Category: Reflections

This week we are to revisit a training so I decided to tackle the Audacity training.

From what I recall, the training is pretty comprehensive about how to use the software rather than a specific set of steps to follow. I really enjoyed that. I particularly like the simple explanation of file formats, bitrates, sample rates and quick export guide because that can be very overwhelming the first time.

One oversight is in the “Selecting, Trimming, Shifting Tracks” section, there’s a faster way of splitting tracks. Right click with your cursor at the spot you want to split and chose “split” or use the shortcut cmd+I or ctrl+I with your cursor at the spot you want to click. The training has the user go into the Edit menu at the top which is more confusing.

The keyboard shortcut shift+space doesn’t play things in a loop, it starts playback at the same location. To play a part of the clip on a loop, select that section in blue on the playback bar where the length of the clip is displayed.

Another issue was the link to the audacity documentation in the “Trouble Opening Certain Filetypes? Install the FFMPEG Library” section is outdated. The new FFMPEG documentation is https://support.audacityteam.org/basics/installing-ffmpeg. It would also be nice to add https://manual.audacityteam.org/index.html (Audacity 3.7 and earlier documentation), https://support.audacityteam.org (Audacity 3x & 4 documentation) and https://www.audacityteam.org/help/ (Audacity 4 documentation) since Audacity had a major UI/UX overhaul between older versions and 4.

Anyway I mixed some recordings I had laying around:

(NOT RECORDED WITH COLLEGE MICS! I also used an online mp4 to mp3 converter because I didn’t want to download FFMPEG on the library computer)

Hey future me!! These are the ones:

• https://toyhou.se/15013812.-html-css-cheat-sheet
• https://toyhou.se/24877153.list-of-coding-resources
• https://toyhou.se/~forums/16.htmlcss-graphics/123106.coding-reference-

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.

This week is accessibility checking my website. With the new (and more charming) theme, the majority of previous accessibility problems were fixed. The layout is also much more clear and the reflections are not shortened on the “Reflections” page. I also really like the grey boxes when you hover over the top menu buttons.

There’s only 1 issue flagged with by the Editoria11y Accessibility Checker which is the arrow icon button to the next page asking if the symbol is meaningful. It is. But from inspect element on my browser it doesn’t have alt text. I can’t fix it in the wordpress interface though. The Reflections page is empty in the classic editor since it’s a page for “posts”. I think it might be editable in a different editor.

The WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool showed me some weirdness around the “ Home” button saying “Adjacent links go to the same URL”. I thought it’s because I had ‘ id=”Home” ‘ but when I removed it to match the other two buttons without id, the warning remained. I genuinely have no idea what is causing this. I tried inspect element too but it only shows one link. While inspecting this time I noticed the slug for the newly renamed “Projects” page was still “/project/”. Glad I noticed that because I had already typed in the plural url a couple times and been confused why it didn’t work. It’s “/projects/” now.

I then checked my site with www.toptal.com and set the preview to greyscale since I know that issues with colour perception typically do not affect value (darkness / brightness) perception. This website is legible without colour EXCEPT for the light purple I chose for links, which I promptly changed.

Finally, I checked my site with keyboard navigation and I’m so thankful for this theme to have a “go to top” button as the last element on the page. With the reflections not shortened, it was also way easier to read them by pressing instead of having to click into and back out of a bunch of pages. I’m honestly surprised at how inaccessible the “Twenty Twenty-One” theme was. There was no “return to top” and the content was too spaced out and did not have enough dividers between menus and page content for me.

Now that I have a year of Vivero under my belt I think the most important thing (and I’ve said this to a couple new fellows already) is to not worry too much and be ready to learn. At the start it was really nerve-racking because you’re dropped into the role of an “expert” but have just started learning the tools for digital projects but as I progressed through the half semester course and trainings I felt a lot better knowing how to use (and how to initially approach) new tools.

We so back. It’s time to revamp this site. During this year’s vivero retreat I helped a couple new fellows in setting up their vivero wordpress site. Namely, immediately adding icons. I’ve also started a checklist because I seriously want to change this site and get better at wordpress template customisation. This year I hope to gain more in-depth knowledge on a few tools of my choosing so I can be more helpful in them. I also want to learn 3D printing and troubleshooting as last year I had a couple students come in during my shift asking to 3D print and I don’t support them beyond pointing them to the info sheet or come back during working hours.

Audio! Sounds interesting? Well I have the Audacity to play with it this week.

Using Audacity to edit audio felt pretty standard to me. It reminded me of an old program I use for voice synthesizers because of the 2000s looking UI. I feel pretty confident in teaching others on how to make a very basic podcast (trimming, noise reduction, audio levels) but not for more complex tasks like mixing music.

I find it really interesting how deceptive the UI is. Audacity looks ancient but it’s surprisingly powerful in what it can do. The most frustrating thing I found was not being able to keep the playhead still and use it to line up duplicates of a track exactly. Another thing is Audacity seems to be applying lossy editing; once you apply an effect it changes the track directly rather than being a filter over it. I think I definitely want to spend more time with Audacity to try more difficult tasks.

This week I’m writing about writing about doing something. I mean, this week is about documentation!

After reading and writing documentation (and having had it on the back of my mind for a while because of my project), I think the key to good documentation is be specific and assuming whoever is picking up after you knows only the bare bones. This is just a rule of thumb though, with more knowledge about what you’re documenting you can adapt your level of hand-holdiness. For example, if you’re writing documentation for a program that will be read by new and returning users, more detail is always better. In another case if you’re writing documentation for a mod of Minecraft you may have to explain how to install it but you won’t have to explain how to play the game.

