Week 9-10

It is hard to believe that I only have a month left with the capstone!  I have already started working on the capstone poster and the end is finally in sight.

I put together a rough outline of what I want to accomplish in the following weeks: 

July 18-22:  Create scripts for tutorials

July 25-29:  Film tutorials

Aug 1-5:      Edit tutorials and create text-based tutorials

Aug 8-12:    Analyze statistics/capstone poster creation/write up evaluation of project

Aug 15-16:  Evaluations of Students/Present training materials 

It is looking like I'll have three main tutorials.  One dealing with the presentation software, another about the transcription software, and a third covering transcription standards and resources that the transcribers should use.  I'll have to create one or two text based tutorials to go along with the video tutorials. I'm recording on video things about the software or standards that are least likely to change while using the text based tutorials to cover things that are more likely to change since they are easier to update.  Parts of the process that may change would be mainly file paths to where files are located. 

My goal is to leave the Stark Center with a set of materials where all they need to do is sit an intern down in front of a computer with these video tutorials and a couple text based tutorials and the intern will be able to start transcribing. 

I have one intern who is ending the project this week.  I'll have a sit down with him to get his impressions of the project on Wednesday.  After that, I only have the one intern working on transcription. 

As part of my final analysis of the project, I've decided to look into grant possibilities for transcription.  Getting a grant to hire a transcription intern would really speed up the project.  I would think that getting class credit for doing transcription would be enough to motivate interns, but after this summer, it is pretty clear that it is not enough to motivate interns at the Stark Center.  I have also concerned setting time goals, like transcribe 30 minutes of audio each week.  That would give them a clear milestone each week, similar to completing an assignment.  Completion/quality of the transcription would factor into determining their grade. 

Week 7-8

OK!  The start of week 8.

I have been busy!  I researched best practices for audio preservation and discussed them with the librarian and the GA responsible for handling the audio files.  They had not been saving or recording in WAVE files, which supports more data and is the conservation standard.  It took some convincing of how we need to be more concerned about the preservation of the audio than how much space the files are taking up or how long it takes for WAVE files to download.

To help speed up the transcription process, the Stark Center decided to change the transcription process. Since Glifos does not allow users to use hot keys while transcribing, we have started using a program called Express Scribe that does allow for hot keys to be used. I created a quick text-based tutorial and trained the interns on it. The main problem with the new program is that the interns work on several different computers at the Stark Center.  The file that contains their transcription could be started on one computer and finished on a different one.

One of the interns is having trouble with the project.  He is simply not invested or motivated to learn how to transcribe or to learn the program.  The Stark Center knows this and they want to let him do something else for the summer.  Another intern was only working for Summer I so she finished up last week.

The other two interns are doing pretty well.  It's tedious work and I feel like I have very little to motivate them with.  The Stark Center wants the interns to do only what they want to do so I feel like very little transcribing actually gets done.

I feel like the project is going successfully!  This summer was supposed to be a test to figure out the best way to go about doing the transcription and I think we are doing just that.  We won't be able to meet the goal of how many transcriptions we wanted to get done, but when I made that goal, I was unaware that the interns would be working on several other Stark Center projects throughout the summer.