By Autumn R. Neal

The one thing I love about education is that no matter what subject you are studying you’re learning about other disciplines at the same time. That’s something I have enjoyed most about this project. I don’t feel like I’m only working on something in history. In the last two semesters, I have learned about and worked with Photoshop, various social media platforms, HTML, and video programs. I’ve already talked about how Photoshop and HTML have changed the way I look at my work but now let’s talk about this video. The video is supposed to be like a commercial with a voice over. It is meant to present information in a certain way that will grab the viewer’s attention, hook them, and make them want to go further into the website. I’ve had to think about what a viewer might want to see. So now I feel like I’m working in marketing. It’s difficult trying to imagine something from a prospective viewer’s point of view. I keep trying to think of what I would want to see if I were browsing the Internet and came across a website like this. What would I want to see in an introduction video? What would hook me and make me want to go look at the site? At the same time, I’m also trying to imagine what might bore me and drive me away. It’s like an episode of Mad Men. Maybe I should invest in some cigars.

By Autumn Neal

In my last two posts I talked about the issues I ran into trying to make a video and navigating Apple products as a PC user. Over the past couple months, though, I have found a lot of things about my iPhone that I love and am so grateful to have discovered. One of those things is the amazing voice to text feature. Sometimes it seems like I can’t type fast enough before the great idea that I had disappears. One day I was messing around with my phone while working on the main text for the Edgar Snow Project and ended up using the voice to text feature to copy some quotes into Google Docs. Then I copied the text from my PC’s browser and pasted it into Word. It made the process so much easier. Let’s be honest though, the technology is not perfect and comes up with some very strange things. In one sentence, it wrote out “where I was” as “Rose”. Maybe I slur. The feature was good for this project because I was copying some quotes from Edgar Snow’s memoir to include in the exhibit. It is pretty difficult to type and hold a book open at the same time, so being able to simply read the passage and then use copy and paste saved me from a lot of frustration. It seems simple but over the past month I have used it for almost all of my writing projects. I just wish I had discovered it sooner than two months before graduation. There’s always Grad School.

By Autumn Neal

I may be late to the party on this one, but it is possible to get iMovie (or any new app) if you are running an older iOS. All you have to do is buy it from a different device and then download the app from “purchased apps”. As I said before, I am a PC user so this information may be common knowledge to Mac users, but I didn’t know this was possible and definitely did not want to update my old iPad to iOS8. As soon as I solved that issue, I was finally able to start some real work on the Edgar Snow Project introduction video. It was surprisingly easy to make a nice looking video and even easier to add and edit an audio track. I’ve never used iMovie and without this internship it may have been a while until I did. I feel more confident now that I have this experience because I think small abilities like this make you more marketable. I follow a lot of institutions on Twitter and Facebook and realize that social media and technology are more important than ever in public history and museum world. The ability to make simple videos goes far beyond this project and can be applied in a variety of career situations.

By Autumn Neal

This project has introduced me to a lot of new technology that I hadn’t used before. Like I discussed before I learned how to digitize and use Photoshop, among other things. In addition to that I have had to learn new things about my computer and iPad. I mentioned before that I am making a video that will play at the beginning of the website and to do that I need to combine multiple photos and audio in a video making program. I don’t think I’ve ever made a video like this before, so I wanted to use an easy program and iMovie was recommended by a few different people. The only issue is that I am a PC user. I have an iPad and iPhone, but they are few years old and the App Store won’t allow me to download iMovie unless I have iOS8. Then you get the dreaded rejection message.

As we all know, older devices slow down a lot if you put a new operating system on them and I am not excited about that. Even though I have not resolved this issue yet but I wanted to blog about it to talk about the challenges that you face when working with technology. Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of working with the newest products so you have to find some way to work around it. Right now I’m going through a list of PC equivalents to iMovie hoping that I can find a good one. We will have to wait and see what I come up with.