Week 7 Feb 22 - Feb 28

Feb 22 - Department Meeting - 1hr
Meeting with both Zoe and Jack today and we looked at one another's revised budgets. One talking point was the color of the material that will used for the display cases, I wanted a red, but Zoe felt that would be too unpleasing. She preferred a dark material, like black, but the I told her the plaque would be black and it would go against the principles of my research. The "so-called" contrasting backgrounds. So we settled on Grey. I guess we will see how it looks, once it's up.

Feb 24 - Revised SMART goal - 3hrs
I have decided to redo my SMART goal to make it something more realistic since my other one relied on too many outside forces. So the hard drives are within, for the most part, completely within my control.

Specific.

Organize digital format files on hard drive. This includes the combination of the Buffalo hard drive and the Lacie hard drive files. In order to have digital files for the online archives.

Who: Myself and Carson.

What: I want to organize the files on the hard drives in order to make them more accessible for future users: archivist, scholars, as well as incorporating them to the digital realm via the internet.

Where: The drives can be organized anywhere the hard drives are located. Home, school, etc.

When: check out Time-Bound below

Which: Need a computer. If a laptop is used it would be recommended that I be close to power source to prevent the computer from shutting down and possibly losing information.

Why: Purpose for this is to market the historical aspects of Visions Film Festival & Conference as well as preserving digital content.

Measurable.

Progress can be determined by inspecting the hard drive files. By seeing how the files are organized on the hard drive. So the completion ratio of Visions1,2,3,4,5 etc

Attainable

Yes very likely.

Realistic.

A low goal that is easy to attain would be getting all of the Visions files. A higher goal will be organizing them not only by year, but by different sections (marketing material, selections, awards, conference, juries (our historical info) files, and figure out stats as well). All things that can contribute to the online archive.

Time-Bound

Feb 16 - Combines drives

Feb 23 - Organize Visions1

Feb 27 - Give Visions1 files to Carson

Mar 5 - Organize Visions2

Mar 19 - Give Visions2 files to Carson

Mar 22 - Organize Visions3

Mar 26 - Give Visions3 files to Carson

Apr 5 - Organize Visions4

Apr 9 - Give Visions4 files to Carson

Apr 16 - Organize Visions5

Apr 20 - Give Visions5 files to Carson

Apr 24- Begin Organizing Visions6

Apr 30 - Begin Manual for Archivist, specifically a chapter: Digital Content Preservation - This will be about organization strategies using Visions6 files as the example on how to best and efficiently preserve digital material.

Feb 25 - Organized Visions 2011 Files - 2hrs
As the title for today suggest I completed merging the 2011 files from both hard drives and organized them to the best of my ability. I may need input from people based on what I have completed to see if my structure makes sense. I have been looking at these files for so long that I have probably created a bias.

Feb 27 - Departmental Meeting - 1hr
Had to meet with Zoe today, at a later time due to time conflicts with another project. I showed her the hard drive progress so far, and she seemed to be like what she saw. Not a hundred percent that she did like it, but there is a good probability that she likes what I have accomplished so far. If not, then I will be at her mercy.

Reflections
I have come to realize, that much like everything in life, you can't win every battle. This job of the archivist is quite depressing. It is like working within a vacuum, disconnected from the outside world, unsure of where you belong; this is because you are not quite in the marketing department and also because the job has never existed. Perhaps it has, but it doesn't seem like if they did it effectively. I am a pioneer in many way, because I must venture into the unknown and figure out  how to best survive. My hope is that future archivists look at theses files and see, not the vast amount of data, but rather what could be accomplished with them. What I am trying to say is that these files have more purpose than just to be organized. They are designed to be used and learned from, there are a lot of mistakes from previous visions and the only way to learn from them is to see what was attempted in the past. Case and point, the link below is a website to a filmmaker who had a film in visions. Nowhere on their site does it mention Visions Film Festival & Conference.    

Source:
http://www.buffalopicturehouse.com/work

Week 6 Feb 15 - Feb 21

Feb 15 - Budget - 2hr
Today I readjusted my budget, and realized that I would have to pick between either another hard drive or supplies to make the display case look nicer. Because I have one hard drive right now, I think visions awareness would be more beneficial for the short term rather than using majority of my budget for another hard drive.

