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!

Project Update

It's been a few days since my last post, so I figured it was time for an update.

First, a quick update on the RA position/UN project:

Housing: We have to move apartments. I'm not even going to get into the argument. I don't agree with their reasoning (there seems to be a trend here) but its not even worth it at this point. We're hoping for 2 spaces to be available in Spinner, but if not Amanda and I will have to move into separate apartments. Meeting with housing again tomorrow morning to figure things out more. I just want everything over with so I can focus on my online classes, the project, and my life, basically. This whole ordeal has consumed it for the past two weeks or so. It's been a long battle, and I'm just done fighting it. If anything, it's just made me lose any desire to work for them in the future.

But, on to more positive? note: the UN Project

Research is coming along, slowly but surely. We've struggled the first few days, I believe in part because we didn't really have a direction. We were dropped into this without knowing what to do, and it took us a few days to "Get accustomed" to everything I guess. The only analogy I can come up with is in Castaway, where Tom Hanks first washes up on the island. He just sits there, unsure of what to do. He mentally takes in his surroundings, and simply sits there and thinks. Finally he gets some direction and begins to take steps to survive.

Today was especially good, we all felt extremely productive and felt like we made some strides towards making a plan for the next few weeks. It's been great working together as a team for most of the time, we really utilize each other- talk things through out loud, bounce ideas around, and find new things or topics to research through each other's research.

We've also spent a good amount of time discussing the marketing around this project. We know that we want to make others aware of it, as it's a big project for Champlain College. Not only should others in the college know about it, but the community as well. But, here lies the problem--how do we do that? How to we make others aware of it? Especially in the next few weeks, as we want others to be able to follow us while we're in Africa. So far, we've turned to one marketing method we know and trust-Facebook. We created a group in order for everyone to join- group members, friends, family, etc... Here, we'll use this as a way to update our research findings, marketing strategies, etc... to keep everyone updated. Also, we've listed some student blogs and encouraged others to do it as well. This way they are all in one convenient place and others can access various student blogs in one place. On the flip side, once we gather a great deal of students, it will be easy to reach them all if we need to by simply sending a message to all the members in the group. In addition, we're hoping the more people we reach out to, the more will come back with information links, contact names, etc... that they know of. Yay for social networking!

Another issue we've come across in our our discussions is a lack of a "brand" I guess you could call it? We want to give the project a name and a logo, something that will not only unite everyone working on the project (there seems to be some division lines between groups) but will also give something for others to connect to, not just the "EMC UN Project". As marketing majors, we all got excited about this topic and have developed a few ideas for names, t-shirt and logo ideas, as well as empowering quotes and slogans. Of course, this isn't all up to us, so we're excited to bring this to the group meeting and get feedback from the two design teams as well. But, some of the questions I've been wrestling with--is this something that the students and community will be excited about? Is this a cause they'll deem worthy of supporting? If not, is there a way we can change that? And, do they believe the project has as much magnitude as we do? I guess these are just questions we'll have to work on finding the answers to over the next few months.

Either way, we want to not only make a change to the communities in South Africa, but we think its equally as important to reach out to the community around us, even if only to educate them on the severity of this issue. We have to be careful though, and not focus too much on this issue just yet. I think sometimes its easier to work on marketing for this because it's familiar, its the world that we live in. But, with only a few short weeks before the trip, we need to really focus our attention on gathering the right research and preparing for the research we need to collect while over there. Not only is this research going to be vital towards the project, but we only have one shot (10 days) at everything. There is no room for error, really.

So, our goals for the next few weeks are going to be to really figure out the target market and narrow it down as much as possible. The more specific the target market, the better results we'll have, hopefully. We also need to create surveys, determine the areas that we want to visit to observe behavior and have focus groups, along with which we'll need good, quality interview questions. On top of that, we need to collect as much general research as we can to be able to develop a detailed profile of the target market before we go so that we can have something together for others to read on the plane.

We have a lot of work ahead of us and sometimes we feel a little in over our heads, but I'm confident we have a great team and great advisers such as Meg Frenzen and Elaine Young that are helping to steer us in the right directions.

Overall, with each day that goes by and the more information I learn, I feel more committed and passionate about this project. I only hope we'll be able to inspire others in the same way.

I leave you with a quote that I found earlier, and I thought it was relevant to the project and a great possible slogan for our group. It was said by Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress:

"Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."