Digital Journalism - Reflection

It's been a week since we finished making our video and looking back on it I think it could have went a lot better.

What went well:

1-Choosing a Topic: In this mission we had to choose a topic and research for it. We then had to tell the story through different media. At first I thought it would be interesting to look at Media Bias and how during the US Election news platforms report the news different. Fox news are pro Trump and CNN are anti Trump - because of these they both report it differently. After looking at it we thought not everybody would be interested in watching a video on that topic so we decided to go for something more trivial - Entertainment in 2019

2-TimelineJS: After looking at each of the tools that were recommended in the brief I thought that Timeline made the most sense to use in our video. We needed to show dates throughout the year so it was a perfect fit.

3-Teamwork: I thought we worked really well as a team when we finally met up - we  got to work really quick and came up with some good ideas.

Challenges:

1-Meeting Up: The first time we were supposed to meet up turned out to be a disaster - after coming in at 9am on my day off for a day of working on the assignment my group members weren't able to make it. Trying to plan a time after this turned out to be hard aswell due to other assignments being due and having to go to work after college. The only other time we met up was the day before the video was due - we were in college for 8 hours and it felt like we had done majority of the research and work last minute to be honest and I think it showed in the quality of our video.

2-Tools: In the end we only used Timeline - I think that it would have been way better if we tried some more out and included them in our video.

What I learned:

1-TimelineJS: I looked through some of the suggested tools which included Open Refine and Story Mapper but in the end decided to use TimelineJS - I watched a video on how to use it and it was so simple. I think i could definitely use it again in the future.

2-PremierePro: I had never really used Premiere Pro and even though I myself didn't really use it during this mission I think I have a bit more knowledge on it now.

Overall I'm disappointed in our final video and the result we were given. I think we did show a new tool we learned pretty well and that we could work as a team . I also think for beginners who had never used PremierePro before our editing skills were pretty good.

Well that's my final post for this semester. Hope you enjoyed reading my posts over the past few months.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Seán Clarke

Producing Digital Journalism

This blog post is going to be about how me and my group went about completing this mission.

In my previous blog post I talked about which topic we chose and why which was Digital Journalism.On social media I use apps like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Buzzfeed. Each one of these apps uses one of the forms of Digital Journalism and I wanted to look into each one.

When I finally got into my group the first thing I did was make a Whatsapp group so that we could communicate and share any information or challenges we were facing during our research. This way we could ask for one anothers help if we got stuck at any point.

When I began to research the first thing I did was read about the 12 formats within Digital Journalism. I wanted to see which one I could use in my video and which one I thought I could make myself. The two formats that I was most interested in looking into producing were Timelines and Listicles. I decided on making a timeline in the end. For this mission we had to choose a topic and research it so that we could present it through one of the tools suggested. The topic we decided to to research was the entertainment industry in 2019 and we included Music, Movies and Social Media trends.

To create my timeline I used the tool TimelineJS. It's a Google spreadsheet that lets you enter dates and information - results in a slick timeline. You can improve the layout of the timeline as it lets you edit the font, background colour and it lets you add images. The timeline we decided to make shared information about every Number 1 song in 2019. After entering all of the information we had gathered and we finished editing the layout to how I wanted it we then used Quick Time Player on the Mac to screen record our timeline, showing each No1. We recorded the audio we used in this video separately. In  this we spoke a bit about what our topic was, how the timeline was made and a bit of information about the chart this year.

The next thing we looked at was to make a Listicle that would talk about the movies of 2019. We looked through Buzzfeed to see how they do some of their ones and noticded that they make a lot of quizzes for their users to do. We thought this would be fun for us to do so we let David come up with the questions. We wanted to make it light hearted so he made the quiz title "Can you guess the 2019 movie from these bad descriptions". We screen recorded the same way we had done for TimelineJS and the audio for this was also done separately. In it David asked me and Melissa the questions he had made and we had to see if we could get the answers.

The last thing we did was looked at TikTok. It's a social media app that lets users share short videos - most of them are funny and resemble the now inactive social media app Vine. We decided to recreate a viral video and spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to perfect it.

When we finished all of our video content and audio recording we had to use Premiere Pro to put our video together for the presentation.

Next blog post will be my final one of this semester, it will be reflecting on this mission.
Seán

Digital Journalism - Why did I choose it?

Mission 3 - Methodology
For our final mission in Introduction to Digital Media we had to research and present a video on one of the following topics: Networks, Image Visualization, Mapping or Text Analysis. At home I looked into each topic to see which one I thought would suit me best. To be honest I was kind of confused reading through each brief at first and wasn't actually sure what I would have to do for some of the topics if I had chose them.The two topics I was most interested in exploring was Text Analysis and Digital Journalism. I know nothing about Text Analysis and thought it would be really cool to see how technology helps in analyzing text. When looking at the brief for Digital Journalism i knew it was one I definitely wanted to do. I use social media and the internet a lot and without even realising it we all constantly use different forms of Digital Journalism. I finally decided on Digital Journalism when I looked at the article that broke down the Digital Journalism formats into 12 categories, I thought it would be great to look into them in more detail and maybe make one by myself.

