Category Archives: Reflective Essay

Upon making project 3, I took many steps to gather information. The essay that project 3 was based on had been the longest and most detailed piece of writing that I have worked on. In the process of creating project 2, Professor Perry had our class create Wikipedia accounts, which was very new to me because I had never used Wikipedia during school. While getting familiar with Wikipedia, I used it to gather information about gender bias and see it occur with my own eyes. I wanted to see the gender bias myself, and I got what I was searching for. I eventually did research on Feminist Theory and the Patriarchy. I wrote my essay that consisted of 10 pages, using all the information I collected. Professor Perry then talked to the class about the creative mix project. I was intrigued by the assignment due to the fact that I had not done something like it before. The goal of the project was to recreate one of the papers that we wrote and turn it into some sort of multimedia piece. The instructions called for digital remediation, which is “re-mediating” or adapting a message from its current page-based medium to some other medium using digital technology. There were many different ways to do this, such as creating an audio essay or podcast, making a short video, making a visual essay, or creating a mashup/remix of information using pictures and audio to create something unique. I decided to go with a podcast. 

Podcasts are audio programmes that one can listen to at any time and provide a person or people talking. They tend to be focused on a topic or theme. A popular podcast I like to listen to is The Joe Rogan Experience. In this podcast, the host Joe Rogan talks about a range of topics and has had guests such as Elon Musk, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and many more. I enjoy listening to his podcasts because they make me think about things in ways that I haven’t thought before. Because of his podcasts and my enjoyment of them, I wanted to create my own for the creative remix project, and it would be centered around gender bias specifically on Wikipedia. When I first learned about gender bias on Wikipedia, I was surprised because it was something that I had not known before. I always knew gender bias existed in this world, but on Wikipedia ? It came as a shock to me. After exploring more about the topic I realized that it is a very big thing, and it is important to spread awareness of it. For the podcast, I asked my girlfriend to be part of it so the viewers and I could hear her opinion of it, and she happily said yes. I told her what the podcast was about and she was glad to be part of it. I told her the topic, but I did not go into much detail about it, as I wanted the podcast to be genuine and not faked. I believe that emotion that is portrayed in the podcast can be translated to the viewers, which can in turn help spread awareness for the problem, and I believe that genuinity can achieve that. If one were to read about the problem, the effect would be there but not as strong as seeing and feeling the emotions that are present. That is also why I wanted to have a guest on the podcast, to show emotions that aren’t coming just from me but also from another person. 

In the podcast, my girlfriend and I talked about an example of gender bias in Wikipedia. We took two celebrities, Beyonce and Ryan Gosling and compared their Wikipedia articles. I asked her to take 2 minutes to examine their articles and to spot any differences. Once done, she said that the only difference between the two was that Beyonce’s article had more information than Ryan Gosling’s article. This could’ve actually defeated the argument of gender bias in that example. But then, we took a look at the pictures that were posted for the articles between the two and gender bias was right there in front of our eyes. Beyonce’s pictures had close ups of her cleavage and most of the shots were of her in revealing clothing. Ryan Gosling, on the other hand, had simple headshots of him in suits. After this examination, that was when the emotion was portrayed. The viewers were able to hear the examination of the articles, and were able to hear the emotions afterwards. This, in turn, would help the audience resonate with the topic of the podcast, as they would hear, feel, and be a part of the conversation. An even better way of helping the podcast resonate with the audience is having a camera set up. Since a podcast is just talking, I believe that setting up a camera for the audience to see and hear the people talking could help as they are now able to see the emotions, not just feel them. Sadly, I was not able to do this due to unfavorable circumstances. 

