While this didn’t sound bad, I still wasn’t quite happy with it. So, I enlisted the help of my dad. Being a videographer, my dad has a lot of experience setting up recording spaces. After digging through the shed and trying multiple combinations of microphones, cords, and mixers, we finally agreed on the setup that sounded the best: an Audio Technica microphone, taped to a mic stand that's clipped to my desk, fed into a fancy mixer which outputs to a 1/4 inch cable that is connected to my desktop using a 5mm adapter. Overkill? Definitely. But it sounded good, and we spent over an hour trying out different setups, so I decided to stick with it.
After this, I opened up Premiere Pro and went to work recording my voiceover. While I still recorded all of the lines a handful of times, I tried to fight my perfectionistic side as much as possible and avoid recording the same thing dozens of times in order to achieve a perfect take.
I then had the task of adding the video component. Previously, I had captured some of my footage using Snagit, but I recorded it in a horizontal format without thinking about it. While this problem was annoying at first, it ended up forcing me to be creative and think about unique and aesthetically pleasing ways to include this footage. I ended up using multiple of these shots on screen at the same time in several places. While this was somewhat time-consuming to edit (since I had to adjust the scale and position of each shot), I am very happy with how it turned out. I am thankful that this difficulty led to creative paths that I wouldn’t have taken otherwise.
My experience with the Pinterest video taught me a couple of other lessons as well. As odd as it sounds, much like with my Wikipedia paper, working on this project reminded me to give the humanities a chance. I initially put off working on this project multiple times because I just really didn’t want to do it. However, once I started getting into it, I had a lot of fun. I generally enjoy making videos, and I was really excited about the insights I gained into how Pinterest functions. Thus, despite my initial reluctance and dread, I found myself appreciating and enjoying the project. This is a common theme with a lot of humanities work for me: in the beginning, I feel lost and frustrated, hopeless that I’ll ever be able to complete the assignment. Nevertheless, once I am able to bring myself to start making progress, things just get easier and easier. I don’t mind actually writing a paper, or thinking about what I'm going to say, I just really fear the period of time in between having something assigned and actually having ideas flowing through my head. So, my first takeaway is to remind myself that there is real fun to be had in the humanities, it just may not immediately present itself.
The other lesson I learned has more to do with the actual contents of the project. As already discussed, this assignment taught me what Pinterest actually was. Considering how quickly the platform is growing, I am glad I am now aware of this. But more importantly, the report showed me how humanities can be important in the real world. Like many STEM people, I often (unfairly) think of the humanities—and especially Literary Arts—as being the sort of thing that can entertain and strengthen your mind but has no real application or use. Despite my preconceived notions of the humanities, this assignment proved that these things matter. Pinterest is wildly popular, and its user base is overwhelmingly female. So, the fact that the Pinterest account creation process has inescapable sexist assumptions matters. These sorts of things really do affect people’s identities, and it is important that we address them for the betterment of society. While they may seem obvious to some, I am glad this project cemented the potential applications of digital humanities into my mind.
Final Product:
Task 5 - DH Project Video, Revised
When it came time for me to select a project to revise, it was pretty clear to me that I should choose my DH Project Report Video. Out of everything I had done in the class, it seemed the least complete to me and had the most room for improvement.
I spell out the specific details of what I did in the Portfolio Video below, so I won't go too into them here. Basically, my goal with this revision was to address two main aspects of the video:
1. The narration
The narration was clearly the weakest part of the video to me looking back on it. I hadn't gotten used to recording myself speak yet, so my lines are extremely rushed and I hardly if ever pause to let the audience catch up. Additionally, the audio quality was subpar, so I wanted to use a better microphone this time.
2. The visuals
The other thing that needed a slight upgrade were the visuals, specifically in the second half of the video. Much of this section was simply recordings of me scrolling through various webpages, and I wanted to add some more visual variety. In addition to adding a new clip of me demonstrating Wikipedia's editor, I paused the footage at several points and zoomed in on a block of text so the audience could read it better.
Revision:
Now, even though I feel really proud about the video I created, and I don't think that I could produce anything more advanced with my level of knowledge, there still seemed to be something missing when I compared it to the videos I watch on a regular basis. I watch a lot of YouTube videos, including a fair amount of video essays, and composing a video myself showed me that there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.
For example, I didn’t put background music in the initial version of my video essay because it seemed unnecessary and unnatural to me. And even when I revisited the video more recently and spent quite a while specifically looking for some background music, I couldn’t find anything that I thought fit. I didn’t know what sort of tone to look for, or which genre fit my situation, so I eventually just gave up and decided that my video was better without it.
However, I later logged onto YouTube and watched several video essays from content creators I follow, and I realized that pretty much all of them had background music, I just hadn’t noticed. Similarly, there were points in the video-making process where I had a central shot or image as the subject, but it didn’t take up the whole screen. It felt strange and empty if the rest of the frame was just white, but I had no idea what to put there to make it not feel that way.
