further progress

Oy, things have been so busy that I barely have time to do anything it seems...

Progress:

*got my interview with Erica Duffy yesterday. It's 24 minutes (!) and she gave me a DNR contact that helps artists get materials that are not otherwise recyclable. So I've got to track him down not just for this project, but for the IPR story. The IPR story has to be under 4 minutes, so the good thing is I have plenty (PLENTY) of audio for both projects, thank goodness.

*checked the weather: looks like Saturday is the next decent sunny day to go take pictures of the outside art on campus. Unfortunately brrrrrrrrrrrr I'm probably going to freeze my giblets off, so I sure hope it all turns out okay and is totally worth it in the end. :-) (please consider that when grading, please!! I freeze easily!)

*figured out data for the graph, just need to create it in Excel in a way that shows up correctly on the final visualization.

*I've shot video, but I have yet to edit it because, well, I don't have a way to edit it. I'm going to have to see if Janelle can give me the hookup for getting at the editor in the e-media lab. (I really ought to have free reign over the department as a grad student, don'tcha think?)

*got a heads up on when that art expert prof is around on campus...not until Monday for classes, but I'm going to head over and try to scope out where his office is and see if he happens to be in.

*In terms of the paper...I'm struggling, for a very stupid reason: the single space thing freaks me out. I know I could write double and then make it single, but for some reason, the idea makes me flail. I've got some stuff, but I guess a good thing about the whole mess is that I might be able to get a hold of someone at NPR who can point me in the right direction for someone to talk to. Plus I just haven't got a lot of sources and I look at the short stack and think OMG HOW CAN I MAKE THIS FIVE PAGES or whatnot. I probably should have mentioned this a lot sooner, but it mostly came up the week before break, and this week has just been utterly swamped (I'm so busy and confused that yesterday I thought tomorrow was Friday--it's obviously not).

Anyway...there is progress. Not as much as I'd like, but progress.

And then there's the presentation for Monday to tackle...so this weekend will be rather a busy one.

crazy

I got video footage from the crochet project yesterday. I'll take pictures on a sunny day next week, and try to get more info on sculpture. I got a lead on a prof in the dept. who specializes in public art, so I'm going to try to interview him as well.

I know this is short, but I'm a bit frantic right now and super stressed to the max, but I'll try to have more later.

progress...

Okay, so maybe my first idea was too specific...I think if I just focus on student art/the student art gallery, it might be a more in depth project. I'm going over on Monday to talk to the crochet artist, and may join in myself for a bit! Why not, right?

So I think for the pictures and audio, I could do an art class, similarly to how we did the slide show. The video could be the people working on the crochet piece. Data visualization could be visitors or trends of students who have had pieces or exhibits over the years. I'm not totally sure about the interactive map yet, but I'm sure there's something that could be figured out...maybe. It's going to take some thought, anyway.

For now, that's that...

different idea?

Okay, I came up with a different idea instead of the Geography department...maybe you can tell me what you think.

There's a new art exhibit at the UNI Museums, or it's in the art department, I'm not totally sure. Basically the artist is inviting people on and off campus to come and crochet something, anything, even if you don't have experience, and then she's going to somehow connect them all together and make one big piece.

I like to crochet, so I think this would be a really cool project to do! I also think it would be cool because then hopefully I could get some community members to give me feedback on the project, along with students.

The frustrating thing is that right now I can't find anything on the UNI site about it, but I think it would be a really interesting article, a different sort of perspective about something going on on campus.

Thoughts?

third update

Well, I'm still stumped for a subject, however I did think of another idea this morning: UNI puts a lot of things in storage, but why? What determines what goes in storage? Why are they storing it? Could they be selling these items to generate revenue, or is it more cost effective to store them?

I don't think anyone's thought of this in much detail before...I'm not sure who to contact but I'd obviously better figure it out quickly. I'll have to figure out who to contact about this, but it's not a horrible idea (I think).

part two...

Well, I have ideas...but are they good ones?

The AD/HD one is good, but I'm not sure where I'd find sources this quickly, for the turnaround for class. It might be one to shelve.

The clinic one might not be a bad idea; I know there are clinics in town and I think I could find a list of them and try to make contacts to go record and interview some people.

The flood one might not be hard, but it seems so overdone at this point...I'm almost sick of the flood coverage.

So I think I'll probably try to go with the health clinic one...I know Pat (my co-worker) went to a conference about health reporting earlier this year, so I'll ask her for some tips. I'll try to find out when the local clinics are, find some people to talk to, and then go sit at some clinics and try to figure out how to get sound. I'll have to formulate some questions and such with more thought about the topic--I think I'll wait to ask Pat how to cover this sort of thing before I proceed.

Story Ideas

So I'm (A) starting this blog for class and (B) supposed to come up with three story ideas.

Story Idea One:
AD/HD differences between boys/girls and men/women--how it presents, how symptoms are different, etc.

Story Idea Two:
Free public health clinics--what kind of people are using them? How are these clinics staffed, and what resources are they using?

Story Idea Three:
Continuing flood recovery--is there recovery? What type of long term effects will there be? What kind of effects continue still? What is the progress for those who are still displaced?

Well, there's some stuff to start things off...I may come up with better ideas if I mull it over some more, but those are the first things that come to mind for now.