Feb 16 - Organizing Visions 2011 Files - 2hr
I continue working on the 2011 files and end up finding more of the same things on the tow different drives. I am almost complete with this year and will be getting ready to hand it over to Carson so he can easily find the files that he needs for the online archive.

Feb 20 - Organizing Visions 2011 Files - 2hrs
Because Zoe is part of the group leaving to Virginia we did not have a meeting this week. So I worked on the Visions 2011 files. These seem to be taking forever because everything seems to be out of place in the hard drive. I know that once I get to Visions 4 there will be more issues because they were switching from dropbox to googledrive. Visions 5 is nowhere to be found as well. So my goal is to complete Visions1 by next Saturday because it will serve as the template for the rest of the files.

Reflections
Looking at it now, this was a slow week. This is partly due to working on other assignments for other classes. This coming week I will submit my revised budget with hard drive included, and begin (and hopefully finish) the inventory of material in the kitchen. So hopefully I will get back to the old work rate.

Source:
N/A

Week 5 Feb 8 - Feb 14

Feb 8 - Display Case Presentation - 2hr
Today I added some final touches to the display case presentation. Mainly I found images and photos in order to add them to the presentation. The research information I found about the "science attention" and the interview I had with Brandon Guthrie contributed to the presentation heavily.  One of the issues was finding film festival images, because the only display cases about films were preserving movie props and other movie memorabilia rather than the festivals themselves. Another issue was finding examples within the parameters of the type of case I had access too, so I had to create something myself.

Feb 9 - Organizing Visions 2011 Files - 1hr
I continued organizing the drives but could only work on them for so long before the madness sets in again. One of the biggest issues that I have encountered is that there is duplicate folder's inside of themselves. So I have to look at individual files and determine if there is any differences, most of the time they are carbon copies of one another, but every now and then there is a slightly different version of the same document so I need to keep both versions.

Feb 10 - Bake Sale - 5hrs
Today was the day of the bake sale. I had a lot of fun acting like a fool trying to convince people to donate for baked goods. I mainly tried to push the cake pops that I helped make. What I enjoyed the most was hearing people's excuses why they couldn't donate, it ranged from I don't have cash, I'm running late, and I was just mugged yesterday. Most people seemed to be open to the idea, and when I initially got their attention with "hello, how are you, having a good day" more people were wiling to stop and listen, as oppose to "Hey would you like donate to...through bake sale." I think some people wanted to start conversations, but once they heard me trying to "sell" Visions they either wanted to know more about the cause, or became distant.

Feb 11 - Calico Room Valentines Party - 5hrs
This was the night of the Calico room party. I think because I don't drink alcohol I am just socially awkward at these sort of things. I feel like if I don't have anything to do, and my one task didn't occur until midnight. I was door person #2 and by then there was really no people coming in, so I was mainly handing out short surveys. I will say this though, the Theory of Reciprocity was proven this night, Shannon gave a raffle ticket to Wes, and this lead to Wes and Ryan buying $40 worth of raffle tickets. Not only that but by the time I went to see Ryan again, he was posting on the Cape Fear Equality page drawing to the event that night. He told me to send him the link once the tickets were on sale in order to post about that as well.

Feb 13 - Meeting with Marketing and Art Department - 2hrs
Today I met with Zoe, Jack, Grace, Michelle and Carson. Zoe asked me about my budget, and presentation, and told me to make adjustments. One slide will have to go, even though I liked it because it created synergy. I think I will  fine tune my presentation in order to have it function with the budget since I did not present this week.

Reflections
Other than already knowing I am a socially awkward person in social situations and an outgoing lively person in normal situations, what else did I find out about myself this week, and I guess my job. I am a paradox, so my work is a reflection of that, I make simple task complicated, and make difficult task look simple. My whole idea is that if it is too simple then you should put much more research and work into it in order to get down to the root of the task. Sometimes that means looking at art in order to be visually pleasured or confused, which then leads to trying to understand scientifically how the eye functions, and finally how our attention is attained. All this to try and figure out how a display case should be organized. I really like my holistic approach because somewhere down the research rabbit hole I will find something that interest me a lot.