The problem with making the podcast was having to squeeze it into just a couple of minutes. A podcast regarding a topic like this requires a deep dive and analysis of the problem. Because I had to make the podcast short, I decided to take a simple route and simply state what the problem is, explain it, show an example, and talk about ways to combat it. That way, the viewers could get a gist of and attain somewhat of an understanding of the problem and know that it exists and that efforts must be made to stop it. If I were to show this podcast to the rest of the world and broadcast it for the public to view, I would make the podcast longer and talk more about the problem, using the important aspects of relevant information and emotion. That way, the public would hear about the problem and awareness would be spread greater, ultimately helping the problem end in the long run. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zilJiD_rsLZ2GZxBi7OONb8FnmXY9NhcAZ2CysgugXg/edit?usp=sharing

The initial idea I had for my creative remix project was to make a video or slideshow version of my Black Panther/Black Lives Matter essay. Focusing on the music impacts which both movements created. Due to the fact that I was working individually I decided to take a different take on my project. I realized that I didn’t have enough time to create a project which had sound or videos. I decided to stick with the slideshow idea and instead write about some media which helped give the Black Lives Matter movement more attention.

In order to give my audience some background information about the BLM movement, the first two pages were strictly about its history and founders. The reason behind the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag coming around was, as a response to Trayvon Martin’s murder. Patrisse Cullors, one of the movement’s founders, had brought this hashtag to social media. This is when I would go and show quick facts about each founder, since this project was meant to be presented to someone who may not know a thing about BLM.

I had chosen this form of a medium since it would be very clear for any audience. With a slideshow there are many opportunities. I was able to add images to every slide to fit the description of what I had been talking about. An example of this would be when I chose to present how the song “The Bigger Picture”, brought attention to the movement. I chose to place an image of the song cover in order for the audience to have a better understanding of what I was talking about. I knew it was important to choose a topic which would be easy for me to find information on, but also attract my audience’s attention. With thai medium I was able to customize to my liking. To make it simpler for me, I chose a template on Canva which would fit the theme of my topic. Since I was writing about Black Lives Matter, a template with black and yellow coloring would fit in since these colors have been used to represent the movement. When visiting the official Black Lives Matter website, these are the colors that will be seen. 

Sticking to a multimodal mode would allow me to use images when converting the points I had made in my essay, into slides. Remediating the ideas which brought attention to the party would allow me to dig deeper into each point I had made in my essay. In my essay I briefly brought up the use of the hashtag, but in the remix I was able to give deeper information behind its impacts. The multimodal mode gave me a chance to change things around which I think made it simpler. Funding the right images wasn’t really hard since I already had an idea of what I wanted for each slide. Only thing I would’ve done differently if I did this again, is incorporating even more images, in order to make it more hands-on.

I like the idea of sharing the project with a space outside of the classroom but, I don’t think it’s ready. I know I could have added more aspects which brought attention to the movement. Or at least furthering my thoughts for the three ideas I chose, like adding more than one slide for each. If I decide on putting it out there for the public view, I definitely need to work on it more. The thing that stopped me from making it better was my lack of knowledge in the tech sense. My initial idea was to make a video where I can add sounds, like the voice of George Floyd saying “I cant breathe”, or instead of quoting Lil Baby’s lyrics I could’ve actually uploaded clips. I started to think that maybe working independently wasn’t so easy for me, and I had to stick to a simpler version. If I ever want to make this public, I will definitely have to take the time to learn these new skills. If only I had started earlier I could have taken the time to make my remix better.

Doing a remix of my old work was something very different, something I could put my own spin on. Now the difference between choosing the between projects was more of the creativity to it based on the information that I have researched and put together. Turn an old piece of writing from an earlier project and make it into something new and more interesting to look at. In the end I decided on doing my creative remix project on the Black Lives Matter Movement, scoping in on the effects such a massive movement had on the press/media of society. BLM’s focus has been less about changing specific laws and more about fighting for a reordering of society wherein Black lives are free from systematic dehumanization. The movement’s measurable impact on the political and legal landscape is undeniable. The BLM movement has succeeded in transforming how Americans talk about, think about, and organize for freedom.

I believe using a presentation on slides or PowerPoint is a more effective method of spreading your information to an audience. Additionally, I want my topic not to feel dry and boring. It is a serious topic and there is a lot of information given that would make people feel overwhelmed at once. Especially college students being one myself I know that they definitely do not want to read a bunch oof words in a presentation and would want to look at their phones instead. With that idea in mind, I opted to go for something that can be more appealing to my younger audience, being videos of past and current events of my topic. I want my audience to realize how impactful the Black Lives Matter movement was so much that it was covered over several news channels and broadcast that contained thousands of protestors rallying together. They say the phrase is a demand for equal treatment and an end to racism – because the lives of black people are just as important as those of others.

