Poetry and Prose Performances Project

The Time Has Come, The Walrus Said

Webmonarch — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:56:32 +0000

P4 (which started as a Posner Internship, continued with a SURG, and concluded with a poster presentation at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing) was such an amazing experience, I am sad to say goodbye to the project. Almost 10 months ago, I first started posting p4′s videos online. I’ve gone through 2 sets of grants, worked with more than 15 amazing actors, borrowed thousands of dollars of equipment, and the project has received awards and accolades from some very serious places. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

p4 Profiled on BLOG@CACM!

Webmonarch — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:32:39 +0000

Last night I (and my poster for pfour) were randomly selected to be profiled on an ACM blog. Here is the awesome write-up. Presenting the post last night was so much fun! I chatted with students, a president of a college, at CTO of a major tech company, and friends from last year. This female-community thing is pretty amazing!

Video Marathon!

Webmonarch — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:51:22 +0000

So, when I finished last semester, I still had chapters 8-17 and a few smaller pieces still not uploaded from my research project. After my awesome summer internship I will be presenting my work on pfour at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Technology and need to get the rest of the videos up. So. Here goes my 12 hour day of video uploading. Every time I get a new video up on YouTube, I will post it here. Watch out!

Update, 2:26pm. First video up! It’s “Birches” by Robert Frost

Update, 2:56pm: Second video up! It’s “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost

Update, 4:22pm. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Enjoy!

Update, 6:19pm. Parts 1 and 2 of Peter Pan, Chapter 8 are up!

Update, 6:37pm. Part 3 of chapter 8 of Peter Pan is up.

Money quote: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Update, 6:42pm. All of chapter 9 is up (this sudden bursts of uploads has more to do with queuing than huge jumps of productivity ).

This is one of the quirkiest in all of J.M. Barrie’s quirky book. In it, the Never Bird saves Peter and Wendy from drowning by letting them use her nest as a boat. It shows Peter at his most transcendental. Enjoy!

Update, 7:32pm. Part 1 of Chapter 10 is up. It’s missing a bit–go to the YouTube page for the text of the missing parts. Part 2 is on its way.

Update, 7:45pm. Here it is!

Update, 8:06pm. Here is chapter 11, parts 1 and 2″

Update, 8:55pm. Here’s Chapter 12, parts 1 and 12:

Update, 10:11pm. Parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 13 are up:

Update, 10:15pm. Parts 1 and 2 of chapter 14 are up. Horray!

Update, 10:54pm. Both parts of Chapter 15 (“Hook or Me This Time!”) are up!

Update, 10:58pm. Sad update. I cannot find Chapter 16. But you can read it here. Coming up is one of the most bittersweet chapters in all of children’s literature. The final chapter of Peter Pan.

Update, 11:04pm. Last chapter *sigh of relief*. Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Chapter 17 of Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie

I spent 9 hours working on these videos today, and I still feel jazzed. I love creating defined objects that will be used, that help people access things I love. I love it. Time for sleep.

p4 Wins Research Prize

Webmonarch — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:08:17 +0000

At the Meeting of the Minds research symposium p4 won an award from the Center for Arts in Society. Go us. We rock, and they said so. Go us.

Poster is Done!

Webmonarch — Wed, 06 May 2009 00:05:33 +0000

Exploring New Media

Webmonarch — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:15:52 +0000

I have spent a lot of the past 3 days learning Google Docs, learning YouTube’s data collection mechanism, learning to save time when dealing with data entry.

3 funny things I have learned:

YouTube does not record any data when there are no views for a video. This means that I must re-organize spread-sheets by hand to make sure the data for 03/04/09 for Sonnet 116 lines up with the data for 03/04/09 for Huckleberry Finn.

Google Docs does not work well when you have a lot of docs open in different tabs. It stalls, creaks, and goes badly. I have learned to open just a few at a time.

Though this humanities major would not have expected it, but I am really enjoying playing with numbers. Knowing that every line of every data sheet is a reflection of my efforts to spread great literature gives me a consistent, warm motivation to see what patterns I can pull out. It is something like giving a speech on something you are really good at.

I have been a bit concerned that I am spending so much time learning new media under a grant. Is learning to use an HD camera, a Cannon 360, Google Docs, or YouTube’s interface research? Is learning to negotiate for access to special equipment or for actors’ time covered in my grant? I know these things are important, but I am not sure if they are research.

