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.