Sharing my work with others is the biggest part of the remix project. I am not too great with technology, so I went with a more effective approach of a PowerPoint with slides to demonstrate my knowledge of the topic I chose. Sharing a presentation outside a classroom would prove to be rather difficult but I can use it to spread awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement on social media platforms that are used every single day. Having open platforms to spread awareness is the best way for me to use my remix project to inform the public on my topic. I can only hope it sparks activity in other people to make a change for the better of society and improve the relationship between all races. My research can become someone else’s building blocks to a movement, which is my goal for sharing this project to the public.

Overall, I enjoyed this project and what it had to offer in terms of creativity and design. I was able to return to an old project and dive deeper into a subtopic of my choice and create a new project from it, a remix. Choosing the topic and doing research was not as complicated as my topic had been narrowed down and I knew what I had to focus on. Now choosing how to portray that information was the biggest challenge I faced as my lack of experience with technology began to show. I didn’t know how to go about using a program creating other types of media other than what I was familiar with, PowerPoint. Picking a medium and knowing what I was going to do with it I began to form my presentation to appeal to my audience and hope they take something from it. Black Lives Matter is a very well-known topic, but I always wondered just how much people actually knew about it. I wanted to express how big the movement is and what they are trying to accomplish in the end. I can only hope my presentation can be shown to anyone with creative ideals to turn it into something even bigger for the future and maybe a place in the movement itself.

My creative remix was a podcast of the Black Panthers Party, the context of the work is that I was giving the listeners and my guest an introduction to the Black Panther’sParty. I wanted my work to give listeners an incentive and a newfound interest in learning more about a seemingly buried topic. I hope that it can spread awareness of this topic and remind people that this part of our history, the Black Panthers Party, was a major pillar for programs that we do not think twice about. That is if I publicly publish this, aside from Blogs@Baruch, and I believe my anxiety would probably never let me do that. Even then I think the history of the BPP still lingers around our culture, even if the government tried to dismantle it, the beliefs and aspirations of the party still linger to this day. It is part of our music, art, and fashion. 

I chose to do a podcast because recently, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts, from an array of topics such as scary stories, commentary, and motivational podcasts. There are some podcasts that I don’t even know what their genre is, but it’s nice to listen to them while I’m preoccupied with other work. So with this in mind, when Prof. Perry told us we can do a podcast, I really wanted to apply it to the BPP. I had many ideas, I wanted some microphones, with some music in the background and some good sound quality. Sadly my dreams of a perfect podcast kinda went out the window when I found out how much it costs to have high-quality production microphones. Then I had to move on to picking a guest for this project. I had a couple of friends in mind that I wanted to ask, but the more I thought about who to ask, the funniest image came to my head, and that was my brother. With a lot of convincing and maybe some coercion, he agreed to be part of my podcast. With a rough idea of the direction of the podcast and my special guest, all I had to do was write my script. It wasn’t really a script but it was more of an outline or targets I wanted to talk about during the podcast. I wanted the podcast to sound and be the most normal and natural as it could be, but starting off the podcast we experienced some problems, the music was not really helping the podcast and I was scared about having copyright problems so we decided to remove it, as my brother and I started to record, it became very amusing to do this project. 

Using my phone to record, we had multiple attempts at recording and I had multiple test trials of how to get the recording from my phone to my computer. Sadly, with not too much time on my side, I was not able to really edit the recording, I did cut some parts from the beginning and end since it was dead air. So after reviewing my options, I came up with this way of transferring my recording to my computer, which was by emailing the recording to myself using my phone. I was worried the file would be corrupted or would not fully work but nevertheless, I was able to get the recording on my computer. But this was when the problem came in, that was that blogs at Baruch were not letting me post the file. One of my other peers also had the same problem, even when I tried sending the recording through Black Board it wasn’t working. Luckily Prof. Perry allowed me to play the recording loudly to the class, afterwards, I was able to email it to Prof. Perry through of Outlook. I don’t really know why my recording was not supported by Blogs@Baruch, but I was able to get by. 