The goals for this assignment include the following:
- To learn about the historical relationship between Journalism and Media technologies
- Learn how the internet has made new modalities of communication possible
-Learn how digital tools make new kinds of research possible

For this mission we were able to team up with anybody in the entire year. (in previous missions we had to stick within our groups) I asked around to see if anybody was interested in doing Digital Journalism before I asked on Slack. I eventually ended up teaming up with Melissa and David. Like in previous missions we looked through our goals and made a plan on how to pull it off. This mission was different, in previous ones we had to make a Powerpoint Presentation and present in front of our groups but in this one we had to make a video using Premiere Pro and it was shown in front of our entire lecture group.

Next blog post will be on the story of us producing our Digital Journalism mission!
Sean

Activism and Agency - Reflection

It's been a week since the presentation now and I think it was definitely and improvement on my last one! In this blog post I'm going to talk about what I think went well, what challenges I faced and what I learned throughout this mission.

What went well:

1:Research- I actually much preferred researching for this mission than the last one, while I enjoyed finding out about the History of the Gif i found reading about the #MeToo movement much more interesting. I think the fact I was reading about peoples actual stories and how it affected them made me want to read more and more and it was actually heartbreaking looking at some of them. The research side of this mission could have been never ending as there's so many different stories and you could write a novel on it if you actually wanted to.

2:Communication- I think we worked really well as a group, like the previous assignment we made a WhatsApp group to communicate in. From the very start I think we were all very clear of what we were expected to do. Over the three weeks we met up twice and went through everything that each of us had written and gave feedback to eachother. The day before the presentation we met up to go through the slides to make sure we each knew what part we were going to present. I thought meeting up was definitely a good idea becuase in our first mission my group didn't and I think it would have helped us.

3:Presenting- I think that I was much more comfortable in presenting during this presentation than I was during the last one, I think having done it once before definitely gave me more confidence during this one.

Challenges:
Although the mission went well there was also a few challenges I faced:

1:NodeXL- One of our suggested tasks in this mission was to download the programme NodeXL along with Tags. Tags worked perfectly fine on my laptop and was pretty easy to use but NodeXL just would not download, everytime I tried my anti-virus and Google Chrome would not allow it as it was a "harmful file", I asked Karolina if she had been able to download it and she said it had said the same thing for her.

2:Tags - Although Tags had an easy set up and it was fine archiving the content I wasn't entirely sure on how to present it, in the end I just screenshot a few of the tweets from the spreadsheet and talked about them in more detail during the presentation.

What I Learned:

1:History- While doing this assignment I learned about the history of a lot of movements, I looked briefly into a few before I deciding I definitely wanted to go with the MeToo movement. Doing this made me gain more knowledge about different movements I've seen on social media the past few years.

2:Archiving- Before I started on this assignment I wouldn't have had a clue on how to archive content at all, using Tags has taught me how to do it. Although I wasn't 100% aware on how to then present my archived content using it still gave me a good idea on how to archive.

Well that's everything for this mission.
Next blog post will be about what I decided to do for my Methodology mission.
Seán

Producing Activism and Agency

This blog post is about what we actually done as a group to complete this mission.

As I said in my previous blog post, the main reason I wanted to focus on this topic for the mission is because of how often I see activism on social media. For a while, during the beginning of the #MeToo movement it felt like every time you logged into your social media account a new celebrity had been accused of sexual assault or harassment. With social media growing activism has become even bigger online with new hashtags trending every day. I wanted to look into the big hashtags that I've seen to get a bit of background on them and see how and why they began.

The first thing that we done as a group was made it clear what we each had to do and how we would do it. We decided that we would each look up about the history of citizen journalism and learn about how it was different before social media became big and then compare it to how it is today. The next thing that we would do was to look up current hashtags that are successful, important or controversial. The last thing we would do would be to archive a hashtag and see how it develops.

To research the history of citizen journalism I researched and read some articles from Google about it, one of them was better than the others and it actually gave a timeline that included images on citizen journalism that dated back from before social media to now.

As you know there's so many hashtag these days, people use them for pretty much anything - when they're watching a tv show, talking about politics, football matches etc.. so I wanted to look into ones that I had seemed to always see trending on Twitter. The ones I identified were #ClimateStrike, #Trump, #Remain and #PresidentP***yAssBitch. You can kind of guess what each one would mean just by reading it (maybe not the last one).

The next thing that I did was looked into a certain hashtag in detail, the one that I chose was #MeToo. I looked at where it all started and how it became what it is today, I read loads of article including victims statements and the response from Hollywood actors who had worked with Harvey Weinstein. At first I wasn't sure which hashtag to actually look into but after looking through my options which included #MeToo (obviously), #repeal, and #togetherforyes. I decided in the end to go for #MeToo because it's one that I think will always be developing, women and men will always have a story to tell regarding sexual assault and more and more people will come forward. #repeal and #togetherforyes were both successful campaigns but aren't really used as much since both referendums have been and gone.