Source:
N/A

Week 4 Feb 1 - Feb 7

Feb 1 - Display Research - 2hrs
I read through the The Six Laws of Attention. Summarized them the best I could below.
-1.) Attention is a Limited Resource. Humans are not capable of paying attention or being aware of everything. What I found most interesting about this law was that we are not even aware of our own biology, until something is pointed out. For example we don't notice our pumping/ throbbing  hearts, unless if we are under some sort of stress, or until this last sentence was read.
-2.) Attention is Selective. In order to pay attention to something you must exclude something else. This essentially supports the limited resource law, but rather than not being able to recognize everything because of limitations, one selects what they pay attention to. The "Cocktail Party Phenomenon" illustrates this, basically when one person is having a conversation with somebody they become oblivious to other conversations around them.
-3.) Consciousness Requires Attention. This is a bit trickier to understand, but returning to the cocktail party, a person will still be dimly aware of things around them. So the more engaging something is, the more attention one pays to it.
-4.) Attention does not Require Consciousness. When a person becomes has over-learned something, like driving a car, they are not fully conscious of all the motions that are required to drive a vehicle. The only way this could be applied to display cases is that people may have such a over-learned, automatic behavior like a set routine to class which may result in students not being fully aware of the display case, unless if you draw their attention to it.
-5.) All Tasks Require Some Degree of Attention (although that amount may be small). In a nutshell, everything we do requires attention, even it is a small amount. The little amount of attention is used to monitor automatic behavior; for example we use some attention to notice where we step as we descend stairs, but an even smaller amount when walking on level surface.
-6.) All Tasks Have an Optimal Level of Attention. Complex task suffer from lack of enough  attention, while automatic task suffer from too much behavior. Interestingly how drawing attention to automatic behavior, minor behavior could be very disruptive. Pointing out somebodies gait will result in them walking differently. So how can I apply this to the display case, well I don't know.... yet.  

         - Meeting with Grace - 1hrs
I met with Grace to look through the hard drive in order to see what files she wanted to use for her presentation. This also allowed me the opportunity to look at the material on the hard drive after reformatting it. One thing that became obvious to both Grace and I was that the files are not similarly organized. One folder titles DOCS had videos for a certain Visions, while another contained a VIDEOS folder with every video for that year, things like Panels, advertisement and Submissions all lumped together. It became obvious that there needed to be a universal way of organizing all files. So Grace and I got as much as we could and I left the hard drive sorting for another day. One good thing that came from this was that I was able to see the footage of past conferences and I did not really like the camera placements for much of the panels, they did edit it pretty well, had they had one camera that framed the speakers frontally it could have cut better, so I mentioned that to Sydney.

Feb 3 - Meeting with Brandon Guthrie- 1hr
Zoe and I met with my former professor, now the current Department Chair for Humanities and Fine Arts at CFCC. He gave us a tour of the new Cape Fear Humanities and Fine Arts center, and showed us locations we could advertise. We found out that there is a front side and a backside to the building. The backside is were students have access to, while the front side side used for bigger events and runs like a business by different people not connected to the Humanities and Fine Arts department. So it may be more difficult to advertise in the front part of the building, but we may be able to put, four-ups in the front area. This would be good because this is a high traffic area during plays and concerts. The process of getting posters approved was pretty simple as well, all you have to do is go to the kiosk in Union Station and ask for the posters to be stamped for approval, and you don't even have to be a student.  

         - Organizing Hard Drive - 1hr
After getting back on campus I began organizing the Buffalo Hard Drive. The first thing I did was make a 6 Visions folder and inside of all of them I put 7 folders to help organize material. This way one can go from one Visions folder to another and they will all be organized the same. It really is simple but about an hour in, I ran into a wall, I found some documents that I have no idea where they belong, I need to get my hands on all the programs in order to see what material is missing and begin hunting files down that way.

Feb 4 - Lumina Scout- .5hr
Rebecca Firth gave me access to Lumina Theater and I was able to take some pictures of possible camera placements for Sydney Burton. I think with 3 cameras we would be able to get sufficient coverage of the panels, keynote speakers, host and crowd. The camera operators will have to coordinate by restricted to certain zones.

Feb 5 - Display Case Research - 1hrs
Today I met with Brandon Guthrie again, we discussed various things on displays. It took a while to explain exactly what I was displaying, initially he thought it was just documents so he showed me how to best display that, but then gave me advice on how to best display material and how it should be closer to the glass so people can see it. People don't like to peer into things, they would rather be able to see something closer, so bringing material forward. Guthrie also told me to angle the documents slightly, this way if there is light on top it could illuminate downward on it and make it easier to read. I also found out that a darker background would more foreground objects pop out if they are lighter. Essentially you have to make the material easy to access visually and that will help draw the attention of onlookers.