After a lot of thinking, I still think I don’t want to publish my podcast to the public, the idea of putting this on the internet and keeping it there kinda weirds me out. Maybe if my work was of higher quality, I would want to post it, but this podcast is something I would rather keep private. I think of this podcast more as a funny moment, and a fun project that my brother and I both worked on. My brother too also thinks I should not post it since he thinks this experience was embarrassing. 

             I had never imagined that one day I would perform my voice on any of the famous social media platforms before starting the creative remix project. For the creative remix project, we are asked to recreate the previous two projects we did on Black Panther Party and Wikipedia gender bias as a multimedia piece such as a podcast. The goal of his project is to see how the medium we choose will affect how the message that was presented to the audience. I participated in a group with another two students, Jing Wang, and Maggie Lin. After a long discussion, we decided to use the podcast as our multimedia piece to recreate the project of Wikipedia gender bias.

            It’s interesting that at the beginning of the discussion on the medium we were thinking about using PowerPoint or virtual essay as our medium to present the project, but we eventually decided to use podcast as our medium. The major reason is that podcasts can better connect the audience to the problem compared to just plain text, in which the tone of the speaker matters does affect how the message is brought to the audience and how much attention audiences will pay to this podcast. In addition, we believe that listening to a podcast doesn’t take much attention from the audience compared to reading a long text, which means podcast is more portable for audiences to listen to compared to concentrating on reading plain text. After that, we had a long discussion on deciding between the topic Black Panther Party or Wikipedia gender bias. We considered the notability of both topics to the public; we considered the gender bias issue on Wikipedia less notable compared to Black Panther Party. Wikipedia is a well-known online encyclopedia, but its gender bias is rarely known. After all, few people pay attention to the hardship of those female editors nor the huge difference in gender ratio when they access Wikipedia.

            We decide to split the work before starting working on the project, Jing was in charge of writing the overall script, me and Maggie will be the speaker for our podcast. At first, we decided our intended audience will be the younger generation who are more used to receiving messages from social media. For this reason, we put more attention on how to attract the attention and interest of the audiences and abandoned much information and evidence we had collected from previous projects. If no one is interested in the podcast, it’s no use no matter how much evidence and argument we brought up. For this reason, we decided to create a sense of discussion between the two speakers and brought up the statistical data and experience of female editors during the conversation as supporting detail. In our expectation, conversation and the overall tone are put first before the overall structure of evidence supporting the argument.

            It’s hard to find a balance between academic tone and interestingness, which is why we end up spending most of our time revising the script. We often found room for improvement almost every time we try to practice the script, problems like too much evidence-making with so little interaction, boring tone, and stiff sentences. The time we spent discussing how to improve the part exceeded the time we used to practice the script. We decided to make the overall tone of the podcast question and answers, we can use a question to bring up the general argument and provide evidence while answering. We also tried to involve our personal experiences and opinion in the discussion and tried to drag the overall tone away from just giving a plain and neutral argument.

            We also struggled a lot with practicing the script. Neither of us has experience before presenting a long script, in which the tone and voice often get too low and weak after a long dialogue. I and Maggie decided to split the script into five small sections so that we can pause between each section to respite and prevent tiredness due to the long dialogue. After finishing our recording, we are aware of a serious problem. No one in the group had experience with any of the editing software or any experience in creating a podcast. We are learning and editing the project at the same time. During this process, we learned how to combine different clips of audio, insert an image, and create virtual effects. Even though we learned how to use the software is not enough for us, we have no idea what we need to create a well develop podcast video. We looked through other podcast videos on YouTube, but these videos involved many complex visual effects and well develop overall structure, this is something we cannot grasp in a short time. We thought of adding background music, but we weren’t satisfied with the outcome, in which the background music drowns out our voice. Eventually, we only put a background image and some virtual effects on the audio and turned it into a simple podcast audio. Common Creative Permit is a big problem when we are browsing for cover and background images, but luckily, we still found an image that was strongly connected to our topic of gender bias.

            We uploaded our final product to YouTube eventually. YouTube is the platform we decided to publish after discussion because, from our personal experience, YouTube is the most used video platform we know. Overall, we are quite satisfied with how the podcast turned out, the tone and intonation in the conversation turn out brought out the message in a way that is easier to understand by the audiences. Especially in this era of the internet, everyone is gradually losing their patience in spending time to really understand a topic.

