Tedious Work

So, I'm sitting here at the EMC (Champlain's Emergent Media Center, for those that don't know what I'm talking about) and thought I'd take a quick breather from my work to update on the United Nations Violence Against Women project.
Needless to say, although the trip to South Africa was hands down the most amazing experience I've ever had in my life, it wasn't a vacation. We worked tirelessly to gather as much information as we could in the short timespan of 10 days. Now many are wondering...what are you going to DO with the information?

Well, here's where the "fun" starts. We've spent the last few weeks transcribing all the audio that we collected from the various interviews that we conducted while we were there. For those that aren't familiar with transcribing, its the process of typing/writing out the entire interview, word for word. Literally--word for word. While this seems like a tedious but fairly do-able task, we've encountered a few obstacles that has made the process even more daunting.

First, we didn't have top of the line audio recording equipment. Many of us had simple voice recorders, and some even used the audio recording function on their digital cameras. We had to use what we had available in order to make sure every interview was recorded, no matter what the quality. Second, there was the issue of the heavy South African accents. And, in many of the recordings the interviews were competing with a great deal of background noise. Needless to say, this has been a tough process. But, the dilligent workers of the project have pushed through it and completed many, many, MANY hours of transcribing.

The next task was for the group to sit down and talk about common themes that we saw through the transcription process as well as when we digitized all of the notes we wrote down while in South Africa. One afternoon the group got together and wrote down every theme they could think of on yellow sticky notes. Then, the group stuck the notes all over a whiteboard and stepped back to look at them. Since many people had similar themes, the group began to group the sticky notes by theme and soon had bunches of notes on the whiteboard. Lastly, the group sat down and sorted through the groups and after much deliberation, narrowed it down to 5 main themes with a handful of subthemes to accompany each of them.

After this was completed, the researchers took these themes and divided them amonst themselves. We then used them to go through all of the transcriptions to pull out quotes that supported each theme. My themes included family, community, sex, aids, history, and music. All together, my document was over 23 pages of quotes!

Now, we've moved on to sorting through the photos that were taken during the trip. Collectively, we have over 15,000 photos! That's about 3,000 photos each for the research team to sort through! It's our job to add a title and description to each photo, as well as the author and the copyright. Then, we have to add as many "tags" to each photo as possible. This will allow others to easily search for tags or themes and have all relevant photos show up during their search. It's going to be an extremely tedious task, but one that's VITAL to this project.

So, why do all of this? Well, it's simple. Because we're working on a grant from the United Nations, we have to show that the money for the project and the trip was being used productively. Members from the United Nations ( or anyone else for that matter) can read through our interviews or search our photos and see that we're begun to analyze all the data we collected. Also, the artists and designers will need to use this information to support any artistic or style choice they choose while making the game. By being able to see quotes from the themes and easily searching tags on photos, they will be able to reference interviews and photos taken in South Africa to support their concepts.

It's been a tough few weeks, but we're all pushing through it and getting the work done. This stage is extremely important, as it determines the future of this project. All the work done on the trip and over the next few months will be presented to the United Nations and from there it will be decided if the college is granted the additional money to build the game over the next two or three years.

Now I think it's time to return to tagging photos!