May 2020

Task 3: Voice to Text Task

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Reader Warning (Disclaimer): Gross misrepresentation of people and objects ahead! No dogs were harmed or involved in this story in any way despite what the text below might seem to indicate.

Disclaimer: not the actual pizza of the story below but one I made previously.

Hey friend! So I thought I’d just keep you updated on what we’ve been doing over weekends since the lockdown. Friday is normally start the same way since we always make a pizza for dinner. You asked me for a recipe awhile back? So I thought I would just give you some pointers on how we do it and what our Friday pizza was like. Mostly important part is to get the diorite. So to make the pizza dough you need to have some yeast the instant kind and dissolve the packet of feast in one cup of warm water. The water shouldn’t be too warm definitely not pointing. Also add about 2 teaspoons of sugar to the Heast mixture as sugar is food to Heast. How to check when he says ready is to look out for bubbling or a thick layer of Heast that looks frothy in the water. Normally it takes about five minutes. And then measure of 2 cups of flour, the recipe calls for bread flour and was never have that on hand as you know so I mostly use cake wheat flour. Your remember that I really struggle to find flower in the shops of the last few weeks and so when I couldn’t find wheat flour are you did a pint 5 kg. Right so to the flour mixture you add 1 teaspoon of salt and also 2 tablespoons of Olive Oyl and then you’re ready to add in your used mixture. Mix it really well either with a spoon or with your hands I don’t like it in my hands dirty so I always use a spoon. When the dog comes together into a nice bowl then you know you can stop mixing. Since this is a historic we need Space to let it rise and I normally do that by cover in the bowl in the kitchen towel and then place it somewhere warm in my case that’s my microwave. You can maybe think of using that kitchen counter you have that always has some sun shining on it. Leave the door for about half an hour I don’t sit back and relax go the extra effort and make your own tomato base. I’ll share with you Saudis secret recipe don’t tell him I told you. Your Waze takes one can of either diced or whole peeled Italian tomatoes and two that he adds just a little bit of butter and Olive Oyl and he secret spices of salt and pepper as well as some oregano. We just got in oregano plant a week ago and since we’ve been adding in fresh oregano it’s been the next level pizza sauce. You have to reduce the source until you happy with the consistency it should take about half an hour. And by now your door and you’re so should be ready so I hope you preheated the oven but 200°C is good and are you ready for Semley. So on our Friday night pizza we added first hour dry ingredients so we started with a layer of Olive Oyl to help Chris the base and then we added the tomato base sauce that you made followed by some salami and olives. Next came layer of grated cheese followed by the wet ingredients or those that will give us some moisture when they bake in the Aven those were the cherry tomatoes and some mushrooms. We bake the pizza in the oven for about 20 minutes that’s all normal time and when I came out the added some freshly sliced avocado i’m sure you know to never take avocado in the oven it will go brown and horrible. And as you know Peter is not complete without some hot sources which fatty taught me to eat so we put out all four varieties of Tabasco sauce as well as a home-made have a nearest source. But honestly just add whatever you want or eat it as you like I hope you. Get a chance to make it this week 20 and don’t forget to parent with some here if you have any left or if you’re like us we now always have non-alcoholic beer same experience, awesome meal and a great time oh and I forgot to say that we ended up watching charger upJoJo rabbit upon your recommendation I really liked it but found the reader.

I used the built-in dictation tool on my iPhone in the Notes app. and I think I will steer clear of this function on my phone for quite some time to come in the future. It was fairly easy to set up and use but the first thing I noticed I had to train myself to do was to voice the punctuation marks I wanted to include in my story. Unfortunately, you will notice I did this fairly inconsistently throughout the text as I found it really challenging to concentrate on telling the story as I remembered it and still consider the technical workings of how that would translate into text. The second issue I had with using the software on my phone was that the dictation would switch off by itself every few minutes. Restarting the function led to words being amalgamated together in my text. The result of my labor is alas a piece of work that doesn’t even equate to a typed first draft had I written the story myself.

It’s also very clear that the software couldn’t quite make out my dialect on certain words with the most notable being whenever I tried to say the word “dough”, the words “diorite”, “dog” and “door” would appear on screen. “Yeast” became “heast” multiple times and my poor Fiancé’s name was construed into “Saudis” and “fatty”! Just a heads up- if he comes to me and asks about this, I will know one of my classmates leaked this information… I also have no idea why the software would interpret “Olive oil” as “Olive Oyl” or why “I’m” would be typed as “i’m”. Those were interesting and unexpected errors, which I can’t really think of as being due to my dialect.