Ethan Jusino

Prof Perry 

Eng 2150 

To introduce this reflection paper I would like to say that it was a pleasure to actually do this, turning an old piece of work into something new. The project I chose was the most recent one. Since I had a lot of the information on the woman in red that I chose, which was Celina Acosta Vice, I decided to do a podcast of my essay. Explaining it in my own words was not easy and in fact it was quite difficult because I decided to wing it by reading certain things off my essay paper which I know I did really well. 

Overall while deciding on what to use for my multimedia project I ultimately thought about who the intended audience was, I was thinking beyond the classroom so with the tone of my voice I tried to keep in informative. However I know I couldn’t do that without sounding like a robot so I did also try to slightly change the tone as well which would make it more interesting. I knew that it would be anyone that had the ability to find this podcast and listen to it on Spotify. Now the purpose was to educate people on who Celina Acosta Vice was and what her life was like, to show people that her accomplishments were very undermined because of the fact that pretty much everywhere you look to try to find her name it is either erased or forgotten. It is a nice look back in the history of women and how their achievements were almost fully forgotten based on their looks. 

Now the difference between choosing the Black Panther Party versus making the Wikipedia project was more of the creativity to it based on the information that we have researched and put together. I really decided to choose the Wikipedia project because I built that from the ground up. I had to find as much data as possible for it and then create an article for it. It was fine at first due to the fact that I had been able to use all of my information to form a nice little article even if it ultimately got deleted. Why did I choose to do a podcast though? Well the answer to that is simple, I just really wanted to sit down and talk about this person for as much time as I could. Just sitting back and relaxing with music and putting on my educational/ relaxed tone of voice really made the experience easier for me. It allowed me to focus more on actually getting the information out there rather than worrying about how I sound and what I look like. Not that I am self conscious, it just makes life easier to be faceless. I listened to podcasts before I even had the idea to make my own and it was always really interesting because of the fact that there was either one person talking or there were multiple people. After listening to around 30 hours worth of podcasts I discovered that either the independent or the ones with one or two guests worked really well. 

The benefits of using the  multimedia format allows for many different views to be explained differently. Like in my essay I talked about a small amount of her work before Acosta Vice became a politician, but in my podcast I talked more about it and how she was really struggling keeping her life stable because of the lack of opportunities. In addition, during my podcast I described why she kept going just a bit more so than in my essay because it was easier to fathom the words to speak instead of the words to type it. It really comes down to which types of media is used as well because infographics are really good as well when paired with little pieces of text as well. 

Due to how quickly this project came after the previous one I ran into multiple issues. Having run through a few scripts for the video essay that I scrapped completely because it just did not sound like me at all. I am more of a natural speaker and I sort of don’t like scripts because of the lack of variety in tone of voice. When reading off a piece of paper for me it is more robotic and less enthusiastic which is what I try to avoid entirely. My voice can be very soothing which I feel is good for a podcast, my friends also listened to the podcast and they were like my voice is really nice and the music in the background only made it better. If I had done let’s say infographics , I would have been able to include a bunch of photos related to the time period and Acosta Vice herself. However I just could not get it to work at all. So having some experience with podcasts I knew what I could include. It was not like I just did a one and done thing though because some of the audio files got corrupted so I then had to redo the entire 6 minutes of the podcast and try to remember what exactly I said word for word. So even though I had known what I was doing when it came to the podcast option, it did challenge me just enough to almost consider doing something else completely. 

Finally , to better demonstrate why I made it public on spotify is that it is a very popular streaming service and easily accessible to anyone on practically any device. I could go on my playstation and load up spotify and just play my own podcast if I want to. It is not about me though, it is about the audience of people I want to listen to and to put it simply that is anyone that likes podcasts about people. Whenever I am on the train in NYC I’ve noticed that there are a bunch of people that actually listen to podcasts and some of them I have never even heard of. This piece of work is made for anyone that really wants to view it, which can be from a college professor all the way to a highschooler that wants to learn something interesting. 

