My James Farmer Caption Journey is coming to a close at last. I want to look over the subtitle file for 038 one last time, as that’s the one I transcribed entirely by hand rather than using autocaptioning, and therefore the one I’m most suspicious of errors in. That one will be up tomorrow. With that said, 039 and 040 are up.
Angie Kemp came through as she always does, and with her help I ended up using the HTML5 Media Viewer plugin for Omeka to install a viewing platform for the videos. The alternative was Youtube Import, which wouldn’t have imported the CC options that Youtube gives. In HTML4 Media Viewer, an srt caption file and an mp4 video file are uploaded under the same name and automatically associated. I had a moment of panic when uploading these when Omeka told me that the .srt file type was disallowed, but this was fixed by going into Omeka’s security settings and adding it to the list of allowed extensions. This is, I think, a good example of Omeka’s peculiarities for those who are used to WordPress – everything’s a lot more hands-on, which is both good – it necessitates control and awareness of the aspects of a site that we don’t usually think about – and sometimes inconvenient.
From here on out, the rest of us are helping Megan with metadata for Bullet articles, we’re going towards working on a unifying exhibit for our videos, and I’ll have to go back and deliver on the metadata for the three lectures, which will include providing summaries of the topics he discusses in the videos.
I’ve greatly enjoyed doing this part of the project, even through sometimes wondering just how people could cough loudly enough to block out a man saying an entire word. I’ve also accidentally become a lot more knowledgeable about the Civil Rights movement – and about the lived experience of organizing mass political change – than I was before. I’ve gone from admiring Farmer in the abstract to being sincerely invested in him as a historical figure and as a part of UMW history. My hope is that our finished site allows others to do the same.
Wow, Katia! I am very much looking forward to the finished project. It sounds like you all have been busy, and it’s really interesting to me to see how our journeys and end goals differ. Of course, in the end we all hope to educate and enlighten our viewers, but our avenues are different from project to project. Good job!