A behind-the-scenes look at the work that goes into the Rich Media Projects sponsored by the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Xavier University of Louisiana.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Collage Culturel: Carmen Rogers finished trimming the first batch of video clips and has begun the process of winnowing the clips down to the very best examples. We reviewed the design document and discussed the pros and cons or varying from the planned design, but reached no definitive conclusion. I shared the prototype Web page with Carmen, and we didscussed the possibility of a geographical/global graphic theme.
posted by Editor B
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Initial work on implementing glossary feature.
posted by Editor B
Monday, September 29, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Created very rough prototype to display timeline content.
posted by Editor B
Vive: Delivered 60 CD-ROMs to Susan Spillman. Special thanks to Kerry, our work-study student, for burning all those disks.
posted by Editor B
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Burnt a Windows-only CD for Mark Schlueter to show to his department chair. [Follow-up: must have done something wrong, because Mark reported back to me that it doesn't work.]
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Established new MySQL database for project. Created table for timelines. Created MySQL user account for Mark Gstohl. Met with Mark and showed him how to use Web interface to MySQL. His assignment: populate table with some real data. My assignment: write prototype scripts to draw information from table and display as HTML. We discussed possibility of a table for related images.
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Thinker: Met with Elliott Hammer. We established a regular time for weekly meetings (Fridays, 1:30) and discussed progress Elliott has made on writing for the second module (which will be the first to be implemented).
posted by Editor B
Collage Culturel: Carmen Rogers edited more video clips while I designed a prototype Web page.
posted by Editor B
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Experimenting with different methods of transferring audio from PCM-M1 (DAT recorder) to computer. Researching hardware and software that may facilitate this.
posted by Editor B
Monday, September 22, 2003
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: David Lanoue and I experimented with microphone and DAT recorder.
posted by Editor B
BibleDudes: Received text and images for Section One from Michael Homan; seems to be some variance from structure proposed in design document, so I queried him for clarification. He got back to me right quick and I've done a little image editing and coding for the section.
posted by Editor B
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Kids to Afrika: Met Jade, Chelsi and Ryan, high school students in the KTA program from Warren Easton, Ben Franklin and McMain. We learned to scan photographs and do a little image editing in Photoshop; then we scanned a pack of photographs of a KTA event from earlier this year. We burned CDs of the photos for the students to work with, and I'll use the images to build a photo album for the website.
posted by Editor B
Friday, September 19, 2003
Haiku of Kobayashi Issa: Met with David Lanoue. We discussed a number of topics, including the creation of a daily random haiku e-mail list, the addition of audio elements to the website, syndicated content and a few miscellaneous content improvements. I will attempt to summarize the outcomes of our discussion on some of these topics:
Audio: David will take the CAT DAT recorder and microphone to Japan when he attends a conference there later this month, and he will record native Japanese speakers reading selected haiku by Issa for inclusion on the website. To that end we will do some testing with the equipment next week.
E-mail List: The idea is that you sign up for the list and get a haiku every day via e-mail, sleected at random from the Issa archive. We want to keep the e-mails extremely short so that people could get them as text messages on phones and other handheld devices, which seem to have a limit of 100 characters. It's a natural idea, so it's no surprise that someone else is already doing something like this. But of course this would be unique in that it would be focused on Kobayashi Issa. We'll need to implement a system for subscribing and confirming subscription and unsubscribing. A crontab job should be able to trigger the daily mailing. We decided there would be no point in archiving the haiku sent to the list, since they'll all be coming from an archive anyhow.
Syndication: The random haiku idea also lends itself to syndication, so I will do research on RSS, find out how it's done, and report back to David.
BibleDudes: Met with Michael Homan. We agreed that a regular meeting schedule was not necessary for this project, since we have developed a good production rhythm. He's gotten text for the "About the Bible" section back from Jeff and will send it on to me once Therese draws the illustrations. We also discussed a new feature to be deployed in this section, which will enable the user to view a random Bible verse; I'm puzzling over the best way to do this. Mike's still not happy with the home page, so we agreed to think about it further.
posted by Editor B
Collage Culturel: I gave Carmen Rogers some further iMovie coaching, then turned her loose and let her trim clips on her own. We established Tuesdays at 11 am as the only workable regular timeslot for future meetings.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl. We set up a weekly meeting schedule. He showed me some development work he's done in PowerPoint. We discussed possibilities for presentation of slideshows and timelines. The project seems to be looking more like a database-driven website than a CD-ROM. I said I would develop some prototype content-management features for Mark to examine when next we meet.