How to Cut Videos of Literature

Webmonarch — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:17:02 +0000

Because of YouTube’s 10 minute rule, I have had to be creative in where I end videos over 10 minutes. I want the ending to make sense, but also leave the viewer wanting to hear the next part. I think the best cutting I did was with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper”. It is a short story written as a journal of a woman slowly slipping into madness. I ended up cutting each scene at the end of a journal entry.

Kinda cool, huh? I group entries where convenient, but I think the 5 videos break up her descent well.

With longer pieces with less obvious breaks, I just try to make them logical and interesting.

Sign-Language Music (or, another way to use YouTube to benefit students with disabilities)

Webmonarch — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:20:35 +0000

I have recently found a new way to use YouTube to support people with disabilities–for people who are deaf and read sign (ASL, British, etc). How do you communicate music without sound? Pairing dance and rhythmic signing with the already very expressive sign-language these three creative signers bring songs to sign language in an authentic and fascinating way. Enjoy!

Below may be my favorite signed music video.

Notice: the signer is an *amazing* dancer and also is not wearing a shirt for parts of this. Also, the song itself is about a man who is a womanizer, so the content is adultish. You can find a fascinating discussion of this performer on what it takes to “translate” a song into sign (and dance!).

Did I mention that I love YouTube?

Webmonarch — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:55:35 +0000

I was sitting in the lab, getting read to get down to some serious data entry for my poster (I am graphing each of my p4 video‘s popularity statistics on top of the others, see here for more on that) and I thought I was going to have to move the little dot on YouTube’s data aggregator across the fields and manually input each data point. Then I noticed a little button near the bottom. It said “Download reports for this video: csv”. Hallelujah! I am now on the IMF website reading up on csv document format. I am so glad YouTube took care of my data entry!

Apparently this is new as of today.

Super neat!

I will report more once I’ve figured it out.

UPDATE 1:
When I set the time-range of my Insight to 6 months, it only downloaded March. I was worried March was the only one that would be availible, but it seems that I can download data by month. yay!

UPDATE 2: weirdly, I cannot set my time-range starting or ending on a weekend. A moralistic comment on the evil of doing work on weekends perhaps?

UPDATE 3: I guess I cannot get that data. The alt-text for the csv link (which I have just read) tells me that “Reports can be a maximum of 31 days and can not contain data from before the 1st of March 2009″. (“can not” is sic). Well. That is unhelpful. At least I don’t have to do data entry for the last month and a half of views…

Since I cannot download all of the videos’ individual data at once, and cannot even download all of it at a time, this will be less helpful of a tool than I had supposed. *sigh*.

How to Post Videos Longer Than 10 Minutes to YouTube (10 easy steps)

Webmonarch — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:35:31 +0000

It will require some cutting, but you can get your hours long speech or half-hour long video uploaded and usable.

It used to be that YouTube had something like a favored user status and those users (universities, companies, etc) could upload longer than 10 minute content. However, as far as my non-favored-self can tell, this is no longer possible.

So. What is a Youtuber to do? Around the same time as YouTube was making strict the 10-minute rule, it introduced playlists. Playlists are sets of videos which continuously play. Say you have a 39 minute video of a lecture on Ancient Egypt.

[I am assuming: you can upload your video without violating your bandwidth restrictions. You have the rights to the video you are uploading. You have a YouTube account]

You

Take a video editing program

Macs: the new iMovie is great, Audacity (perhaps for Windows als0), Final Cut, Final Cut Pro

Windows: Windows Movie Maker

Chop your video into <10 minute segments

(add explanatory intro/extro titles)

Upload the videos to you YouTube channel

(add tags and a simple, informative description of the video’s content)

Go to My Account->Playlists

New->Playlist

Now, there might be a sexier way to do this, but here is how I do it. Open each of your newly uploaded videos (it may take around 1/2 an hour for YouTube to process newly uploaded videos) in a different window or tab, and at the bottom of each video click the “+ Playlist” and add it to the playlist you just created

Now you have a playlist which will play your entire lecture nearly continuously and can be found through a normal YouTube search.

(Subtitle/closed caption you video)

That should be it. Enjoy!