Humanities Project Showcase

I'll add a few more here:

• Presenters need more than 1/2 hour to set up. We should encourage at least 45-60 minutes. Set up was pretty chaotic, so clear delegation about who attends to what needs during set up (booth assignments, tech support, poster issues, flipcharts, power, etc.)
• Test power capacity if we are increasing use (monitors, extra computers, peripherals) at any given station, pod or on any given circuit.
• Video tape the presentations for podcasts downloadable from the HCMC web site. I think individual interviews at the booths would be a good idea, too.
• Expand invitation to interdisciplinary projects or projects of interest across campus. There isn't a good venue on campus for this type of display, and the more ideas people can walk away with, the better. We did some of this this year by inviting David Leach from Fine Arts, Mark Roman, and Leslie Saxson/Chris Coey from Linguistics.
• Press more individual flesh for publicity. Flyers and announcements are fine, but nothing beats an enthusiastic face2face plug and commitment to attend.
• More planning as a group and clear delegation of tasks. I have tended to view the showcase as my responsibility, and have been reluctant to involve HCMC staff because many of you are already involved in the project work. The lack of clear delegation caught up to us when I got sick.

The showcase is over and we've had a bit of postmortem via email which boils down to:
1) Before committing to a date make sure that there are enough bodies available to help clean up (if it takes place in our space - Language labs or CALL). This needs to be as integral to the planning process as anything else.
2) Order the food early. Catering responds very well to early orders and, not surprisingly, not as well to late orders.
3) Make sure that at least a few people are taking pictures, and that they know how to get a good picture in the space used (e.g. in the CALL a flash is absolutely required).
4) Delegated tasks need to be arranged well ahead of schedule. Things were a bit tight for some (especially those running multiple displays) due to a lack of communication regarding what tasks were outstanding.

These are the tasks I know. Any others?

In the absence of any info about where we're going to be placed and what the layout will be, I talked to Greg Fanning and looked at the available places; it looks as though a banner would be a good idea for most places, so I created one in Illustrator for each project, using multiple 8x17 printed pages trimmed and pasted together.

Made the materials based on the theme Greg has created for the site, and using his SVG graphics. Claire provided a headline for it.

With the Lettuce server's Tomcat stack down, I was unable to work on the site code, so I started work on the handout for the showcase, using images and colours from Greg's redesign of the site. Got the basic framework done; now we need some more content to fill it up. I'll probably have to take it into Illustrator in the end, to get text to justify, but I'm working in Inkscape at the moment.

As content has come in over the last week I've been adding it to the website, but neglecting to post on it for some reason.
The site is now up-to-date, although we're waiting for content from Stephen Culhane.
Minutes posted are for website work only (meetings/discussions regarding structure and style, as well as the actual codework).

Had a meeting with Scott and Chris to discuss the posters for the Scraps project. The poster will have at least screenshots of the viewer and administration program screens, plus some text.

Nobody could remember whether the audio system in the CALL worked, and if so, how. Greg and I spent some time working on it, and discovered that it does work. There's an XLR mic input on the pillar at the far end of the room (where all the other switches are), which is connected to an input on the preamp. The preamp stereo output cables were disconnected; I plugged them back in. They go to the equalizer, which is then hooked into the power amp, and the power amp drives the speakers on the wall at the far end. We set up and tested with two mics (one of our Sony F780s, and the Shure SM81 that belongs to the CALL), and both work. The SM81 is more sensitive when you stand back from it, so it's better suited to announcements or presentations.

The old mic stand in the workshop works, but we also found a better boom stand in the archive room, and grafted the top of the old stand to it so that the SM81 will attach to it. The SM81 needs a wind shield, which Greg can order from Long and McQuade.