My South African English and this software was perhaps a mismatch or maybe others fared similar to me. I’ll be reading the other posts with great curiosity and keep in the back of my mind that I should perhaps look up an English pronunciation course online. I do believe the result would have been better had I scripted what I wanted to say as I would have had a chance to make notes of the punctuation marks I needed to add and say aloud for the software to incorporate them into the story. I’m also not sure if there is an instruction available where I could spell out certain words that the software clearly had issues with? That would have gone a long way to have improved my story too.

I believe that written storytelling constitutes a more calculated and thoughtfully constructed design process. The option exists to edit, re-edit and contemplate how the pieces of the puzzle fit together in a meaningful way. The web of the story with all its connections is spun until it is perfected. This is important as written storytelling leaves the interpretation of the story to the reader. In the case of a badly written story like the one above, I’m not sure readers can interpret much at all and the sense of emotion gets lost. Only I know what the story is that I wanted to tell. In oral storytelling, there is no going back and changing things but the reader/ listener gets to hear the story first hand. There is thus less interpretation that has to take place as the listener gets to hear the story exactly as the author intended it with all the emotions expressed by the storyteller either by their voice or in their facial expressions etc. Each therefore has their advantages and depending on the task at hand, one might be preferred over the other but they are both very capable of conveying their intended messages.

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Additional thoughts (27 May 2020): The original draft of this post was constructed on the 20th of May and I hadn’t begun the readings for Week 3 by that time. Having had a chance to catch up on the readings, I had some additional thoughts on the task that I wanted to include here. Gnanadesikan (2011) in their chapter titled, The First IT Revolution, refers to writing as a process of translating a message of time into space that uses words to create objects that are visible and tangible for the reader. Following that argument, then the above technology used to create the written words in my story has fallen severely short of accomplishing its purpose as there are large parts in the story that no one can read and imagine seeing in front of them.

The chapter by Gnanadesikan (2011) reaffirms my initial statements in the post that written story-telling is more carefully constructed by referring to writing as being more deliberate than speaking. What I now find intriguing is the idea that this task offers a technological blend for storytelling. Our input was oral but the output of our labor was a written product. Where there would have been a deliberate cognitive reflection undergone had I written this story myself in text, the dictation software took away that process and the result is perhaps then not to be so unexpected- a story that reads terrible and lacks coherence. This sparks in me the same Technology Question brought up by Ong (2002) when he asks what the nature of computer technologies are and what their impact on writing is. Although I don’t know enough yet to answer that question I do recognize the step missed in the construction of this story i.e. my own cognitive process of thinking over the events described and then relaying them in a purposefully designed material text artifact through writing.

References:

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).

Ong, Walter, J. Taylor & Francis eBooks – CRKN, & CRKN MiL Collection. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York; London: Routledge.

Task 1: What’s in my bag?

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I decided to unpack my work laptop bag for this task. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the items I packed in to take home on my final day of work before we began a lock-down here. It’s been over 8 weeks now since I’ve needed to use this bag and some items I had taken out as I’ve needed them but I placed them back for the picture. To begin exploring it’s contents, click on the numbered icons in the picture below or if the image doesn’t display follow this link.

I think the picture I am about to unpack tells enough of a story without me having to tell you exactly what I do or what my interests are (it gives some broad strokes at least to start the painting with and I will fill in the detail as we go along). The textbooks would probably be the first thing to give away that I am involved with teaching/ studying Chemistry in some way. I am in fact a lecturer in Chemistry at a local university and I think it’s also very valid to say that I am also still a student of this discipline because let’s admit it- can we really ever know everything there is to know when new knowledge is still being created on a daily basis?

You might also wonder why I have two textbooks here- well to be honest I have several more that I consult on a daily/ weekly basis. Only one could fit in my laptop bag along with the other items and so the second one I would carry by hand. This kind of text says something very important about the world I inhabit- the academic landscape. Knowledge is valued above all else in academia and so sources of knowledge like textbooks are regarded as sacred in some ways- “what the textbook says is final for most debates”. That is how it is at least in the physical sciences. The facts included in a textbook have been checked, re-checked and agreed upon by a global cohort of scientists. I am therefore not only expected to be literate in the English language that these books are written in but also the scientific language being used. A part of my job to put it crudely is to get the information that is held in that textbook into the heads of my students. I need to help them think about the natural world in the same way as these textbooks interpret it, they need to come to respect its sanctity and turn to it faithfully when in doubt if they too are to become literate in the world of science.

