Almost Done

With the end of the semester upon us, I have shifted my focus from my own, nearing-completion webpage to the Albuquerque Airport web page. This one is more important and so I am putting more time and energy into it. My project is a group project with two other students directly, and a few other students helping with the programing as well. We are working on a visual project, putting together a web gallery, focusing on the airport and tourism. It’s so strange to think that we are making a professional website. It’s cool, but also adds a lot of pressure since we want it to be good and something we are proud of and happy to have our names attached to. I’ve been having trouble with a few aspects of the page and will soon have the web designer help me. I tried to create a new page to make a separate gallery, but when I copied the information and pasted it where I wanted a new page to be, it would simply replace the other instead of making a new one. I tried changing it several times, trying to figure out how to make a replica and not delete the page. But I still could not fix it. So there’s my failure of the failure blog. But the good news is that it does not have to be done today. And even though I could not make a separate page, I was still able to work on the slides, so I’m still making good progress. And when this problem gets sorted out, all I have to do is move over the slides I want on to the new page. I still have to go back and cite the pictures and text and add in one more section, but the pictures are done, except for one, which I am having trouble working with. It was at first a PDF, and then I thought I got it switched to a jpeg, but Pixlr will not edit it. I tried it as a png too, but again Pixlr said there was an error. I will have to ask about this in class as well. But really, the page is nearing completion, despite these obstacles. And I think it will be good one! We have great pictures and a cool web design. It will be very interesting to see the final product! Check it out in a week or two when the first draft is done! (Sorry, we don’t have a url yet, but Google can surely get you there!)

Getting Back on Track

This week’s failure blog is a short one for a short week. The failure for this week is that I have not worked on my portfolio (so there’s not much to report). My other classes had earlier deadlines for papers and projects and things, so I am finishing those up and I will be getting back to Digital Humanities during the Thanksgiving break. I am planning out what to do for the rest of the semester for this class. I cannot believe this class and the semester are almost over! Time flew by. The Airport Project is my main concern now. After the Thanksgiving break I will begin working on setting up the gallery page with the information and pictures my partners sent me. I think we have the design decided on, so it will just be a matter of inserting our data into the page style (which I will get from the web design team) and formatting it to work correctly and smoothly. Besides the Airport Project, all that is left to do is the individual portfolio. I’m pretty close to being done with this too. Over the break I will work on the writing portions on each of the pages as well as the written page about my research and the written page about the Digital Humanities being used in my field of study. That’s my plan for now: get these last things done (especially the Airport Project!) and finish the semester strong. Check in next week for the progress report (one that will actually have more action to report). Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Nevermind, I Got It

Scratch that last blog! I figured out iMovie. What it was is that I have two iMovies on my computer for some reason, but the new one is in a folder, instead of just an icon like the other one. But once I got in the folder and got the new one, it’s been working better. It’s still tricky to work, but I think I’ve got the hang of the basics. I am going with my original idea of making a slide show in iMovie. I’ve already started on this but I'm not done yet. The cool thing that I didn’t know before Jessica told me was that you can save text typed in PowerPoint as a picture and then insert just text into iMovie. So instead of recording my voice, I have captions. I am thinking I will play my own music instead of what comes with this program though. So far it has been difficult making a simple trailer, mostly because even this second program has been touchy and doing strange things (not as bad as the other version though!) Also, because I wanted it to be cooler than it is, but I just can't do cool stuff with it yet. So for now, it is very bland, but it’s done. Long story short, for me this is a good video. I have never used iMovie before or anything like it. I was unsure how to formulate it content-wise too, but I’m just going to go with what I like and what would make this slide show look most like a real move trailer: pictures! (And maybe animations and film off of the Internet if it’s not too hard.) I’m studying Medievalism, meaning how we use medieval ideas and stuff in pop culture today especially, but also how other time periods did this too. Everyone has always loved the Middle Ages! But it is a chicken-and-the-egg thing: do we love the Middle Ages because of pop culture? Or do we love it so we put it into pop culture? (Or does it even matter?) For me, I went into medieval studies because of the books and movies I had as a kid, namely J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Stephen R. Lawhead. I love this study because I love history and pop culture and learning the history of pop culture and how pop culture uses history. But enough about that. You will see the trailer on Friday!