In search for an answer, I carefully studied the professional content creators that I watch and found that they have creative (and advanced) ways of solving this, whether it be through fluid animations to make the clips more dynamic or blurring the background as a new video element appears or some other clever and unique solution.
What I’ve learned is that these people who make videos for a living know that a lot of effort goes into the things that people won’t actively notice, and aren’t supposed to notice. But, if people don’t notice it, you may think that this work is unnecessary. However, if this extra work doesn’t get done, then the audience will notice that something is missing.
This got me thinking a lot about the accessibility of creation on the internet. The internet is often thought of as an equalizer. To be fair, in some regards it is. Anyone can theoretically pick up a camera—or a piece of recording software—and create a viral sensation that millions upon millions of people will see. However, if someone wants to make something of high technical quality, something that people will reliably want to watch, something that can hold its own against the more professional content that exists, then they're going to need more than just a camera, a dream, and a lucky break.
Specifically, they're going to need knowledge. As we've discussed previously when talking about the design of Pinterest compared to most websites, much of the internet is built upon what came before. This leads to situations where success on a platform requires knowledge of the platforms that have existed previously. And, because of the historically white male-dominated nature of the internet, this creates situations where even if the designers did not intend for it to, many cites are less accessible to women or people of color.
I think content creation could be viewed through a similar sort of lens. If I did not grow up loving tech, and spend pretty much all of my teenage years in front of a computer, and have prior experience using complex pieces of software such a Premiere Pro, then creating a video as "technically advanced" as the one I created would have been significantly more challenging. That's not to say that it would have been impossible—rather, there would have just been a lot more barriers in my way.
This problem gets even worse when you think about cost. Premiere Pro is an expensive piece of software. Access to the Adobe Creative Cloud suite is upwards of $600 a year, and the only reason that I have access to it is because I attend college, which is simply not an option for many people.
To summarize, revising this video got me to think more about the content I see online, the work required to create it, and the people behind it all, and I think it's beneficial to always keep these sorts of things in mind.
Task 6 - Portfolio Video
My process for composing the portfolio video was pretty similar to those of the other videos. I decided to focus on my Wikipedia video revision, so I started by recording the entire session I spent in Premiere editing that project. Then, I wrote my script, reassembled my fancy recording setup, and captured my voiceover. Now that I had more experience with recording audio as a result of the Pinterest video and the revised DH video, reading my lines went a lot more smoothly.
Next, I edited together my audio clips and took on the endeavor of producing the video. I had a fair amount of content already, since I had planned from the beginning to vastly speed up the recordings of my Premiere editing and treat them as a timelapse of sorts. I added a few images and new screen recordings to the mix, as well as an audio excerpt from my old draft, and combined them all together in the way that made the most sense to me. Below is a screenshot of my final Premiere Pro timeline for the project.
Even though I begin the video by stating that my revised Wikipedia video is my best work of the semester, I actually now think that title might go to the portfolio video itself! I am really surprised with how well it turned out. My script reading, audio splicing, and video editing skills have all gotten significantly better since the beginning of the semester, and I think the sped-up footage of me using Premiere looks really cool. Also, as simple as it is, I feel like the intro of the video—my calm, contemplative narration with the subtle-yet-slick fade in of the Wikipedia logo from white—works really well and adds a nice, professional touch to the whole thing.
Overall, I had a lot more fun than I thought I would working on the Portfolio video, and it might even be my favorite project I've done in the class! Either way, I am really proud of my final product, and I think it is the best showcase of my video editing skills that I have ever produced.
Final Product:
Conclusion / Other Comments / Final Thoughts
At this link, you can see all of the things I have posted on the class site, including comments on other users' posts. Something I found interesting while looking back on it is that there is a fair amount of variation in the length of my responses to class readings. I realize now that the length of the response directly correlates to how much I was in a "writing mindset" at the time, as I explained above. For example, with comments like this and this, you could tell that I was able to get completely into my writing mode and that I had a lot of thoughts and ideas and opinions that I wanted to get out. At times like these, I often ended up writing a much longer comment than I initially meant to, but I just got really into it. On the other hand, there were days like this and this, where you could tell I was having a hard time producing any meaningful analysis.
I know that throughout this portfolio, I complain a lot about assignments. I want to make it clear that this is not a criticism of the class at all—for any other English-related class, these complaints would be a whole lot worse. It's just inevitable with the humanities for me, and although I like to complain about it, at my heart I am thankful that I have to take humanities classes as I find they are often where I experience the most academic growth.
As we wrap up the semester, I have realized that I am going to miss working on these types of "unorthadox" projects. Though they are fairly large undertakings, I enjoy making video and audio essays a lot, and it makes me sad that I might not ever get to do another one for school.
All in all, I had a lot of fun this semester. I am grateful for the numerous skills, knowledge, and mindsets that this class has given me that I will carry with me throughout the rest of my life.