You might also notice in my bag the mixture of old and new forms of communication technology. I have several notebooks in which I make handwritten notes, printed copies of documents (that involved the use of digital devices to construct and print them), a USB drive to store digital data, a webcam, headset and a laptop for wireless communication and work. The Wacom tablet I think is particularly interesting though. I could use my Apple tablet with a stylus to perform much the same functions as I use the Wacom tablet for but I prefer the Wacom for the user experience it provides me. If you’ve ever used one you might know what I mean when I say it comes quite close to the feeling of writing with a real pen (the Wacom stylus has a very responsive pressure tip). The movement over the track-pad also gives you the feeling of writing on not paper but a material which offers some friction like paper does. After a few strokes on the Wacom, it feels very much like writing on paper, more so at least than a normal stylus and tablet experience does for me. Why that is curious to me though is because it seems almost as if this newer form of technology was developed to replicate or mimic an older technology (normal pencil and paper writing). Since it’s clear I like writing on paper and recording physical notes, I am therefore drawn like a moth to a candle with this device.

Then we get to what I think might look quite odd in this bag- a series of SIX yellow highlighters of the same brand. You might wonder if this girl is crazy. Yes, probably, but let me explain. This is my favorite brand of highlighter- I’ve used many and this one lasts the longest and is dependable. Why have six in one bag? Well, I use them for all my documents (work, research and MET work) and when I found out we were going into a lock down period, I went to the stationary shop on campus and bought four extra ones. It seems excessive but looking back at it I think what happened was that subconsciously in the midst of a lot of uncertainty and fear, this transaction brought me some comfort and security. I couldn’t control much going on in my immediate environment but being prepared for the coming situation by getting supplies was something I could control (a primal instinct that kicked in?). It sounds foolish saying that but it’s what I think happened, buying so many of those highlighters brought me some sense of security. That’s of course a detail that no one would have guessed had they not had a conversation about it with me (filling in the broad-brush strokes with extra detail).

I think my bag and its contents says that I use a blend of newer text technologies (laptop, Wacom tablet etc.) and older forms of text technology (handwritten notes). I clearly exhibit sentiment and preference for physical documents and communication methods (even though the stack of documents were constructed using most probably some kind of digital word processor and sent for printing over a wireless network which meant that the information for printing was deconstructed and sent as little pockets of information using radio waves). I also have a blend of items that would classify me as a professional but there are items that betray this image and gives insight into my personality in this bag too (the minions USB and those fun button badges I created for an Open day at the university). Again, I am a blend, this time of the professional and whimsical perhaps. If an archaeologist of the future were to examine this bag, they might have thought of me as someone not wanting to let go. Someone that doesn’t want to let go of favored past technologies or the image of their younger self.

The bag’s content would have been a little different 15 years ago as I was still at school then and the textbooks would be there albeit much thinner and the subjects more varied, a calculator would be present and a lot of documents and notebooks too. The technological items would be missing though (I didn’t have a laptop, webcam, headset or USB drive, tablets hadn’t even been invented then). I always have something fun and personal in my bags, I used to carry little Winnie the Pooh in costume key-chains with me on my bags (which serves much the same function as my minions USB does now). The bag would have looked much different though 25 years ago as I had just started school and I don’t think I could read properly then. The pens might have been replaced by crayons and of course none of the technological items would have been there.

Hello to All!

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Welcome to I guess what could be called my new blog home for the next few months. I must admit that calling a virtual space “home” has found new meaning for me in a world where our daily movement and activities have been so inhibited lately. I won’t go into much of an introduction as I’ve seen a few familiar faces in the course already (a warm greeting to you all) but to those I haven’t met yet-  Hello! I hope the MET journey has been as much an adventure for you as it has for me and that the next few months will be some of the best yet in the program.

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I will admit that this course was never one I had planned on taking in the MET but life has taught me that the unplanned with its unexpected twists and turns often yields the most rewarding of experiences. I hope that will be the case for this course.

I will be completely out of my depth in this course as I have absolutely no social science background apart from what I have been exposed to in the MET (yes- I know nothing of linguistics, semantics etc.) but rather my background is in the physical sciences.

Either way, let the journey begin and let’s see where it takes me…