For my project, I haven’t gotten far enough to start documenting a set process yet however I can already smell trouble brewing. Because my project uses in depth functions of TimelineJS I will have to very carefully explain the obscure functions that barely anyone uses… and their quirks. (For example, sometimes the background color doesn’t want to work, or a row labeled “era” doesn’t display anything other than the main title.) I will need to first figure out exactly what I’m doing, then will I be able to document it. I’m also messing around with the CSS formatting so documentation wouldn’t start until I finish up with that. I’m also unsure if I should document the CSS formatting in case it messes with something far down the line and no one knows what I did. I think comments within the CSS may be good for that.

You’ve heard of iPhone, get ready for WeVideo. This week is on the collaborative online video editing software.

Learning WeVideo was virtually seamless for me because I have a lot of experience in other video editing softwares. I did not follow any training video and just jumped into it. It was just a matter of hunting for the feature I want and mapping shortcut keys to known functions. However I have some small nitpicks about it. The main user issue with it is its video/text and audio track system. You have to manually click the menu to rearrange the order of the tracks drag and drop systems for rearranging. I think it would be more intuitive if they were drag and drop. Also WeVideo doesn’t automatically create a new track when you try to slot a longer video clip in an empty gap that isn’t as long as the clip. It just doesn’t let you do that. Instead you have to either cut the clip first or create a new track. This is annoying because in iMovie (the software that comes with every Mac) and many other free softwares, it automatically creates the track so you can insert the clip. This can get really annoying if for a project you have one long clip that is multiple takes and it would be convenient to line up the right take in the right location before cutting. More small nitpicks include not being able to extend clips because it’s pushing against another clip that in other software would slide further down the timeline and not being able to copy paste transitions. Also for some reason you can’t drag to change transition duration.

WeVideo is actually pretty versatile with how you can edit clips. If you double click a clip you can get really detailed clip editing like cropping, really basic movement key framing, colour key (making certain an eyedropped colour transparent), colour grading and clip speed.

I think WeVideo is good for basic video editing for an academic project but anything more advanced in editing (ie. precise masks or keyframes or requires a lot of complex transitions, higher quality exports) should be done in a different software. I think there are many other free online video editing sites such as CapCut that are easier to create an account for and have the more intuitive system I mentioned.

I feel very confident in helping others with WeVideo, but the barrier to entry can be tedious because you have to contact [dlac] and wait for account creation. Unless there is specific instruction to use WeVideo or the collaboration feature is absolutely necessary I would direct a student to a different, more quickly accessible editing software. Especially if the project in question needs to be done as soon as possible.

It’s time for a project reflection! I think I’ve made pretty good progress on the project even though there’s always a nagging voice in my head telling me I’ve not done enough.

So far I’ve gotten all the provided data for the timeline off of EventViewpoint and into spreadsheets. Also very recently with the help of Tierney, I figured out how to have a TimelineJS iframe access a CSS in the domain files which I’m very proud of and really opened so many possibilities.

The immediate next steps are finding a way to format the data nicely and inputing all the data I have. This means understanding the TimelineJS CSS and editing it to match the XCTF site and formatted well for the data provided. I’m holding off on data input because of normalisation and copyright stuff I’ll need to ask my project lead directly about. More long term, I should be making sure the process and data formatting is well documented because there will be more data added in the future by other people.

Another thing that is far in the back of my mind is the second half of the project. It will stay on the back burner until the timeline is done or on hold for whatever reason. It’s an alumni contact tab for the site that can allow alumni to submit their cross country stories. I’m thinking possibly collecting their email and have some person vetting them as a real alumni or maybe have someone corresponding with them via email to see what they’d like to share.

The main obstacle that I encountered so far was working around the idiosyncrasies of TimelineJS. The main issue is the generated link preview being janky and google sheets being finicky especially when TimelineJS needed to process many colours and options. I think I’ve found a way forward using TimelineJS’s hidden features and CSS so that’s good. I don’t have any long lingering questions at the moment but I know for sure there will be hundreds of little questions that pop up when I’m learning to edit the TimelineJS CSS more in depth. I’ll just have to resolve them as they come.

If there’s something strange in your literature… who do you call? Gale Digital Scholar Lab! This week it’s time for text analysis.

After playing around with Gale I feel pretty confident teaching it to someone with the provided vivero documentation, on-site documentation and tool tips. To me, it is a very straightforward tool in its function. I think the main cause of frustration will be that the site can be clunky and slow, especially when needing to index or analyse a large data set. Another piece of pain is how the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) deals with non-standard fonts or god forbid strange formatting. I found many cases where the text is fully human readable but the OCR completely freaks out at borders and decorative elements. Also Gale is not good for using library resources from different languages, especially those that don’t use predominantly characters from the English alphabet. When I searched for it, I found that the library actually has a vast amount of Chinese texts but Gale’s OCR makes the generated plaintext virtually unusable without retyping everything. This makes me very sad knowing the texts are there but the analysis tool isn’t capable enough to properly search through or use them.

I find the different algorithms used for analysis really interesting especially the “Sentiment Analysis” and “Topic Modelling”. Because who gets to determine what is grouped into what and what happens when modern language usage groupings gets mapped onto old archives? I would look further into how the analysis algorithms work but I learned that may be a years long (possibly futile) learning journey.