The Quaint Blog

Monday, 16 December 2019

Text Analysis (The Product)

When we were finished with our research we put the project findings together using Premiere Pro Adobe, which is an editing application that can be used to put footage and sound together and save it.

After we uploaded the footage we needed there to be sound as we did not want to be in the video ourselves. We went somewhere quiet to record our voices, however, there was an issue with the recording equipment and so after spending ages recording what we needed to get done, we had to re-record everything. Luckily there were a few spare rooms in the college that we used to have clear audio and pronounced vocals. When that was finished we needed to go edit the video and audio tracks to have them matching. Each of us had a part in the video and therefore it was more interesting that one of us was speaking the entire time.

We finished our project and uploaded it onto Moodle

After that, on Thursday after we went to a lecture where we viewed every Methodology project finished for the class. We had to grade our class members through a rubric made for this lecture and do out three surveys.

During this lecture, I was able to see others work processes, visual styles and editing skills. I found the experience to be quite helpful as I could see where my ability landing me with others. The lecture gave me a chance to see that I was lacking in some areas and was strong in others, which made me more motivated to study how to be better at the aspects I lacked.

Text Analysis (The Beginning)

For our Methodology Mission, I was tasked at researching and presenting Text Analysis with Nadine and John G. We chose this mission because it was easier to understand than the other missions and was something I took an interest in.
We began by researching what Text Analysis really is and how it works. Text Analysis is the process of the machine understanding text and learning how to use it, and or how to use it to help us. With this knowledge, we sought to find ways in which we would use Text Analysis on our computers.

We took one of Shaun’s suggestions and tried using Voyant which can look at any text you paste into it and pick out the most used words in that text. We chose one movie script that we did know (High School Musical) and one that we didn’t know (Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure)

When we put those into the website, we found that the most used words, in order of most used for Highschool Musical were Troy, Gabriella, Miss, Chad and Sharpay.

And when we used Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure, we found that the most popular words were I'm, just, know, you're, right.

After documenting this and how the data is analysed, we move onto common platforms that use Text Analysis, such as Grammarly, Siri and Chatbots.

Grammarly as we found, uses an NLP which stands for Natural Language processor. Grammarly was taught what proper grammar was by its developers and can implement it in your sentences.
Siri runs as a search engine and can search for anything you need and even preform conversation as an A.I.
Chatbots are also a form of A.I. that learn from having conversations with their users.
This is what we learned from our research.

Blogging (The Reflection)

I found that this Blogging project was one of my favourite missions to do as it had a lot of creative freedom to it. I enjoyed coming up with various ideas on what I should focus my blog on. At first, my ideas were focused on showing the different sides of fashion, but I found that I might like to use that in a different college project which o did end up doing. When exploring I the websites for the first time I found them difficult to use, however as time went on and I became a little more familiar with it I noticed it was better for me that the site was more complicated as I liked it to be precise. I also learned a lot form Flosie and Khang’s blogs and how they used them as they showed me how they did certain things my site could not do.

I feel like there were a few things I could have done better and that I will try to do better with next time. I would like to try doing out a rough idea of what I can do with the blog for next time, in order to optimise my time on getting more content in my blogs. I would like to have spent more time with the layout of the blog and have it more structured and less cluttered. And most of all I hope that next time I can continuously check in on my teammates work to see if they have any pointers of if I have any for them.

I felt like the presentation when we’ll and was given for advice from Helen, she noted that I should try not to read off the presentation itself and that I should be more confident in what I want to say. That way the audience of my presentation will be more invested and will probably pay more attention to what I am trying to say. I hope I can implement this into my next project.

Blogging (The Product)

After we finished making the blogs we researched other blogs that might be of interest to us.
That included Mariam Ezzeddine, who has 2.5 million followers on Instagram. Her blog site is called https://www.cookinwithmima.com/.

On this site, she posts about healthy foods and how to cook them. I found this interesting as I had never known about some of the food she cooks and how being healthy can also be tasty until Flosie told me about her blog. Sometimes I follow her food blogs and see what she is making from time to time. I became really interested in her blog and all her foods.

