HIS 5944 (03/27-04/02/2021)

 

This week continued with the administration process with me catching up. The metadata sheets continue to be an interesting reminder of the interviews that I have given. As I participate in this project, the number of interviews that I have given has only increased that I may forget the details so these data sheets are useful in that regard. Next week should see me doing captioning which I further describe later within this post. For now, the administration process has concluded.

Regarding marketing, I have reached out and received some feedback from some of the people of interest. I was disappointed to hear that one professor from the Computer Science department declined to speak to me due to their busy schedule. While their perspective would have made it interesting, there was no way of convincing them nor any reason to push further. Perhaps a follow up question to see if they are still interesting would be acceptable. Other professors have not given me a response, but I suppose this is merely a skill to hone regarding communication and email ethics.

One of the interviews given was from a professor I greatly respect, Daniel Murphree, a professor at the UCF History Department. Contrasting with Gerber, Dr. Murphree was far more interesting on the professional side. The interview covered much of the professor’s dealings with classes and handling students in different ways. This may be due to Murphree’s smaller class sizes instead of Gerber. Murphree brought up a rather interesting suspicion that some students may take advantage of the COVID situation and may get away with certain things. The interview provided another perspective of a professor dealing with the pandemic and it’s effects on students.

In some ways, the pandemic has fostered some cynical perspectives throughout the year as students have begun to show some distrusting of those without masks. There is no way of each professor verifying if a student is overexaggerating their sickness to be more sympathetic which could be a possibility. Although, faculty and students continue to have some optimism with their continued adherence to safety guidelines placed into the university.

Due to the substantial amount of interview given, parts of the project have halted with me attempting to aid in streamlining the process. Captioning is one of these stages for the oral history as it allows for people to follow along the transcriptions and understand what the interviewee is saying. This can be helpful in case they have a particular accent or somethings may be hard to hear. I watched an instructional video given to us by the Special Collection and University Archives which use a program to caption the interviews. The process is slightly tedious as you must make sure that the captions are correct and within frame. Sometimes a student may be talking fast so the caption may not be there, and you have to be sure that it does not linger either. The process is grueling, so it has taken up a substantial amount of time for me to complete. However, this is a new skill of transcription and video editing which I have only been slightly familiar too. I am grateful to have this opportunity within the project and internship.