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
The first Rich Media Lunch of the semester was a smashing success! David Lanoue presented his work on the Haiku of Kobayashi Issa website, which illustrated the possibilities of such projects and serves as a good model; he also got some ideas for future development. I plugged this blog as well as MERLOT and took care of some basic administrivia.
posted by Editor B
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Met with Mark Schlueter. Showed him changes I've made to the interface (mostly the addition of sound) and we planned a regular meeting time for the rest of the semester.
posted by Editor B
I have contacted all participating faculty and either me with them, established a regular meeting, or am waiting to hear back. If you are a participating faculty member and I haven't contacted you, please let me know!
posted by Editor B
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Vive: CD-ROM burning continues. I'm thankful that we have a work-study student to do this.
posted by Editor B
Readings: Met with Biljana Obradovich and discussed next steps in implementation process.
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Collage Culturel: Carmen Rogers and I reviewed the design document for the project; the basic spirit and structure seems to remain the same, but I asked her to consider making this a website rather than a CD-ROM. I then gave her a crash course on trimming video clips in iMovie. Since I've already imported most of the her first videotape, she will be ready to trim and sort through clips when she comes in next Tuesday.
posted by Editor B
Vive: Burned final cross-platform version of Vive 1.0 CD-ROM. Now the mass duplication can begin.
posted by Editor B
Interactive Taxonomic Zoology: Minor tweaking.
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Vive: Burning one more attempt at a good master CD for Vive. The last one failed because I mistakenly misnamed the CD itself. Hopefully this will be the final version.
posted by Editor B
BibleDudes: Attempting to run-down a very annoying bug in Internet Explorer 6 that is causing large portions of text to be completely invisible. It appears to have something to do with the margin property...
posted by Editor B
Thinker: Converted design document from Word to PDF, appended flowchart and mockups, added to CAT website.
Updated Rich Media Projects pages on CAT website.
Made further arrangements for first Rich Lunch.
posted by Editor B
Friday, September 05, 2003
Vive: Researching multiple CD burners. They are looking to be prohibitively expensive.
posted by Editor B
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Experimented with including images in the Flash interface prototype.
posted by Editor B
Vive: Working on a ReadMe file for the CD.
posted by Editor B
Vive: I think I've uncovered the source of the video file problem. It seems that the QuickTime movies in question had "dependencies," which is to say they shared data with other files, and when they couldn't find those files, errors popped up. I'm still not sure exactly why these error showed up only on some systems and not on others, but at least I've figured out how to fix it; I simply need to resave the problematic movies and make them self-contained. I also renamed many of the movies according to a more logical scheme.
I also figured out the font problem. It seems that when we first created this movie in Mac OS 9, using Director 8.5, we had no problem embedding a PostScript Type1 font. But now that we're using Director MX (in Mac OS X) it won't let us do that. Seems that it only lets you embed TrueType or the new .dfont format. I was able to solve this problem by a rather circuitous route: I downloaded a shareware program that converts Mac fonts to Windows fonts, converted the font, opened the Director movie on my Windows machine and embedded the font there.
I also discovered (and fixed) a bug that caused the interface to display improperly if the user clicks "Quitter" but then changes his or her mind and clicks "Continuer."
posted by Editor B
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Met with Mark Gstohl to review deployment of text in Flash interface prototype. We discussed the question of how photographs would be integrated; no clear answers in sight.
posted by Editor B
Vive: Hmmm. As I tried to track down the video file problem I mentioned yesterday, I uncovered a font problem that I hadn't anticpated. I seem to be sinking ever deeper in a quagmire of mysterious technical difficulties. Help!
posted by Editor B
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Theological Perspectives of the Reformation: Created FTP dropbox for sharing digital photos. Experimented with putting text content into Flash interface prototype.
posted by Editor B
Vive: Troubleshooting cross-platform CD-ROM. Seems some video files are giving an error message on some Macs, but not on Windows. Bizarre, since the whole thing was made on a Mac.