The next person we did research on was Huda Kattan, who is a beauty blogger with 25.3 million followers. In her blogs, she posts beauty guides and cosmetics along with displaying good makeup brands and her own makeup.

This is her blog:https://hudabeauty.com/)

The last blogger we researched was Adam Gallagher, who is also known as "I Am Galla". He has 2.1 million followers, and he posts scenery photos and men's style tips.

His blog is called:(http://iamgalla.com/)

I found these bloggers very interesting as they all have made a name for themselves and wanted to be someone to inspire others in many different areas from cooking to make up to men's fashion, and just like how theirs were individual and different so were ours.

After researching these people we decided we would do some comparisons of their blogs to our own.

We then put our powerpoint together for presenting it to the others.

Blogging (The Beginning)

In the Culture Mission, I worked with Flosie and Khang. We decided we would do our mission on Blogging. For the research of this mission, we decided to look up various different blogging platforms that were suggested to us by the Introduction to Digital Media website. This included “Wordpress”, “Wix” and “Squarespace”.

I got started on Wordpress and began to experiment with the blogging platform. I decided I wanted to use it to showcase my personal favourite artists in jazz, blues and funk. The first thing I did was play around with the settings and appearance of my blog. I changed my blog to have calmer colours in it and added images of some of my favourite artists to it such as Nina Simone and James Brown. I found that at first, the settings were difficult to manage because the website was more sophisticated than a basic blogging platform. However, after a while, I found that after a bit of practice I was able to navigate the blogs and figure out the best way to optimise the capabilities of what my blog could offer.

I was able to figure out how to properly structure the way I wanted my blog to look and was even able to add in YouTube videos of my favourite artists.

After doing this I decided I would put in a small paragraph of facts about my favourite artist's and their background. For instance, did you know? James Brown was poverty-stricken and took odd jobs starting at the age of only 9.
When I was done with that I found that the site I used had a feature which let you make your own logo for your website, this was the logo I made for my website:

I decided to choose a very chic yet modern looking logo that I felt met the way I wanted to present my project's feel. The logo and the website were made to represent a comfortable and cosy atmosphere that people could just search up and relax.

After building my website I made it accessible to the public (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://thesoundlab.home.blog/&sa=D&ust=1574898300133000&usg=AFQjCNFTGySgQCG4GtM95uh0Wbo8B7qWyA)
and put it up on the group presentation for my other teammates to see, and in turn, I was able to see their blogs on their chosen websites too.

Interactive Fiction (Reflection)

What I learned from this experience was that you should always check whether you save your projects every time or not as it could be life and death in your project.

Learning from Twine although was worlds easier than using Inkle.

Twine was much more functionally, visually and physically simplistic than Inkle in every way. It was easy to use and quicker. I discovered that one of the biggest reasons why interactive fiction exists is because of a divorce, which is pretty sad.

However, storytelling is one of my favourite aspects of many video games. I enjoy certain freedom with the choice that interactive fictional games allow, and in that regard, I believe our group has succeeded in observing how that choice works text wise. I hope that our project is entertaining and interesting and that it succeeds in its expectations. Even if it doesn't I had tremendous fun putting my time and effort into it.

I believe my team worked well as a group and were able to design a very good starting product when creating "A Nightmare on Frat Street"

Interactive Fiction (The Product)

After losing all our files on Inkle, the group decided we would start from scratch with the story and tweak a few different ideas that would make the story more intriguing for the player. We met up a few times to work the whole day in order to make sure that the product was up to standard. We started working on Twine which was easer to use as you could map out all your choices and see them visually pan out, which testing the demo of the game over and over to see if the choices would work the way you hoped they would. We found this not only entertaining to each other as we became more and more excited with what we could achieve, but we also loved finding what was wrong with the game and improving on it together as a team. We finished making the Interactive story and put it into our powerpoint to play.