This week is ✨ big reflection ✨ on my time as a Vivero fellow.
My biggest area of growth so far is learning to balance work / life / study. I’m still working on it but I found that having a set time (for example a 2 hour time block) for tasks is very helpful. Thus I am working 3 drop-in shifts this semester for set Vivero work times. My current area of weakness is at the start of any big project or task when I have to make a lot of decisions all at once. I get “analysis paralysis” and suddenly can’t do anything. The worst part is, I learned from the Academic Success Center that the best method to overcome it is to break the larger task into smaller tasks. However, the task of breaking down the larger project into smaller tasks in and of itself is overwhelming and causes analysis paralysis. I’ll probably meet with them about this later this week.
My favourite thing to learn as a Vivero fellow has to be Omeka and Gale Digital Scholar Lab. Omeka was really fun for me because I love collecting, cataloging and curating things, specifically artworks. Having a digital version of that was very enjoyable although I haven’t had a long term project or personal reason to use it yet. Gale Digital Scholar Lab was intriguing because after the training I started to search for obscure historical documents on my city and found truly obscure and interesting books on Shanghainese. Their text analysis system is very latin alphabet focused though so it struggles with languages beyond latin alphabet with diacritics even though its catalogue contains many foreign language documents.
For future training and professional development in October and November I have a few tasks in mind. I would really like to learn Twine. It seem super helpful for conveying branching ideas, writing multiple choice stories and possibly a visual novel planning tool I can share with others. I plan to spend a week or two on Twine then for the remainder of the two months work on learning how to make a website from scratch. I also want to update my resume and make a better portfolio site. I would also like to learn 3D printing. I want to 3D print personal creations but also a few time last year students came down here during my shift looking for assistance in 3D printing but I couldn’t help them.