Road Bump

Today’s failure blog is about the video. I failed at iMovie. I just could not figure out! And Google did not help. The program kept doing the weirdest things. I was going to try to make almost like a slideshow of different pictures, like a trailer but of stills instead of seconds-long video clips. But it would do strange things like replay the same picture in a row instead of moving to the next one; so it would show the first picture twice, then the third then the fourth. I only got to four pictures by this point. There were a lot of little issues like this and weird changes and inconsistencies that the program was doing to my pictures. I don’t know if it was the photos I chose or what, but I could not fix it so that it would run smoothly or even the same from one time to another. And one time it got stuck! I couldn't get out of iMovie, it would not force quit or shut down. It was terrifying! But eventually I guess I hit force quit enough times for it to do it and not give me an error message telling me it could not quit. So I think I might just shoot my own video and put it into iMovie in one swoop instead of trying to make a fancy PowerPoint of images I add in one by one. Either way will take more time than I have, but at least I know how to point and shoot a camera. Then we’ll see if I can’t get it to work in iMovie! If not, I will look into another program like Camtasia to see if that works better. I might also see if there is a photo slideshow program and instead of having video one. This is all just brainstorming and the beginnings of experimentation right now. So far the video programs have been much harder than I expected. I expected it to be easy like PowerPoint, but it was not (at least for me). But we’ll see how this goes and you can tune back in this weekend to see how it turned out!

Light at the End of the Tunnel

The problem I’m having now is getting my screen shots to fit inside the website. I had trouble with getting things to fit at the beginning of the semester, but not again until now, which was strange. I guess I took too large of screen shots. The screen shots I uploaded with my tutor worked fine, but now with these, they won't fit. There seems to be no difference between what I put into Text Wrangler with and without my tutor, but the results are not the same. I will have to Google this problem, but later. Other than that, my website is beginning to come together. I am working on writing in the descriptions and my process to the different pages, but have not finished yet. So my website will not yet reflect these changes. I wanted to finish the pages, at least finish this draft of them, before I changed them in Filezilla and uploaded them. But I’ll let you know (probably – hopefully – in my next blog) when the changes are done and up on the web. For today, I’m just working on the typing and describing parts of the website. I need a break from all the difficult programing and hard stuff today. But with just a few more classes left, it’s getting to be crunch time! I’m running out of time, but I’m closer than I thought I would be by now, so there’s the positive side! Like I said, next week should be the final or at least the penultimate version of my webpage. Tune back in in the next week or so to check it out the final product!

Baby Step

As I try to finish up my website, I am having trouble with a few things. Mostly time. It is amazing how much time it takes to do things on the computer! But on the positive side, I found a cool website for topic modeling called Regex. It doesn’t actually clean anything, but it can find and highlight anything you want to look for in your work. So if you wanted to double check for errors or just see what's in your documents or combine documents, this website would be helpful. It just won’t (as far as I know) take and replace anything. But OCR has been really difficult! And I haven’t even tried to clean PDFs! I’m just trying to get it done with a few word documents. But I think I might have finished my Mallet page. I still don’t really understand it, but my tutor helped me to go through some of the basics. I used the Command Line on the Terminal to look at three documents and see what it spit out. I still don’t really understand what all the numbers and how it’s set up, but it worked, I guess. I haven’t played with it enough to see how to actually use this for my research. The format doesn't make sense to me. Maybe I still need to put it into Excel or something. But I nonetheless have a screen shot (another new thing for me!) of the results. I also put it into Overview. That made even less sense, but maybe that’s because I only used three documents (and unrelated ones – just the three on top). Maybe if I play with it more and add more to it I will understand better. But the main thing is that I did it, and I even have pictures of my work. It’s a baby step, but a step! (Got to end these failure blogs on a positive note!)

For Real This Time

Last week I thought that I had finished and published my website, but I didn’t. So I have it here for real this time. The problem before was that it was coming from my desktop, not straight from the web, so only I could see it. I forgot to actually put it on the Internet through Filezilla. So today I put all of my pages into Filezilla, but then it still didn’t work. It was online, but it looked like my old site, except for my new index page, which I had just recently created. I could not figure it out. So I just moved all of the files into my “old” folder within Filezilla and put the pages into the program fresh and it worked. I don’t know why or how, but it did. So now you can see it too! It’s very simple, but for me it’s a huge step! And I think I’m getting very close to finishing the site, which is exciting. I just need to put up a few more pages. The design is done though, so I just have to fill in the skeleton with the pages I haven’t finished yet. Because I’m not sure yet what my research will be exactly, and because this is my first try with computer things, I designed my website to reflect that. I figured I can change it if or when I need to make it more scholarly, so for now, it’s just a presentation of what I learned to do with the computer. Check it out at maggiewaring.net!