In conclusion I understand that the way I use my voice and change my tone allows for a better experience because having one voice is not really enticing. Also choosing a podcast was a smart decision by me because I had background music that really fit with my voice, it also helped me get my point across in a different way. There were many constraints when it came to it like how the platform worked and what other options I had. As well as having full control in creativity. Lastly the audience was arguably the most important because everyone is on their phone now listening to anything.

I worked in a group for project 3 and the members are Maggie Lin and Jianping Chen. We chose to do a remix of project 2 which was about Wikipedia. The specific topic is the harassment that the female editors encountered which led to the exclusion of female work. Systematic gender bias has been a problem of Wikipedia for a long time. There is the negligence of women in the bibliography where only nearly 20% of the 19 million population are women. Plus, female editors’ work is more easily deleted or rejected by other editors. This problem should be brought up and more people should be aware of this. 

For the remix of this project, we decided to do a podcast. Compared to an essay or a blog, podcasts are more convenient. People can listen to it while doing other things and it does not take long to listen. It is a good way for people to catch up on information in a short amount of time. It also creates a humorous environment that is not informative for the audience to feel bored. Podcasts also helped to find different types of audiences other than students or professors. People with low incomes also listen to podcasts to get information. Podcasts are accessible to a wide range of people. 

Throughout the process of creating our podcast, there are challenges we encountered. At first, we were thinking about going off script and just asking the questions and then answering them. But we found out it is easy to go off-topic. So, we created a script for it. But it was harder than we thought. It makes sense when it is in writing, but it sounded weird when we said it out loud. Our script was more in a formal format which the tone might be dry and boring. We want the podcast to be more humorous so people will enjoy listening to it. We tried different ways of wording and used some phrases that were not formal. After we finished the script, we tried to record it, but it didn’t go smoothly. We would stumble too many times and use more time than we expected. I think it might be that we need more practice and rest between sentences. 

Additionally, we want our topic not to feel dry and boring. It is a serious topic and there is a lot of information given that would make people feel overwhelmed at once. Podcasts are more for entertainment purposes. Its goal is for people to get information in a relaxed atmosphere through sounds. We want our audience to enjoy it when they listen to our podcast while learning something. Plus, podcasts are short and a lot of information is not given which might inspire audiences’ interest to research on their own. And just like I said before, a lot of people have access to podcasts. It is not limited to a certain group of people. We want our audience to be not only limited to students and professors in school but a wider range. Therefore, more people would get to know this topic and know its issue. So maybe one day, there will be a solution to it. 

Nevertheless, podcasts give us a different way of doing the project. We need to do more research on this topic because we have limited time. It is hard to show every detail and would be long to talk about. We need to give information concisely and straightforwardly. We also need to change our tones which can help audiences to feel more connected. The feelings are expressed more clearly with the tone of the speaker. Also, our podcast is demonstrated through questions and answering mode. This creates a hook for the audience and might continue listening to the end. Like we asked the question, can you imagine if you were one of the editors and your work was being judged by others? This question is asking the audience to have a thought. It brings an etho that audiences feel relate to. This way, the audiences can have interaction with the hosts. 

There are constraints that we face when we edit the video. We recorded the script into five sections. We didn’t have experience editing a video, so we searched online. We learn to edit while we are doing the project. After we put all the sections together, we were thinking of putting a BGM, but we couldn’t figure out how to do it. We don’t know what kind of music would be a good fit and it might cover our voices. In the end, we didn’t put any background music. After we finished editing, we thought we could upload the podcast on YouTube. But we can’t upload pure audio. We had to make it into a video to publish our work. Since ours is only audio, we need an image for the cover page. We googled a picture but the picture is copyright protected. The image is not a Common Creative license. Therefore, we need to find a new cover page that is a Common Creative license. Then, we put the image into the editing app with the audio and created a video.

Lastly, we published our podcast on YouTube. Still, I think our project is not ready for public view. We still need to work on our tone and talking speed. In some parts, we talked too fast which is hard for audiences to follow. As for tone, I feel we talked too awkwardly and not too interactive. We should also put background music on so it wouldn’t be dry just as the hosts are talking. Music can sometimes bring audiences more into the topic and be enjoyable. Also, some word choices should be changed to create a more humorous atmosphere. Overall, these are the things we still need to work on.