To finish the mission we had to archive a current hashtag, I had a bit of trouble with this part as one of the suggested programmes "NodeXL" wouldn't actually download on mine or Karolinas laptop. When it wouldn't work I decided to use "Tags" insead, Tags is a Google spreadsheet that basically lets you archive tweets straight from Twitter to the spreadsheet, I had it set to update every half hour so I got loads of content from it. Looking through them there was a reoccuring tweet that involved the singer John Legend re-releasing the song "Baby it's cold outside" in which he changed the lyrics for the #MeToo era.

When we had all finished our work in the mission we put all of it together on Powerpoint and presented it to our Lab class. Like the previous mission, I thought design layout was really important so was sure to make it look as neat as possible.

My next blog post will be about reflecting on the mission. It will include what I thought went well, what didn't and what I learned.

Activism and Agency - Why did I choose it?

Mission 2: Culture

For our second mission in Introduction to Digital Media we had to research and present on one of the following: Memes, Blogging, Activism and Agency, Personal Data Tracking, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, Online Hate and Harassment: The Trouble with Trolling, Youtubing, Digital Privacy, Selfies, Working for the Web or Wikipedia. In our Lab, Shaun got us to write down some points on each individual topic on why we would or wouldn't want to work on that particular one. The two topics that I personally was most interested in was either Online Hate and Harassment or Activism and Agency. By myself I wrote down why I thought I would like to do one of these topics. I use social media a lot and see Online Hate and Harassment on a daily basis, singers, actors etc. get a lot of hate in their comments so I thought it would be a good one to look in to. When I looked into Activism and Agency I knew it was the one I wanted to go for, activism is such a broad subject and the second I googled it there was so many options for me to look at regarding the topic.
The social media website I use the most is Twitter and it's one of the main reasons I chose this topic, everyday you see a hashtag trending that has something to do with activism so I thought it would be interesting to look into them a bit more and learn about some that I may not have known much about before.

When I chose which topic to go for I was then put into a group with fellow classmates who were also interested in Activism and Agency. I was paired with Karolina and Robert.

After being paired with Karolina and Robert we looked through the mission brief to see what the goals and suggested tasks were and between ourselves decided what work needed to be done to complete this mission.

 Some of the goals for this mission included the following:
- Learn about hashtag activism - I wanted to see where it all began, what was the first social media trend that went viral.
- Practice archiving and annotating social media content - Use websites like Tags and NodeXL to archive twitter content.

We looked into the suggested tasks of this mission and between ourselves talked about what we would do to complete it.

My next blog post will be about how we produced our work for this mission
Seán

Art of the Animated Gif - Reflection

It's been a few weeks since doing this assignment and looking back on it I think it went great.

What went well:
Looking back on what we done for this mission there are a number of things that I think went well:

1- Research: The articles that I read about the history of Animated Gif Art that I spoke about in the previous blog post was really interesting and very useful when it came to writing about the history of Gifs in in my powerpoint presentation. The other article that I mentioned which spoke about all the ways to make Gifs was also fantastic and I would highly recommend it to somebody who doesn't have a clue how to but is interested on making Gifs. I myself had no idea how to do it previously and it really helped me.

2- Making Gifs: We all made our own Gifs with no problems - will go into this more when talking about what I learned through working on this mission.

3- Presenting: On the day of the presentation I was really nervous, I hadn't had to present anything in front of a group in almost 5 years but I think it actually went pretty well and surprised myself.  wasn't nearly as nervous once I started the presentation and over was happy with how it went.


Challenges:
Although the mission went well there was also a few challenges I faced:

1-Communication: Although we spoke through the WhatsApp group we made and we spoke about the mission when we seen eachother in college we never actually met up to go through all of our work. We also didn't practice with eachother before we presented which I think could have really helped when it came to presenting.

2- Back to education: I've been out of education for the past 4 years which meant I had to adjust to using programmes like Microsoft Word/Powerpoint again. At the start I was a bit slow but got back into it quickly enough.

3- Gif Error: When presenting during the class we included the gifs we had made in it, before class I made sure the Gifs were working (which they were) but for some reason when it got to actually presenting none of them worked.

What I learned:

1 - History of Gifs: I didn't know a thing about the history of Gifs before this mission and with all the research I done I'm definitely more informed than I was before.

2- Making Gifs: As I said above I would talk about learning to make Gifs. After reading the article that explained all the different ways to make Gifs I used Giphy which was really easy but for my final Gif used Momento. The article was great because it gave you step by step info on every app/website that was suggested.

3- Pronunciation: One of the small things I learned but one that surprised me is that I've been pronouncing Gif wrong the whole time. Its pronounced "Jif", since finding this out I still pronounce it wrong and don't think I'll ever call it a "Jif".

Well that's everything I can say about this mission! The next blog post I do will be about my Culture Mission and the topic I decided to do it on was Activism and Agency.