Feb 6 - Meeting with Art Department - 2hrs
Grace informed me that many Dirty Dozen's needs to be adjusted, so I made some changes. I mainly changed the task completion dates. Grace and I later went to the edit lab and looked through the hard drives again to see what else she may need for her presentation. Found out that things on Vimeo have more information. Another option may be to search through the second drive and see what files are in that drive, hopefully together they can combine to create a complete festival record.
         - Organizing Visions 2011 Files - 2hrs
I went through the 2011 files and organized them into several folders in order to make it more organized. I got through one complete drive and was exhausted by the end. There is a lot of files that are randomly thrown in there. I also did not see any video files files, so I will have to track those somehow.

Reflections

This past week I continued my trend of researching "how things work." I can't wait until I can actually apply all of these theories. Perhaps they wont work, so far the organization of the hard drive in the same structure as the online archive has been useful. If it makes it easier to access stuff on the hard drive it should be easy to access once its online. I look forward to the day Carson and I begin filling up the archives online.

The other day somebody called me Indiana Jones, this was partly because I have to track down all the missing pieces. I really like this idea of being an Anthropologist; after that it is my other major, and this is like the initial research phase that is done before requesting a grant to apply the theory. Last week I compared my research to Going Deep with David Rees, but thinking about it anthropologically is way is a lot more exciting.

Source:
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/lawsofattention.html

Week 3 Jan 25 - Jan 31

Jan 25 - Festival Powerpoint - 1.5hrs
Completed final touches to festival powerpoint, added all images to slides. This included the screenshots of the other festivals demonstrating how they effectively use organizing tools to demonstrate different aspects of the archives.
           - Marketing Dept and Art Dept Meeting - 2.5hrs
Discussed my findings with Zoe, and showed her my presentation. We fined tuned the presentation and decided that the presentation was complete. Zoe also made me aware that I should have a budget prepared for Archives.
           - Archive Budget  Proposal - 3hrs
Created a budget for 3 scenarios: $100, $250, and $500. These included display cases, storage containers, boxes and label makers.

Jan 26 - Inspect Display space in King - .5hrs
Shannon showed me the available cases and I agreed that we should have both the in wall display and the large wall display case. One will serve for season events; like to advertise galaxy quest, cinemixer, the valentines party and main event, Visions6. The in wall display by the screening room in king will be used as a year round display showing the growth of Visions Film Festival & Conference.  

Jan 27 - Display Case Research - 1hr
Spoke with Anthropology Professor, Dr. Michaela Howells and asked her if she knew anything on the science behind the display. Although she has worked in museums, she did not actually display artifacts, but she did motion me to the right direction. She gave me the email to Dr. Shefsiek, a History professor who has studied how historical document and artifacts should be displayed.

Jan 29 - Display Case Research - 1hr
I contacted CFCC Department Chair of Humanities and Fine Arts, Brandon Guthrie, asking him if he could help understand how art is most effectively displayed. I figure that I should try and get a Historical perspective, Shefsiek, and an Artistic perspective, Guthrie, and compare how they differ and are similar. The goal is to understand the most effective way to demonstrate Visions artifacts that resonate with student traffic.

Jan 30 - Marketing Dept Meeting - .5hrs
Showed Grace the files I acquired from Luqi, and shared the folder with her. We agreed to meet again on Monday to go through and select the other files she was interested in. Spoke with Zoe and she told me to adjust the archive budget proposal to include it in my presentation.
           - Formatting Visions Drive - 3hrs
Decided to format the Visions hard drive because it was formatted in MAC os, which will only work on Apple computers. According to Aaron, ExFat format will work on both PC and Mac, so that is why I am reformatting the drive.

Reflections

This past week, I have spent a lot of time trying to get in contact with people. Either people in other departments or sending out email to other professor to see if they would be willing to help me better understand how a display should look. I did find a link online to a page called Visual Expert Human Factors: The Six Laws of Attention. I plan to read that as soon as I have time. Even if the meetings with Shefsiek and Guthrie fall through I will at least have that. I also need to find some examples displays and see if they follow these trends. If I have time this coming week I will head to the Cameron Arts Museum and the Cape Fear Museum. There may be somebody who can assist me. I feel like if I could be a researcher for that National Geographic show, Going Deep with David Rees, which is really, a pretty cool thought.

Source:
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/lawsofattention.html