Archives: Weekly Tasks

Task #4: Potato Printing

Potato Printing

This was a fun activity for a rainy Sunday afternoon with my two kids. We started by discussing which letters might be the easiest letters to carve in a potato. My 8 year old pointed out that straight letters might be easier than curved. Great point! With this in mind, we decided to start with the letters in my name: EMILY. Five letters, all different and all straight – perfect! 

 

We started by writing the letters in marker on the potato, followed the directions for carving and 20 minutes later we had 5 stamps ready to go! 

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We added the paint and carefully started stamping. We noticed as we stamped that the letters are actually backwards and we didn’t take this into account when we created the stamps. However, because of the letters that I chose it actually did not matter; with some careful maneuvering, we switched the E and the L so that they were legible on the paper. This would have been frustrating if we had chosen a letter such as G and would have had to start over. We just got lucky! 

We attempted to make the copies as similar as possible and the whole process took about 40 minutes. As you can see, the paint is not perfectly even on all the letters and the letter placements are not identical or evenly spaced. 

 

This activity allowed me to appreciate the time, effort and patience of those workers who used and continue to use printing presses. I understand why vice locks are used to keep the letters in place, as it was a challenge for me to get the right pressure and prevent the stamps from slipping. I can appreciate the time and effort that goes into creating more elaborate letter stamps than the basic letters that I chose. Finally, I understand that as the design becomes more complicated, the time and patience required increases and this needs to be reflected in the cost of the product created. 

 

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Task # 3: Voice to Text Technology using Speechnotes

Introduction: 

This week we were asked to examine the differences between oral and written language patterns using a voice-to-text tool. The voice to text tool that I used was called Speechnotes. Last week I was preparing to run my first marathon and had a hard time thinking about anything besides running, therefore the story I told was based on my first experiences with racing. This story was unscripted and below you will find the unedited version of my oral story that Speechnotes converted into text: 

Unscripted & Unedited Story:                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Emily. Emily was really active kid; she loves swimming on her swim team she played a lot of soccer and starting to play basketball. Her parents were also very active her mom really good runner and her dad participated entrance hard for a number of triathlons every summer. So when little Emily got to Junior High she decided that she would also start running because that’s what our parents like to do. Her first cross country meet and greet 7 was super exciting remind. On the course that’s travel through the woods and she loved it and it turned out to be good at it. That first race Emily came second. So she started training really hard and she did get better and better and it was amazing. Near the end of the season at the provincial paper ranked the students going to provincials and listed the favourites and wasn’t Emily excited to see her name in the paper predicted to be one of the top in the province! So Emily’s team travelled to put Capital sweet palette for race through Point Pleasant Park it was a rainy old miserable Day by Pleasant Park emily was nervous. Because For the First Time and we was feeling she was feeling a lot of pressure. The gun went off and Emily took off with the fast l and now it’s going pretty well. Until we got to a muddy section that was down. And we thought in her head this is a good place to make up some ground I love running downhill. So I so I took off running nothing goes well for me all of a sudden I was on my knees sliding down the hill. I’m shocked. I looked down and here’s some mud I could see some blood but I was determined place that gay. So I got back up didn’t bother wiping off my knees and kept running. This point there was a number of students ahead of me emily’s didn’t feel great but I kept going. Across the line incest and I was devastated. I worked really hard for that race and I was taken down buy muddy Hill and I couldn’t understand it didn’t seem fair. However watch my teammates cross the line they all had awesome races. In Cross Country it is actually a team event where are your giving points based on your top 5 finishers and because my teammates had a great run and I worked hard to finish bit we actually ended up in third place as a team! Learn that day that sometimes your races don’t go the way that you hoped but if you get up, keep working hard finish the race sometimes you still get to celebrate a different kind of achievement. That I think Arthur Play Celebration was way more fun then I could have had celebrating a Personal Achievement in that race. Fast forward 28 years and not Emily is now lining up next weekend trying to first marathon with eight of her friends and I know does that celebration feeling really special because her friends are there.

 

Analysis of Voice to Text Technology: 

Speechnotes was an easy to use app for recording. It only required that I tap the mic to start and stop recording and it easily allowed me to copy the text when I finished my story. Speechnotes provides a few quick tips to get started; the tip related to punctuation gives three options: dictate the punctuation, type the punctuation or press the correct punctuation button. In an attempt to keep my story as true to an oral culture as a literate person can do, I opted to dictate the punctuation. I recognize that a true oral culture would naturally pause the story and use voice intonations as opposed to dictating punctuation. 

Analyzing the written conventions in my story, I believe it is fair to say that they are atrocious. Dictating the punctuation breaks the fluidity of a story, therefore I frequently forgot to punctuate resulting in a number of long run-on sentences. My story is absent of quotation marks and exclamation points, both which would have allowed for a better story. Finally, the story is one big block of text as opposed to a neatly organized paragraph format that you would expect from an educated literate Master’s student. 

There are various mistakes throughout the story where the Speechnotes program did not understand my voice and replaced a word with one that doesn’t make sense. Here is a chart with some of the replacement mistakes in the writing: 

 

Word Written by Speechnotes Word Said by Me
entrance and trained hard
our her
greet grade
remind run
Sweet palate city
gay day
incest fifth
buy by
bit but
Arthur Play The team

Aside from the misplaced words and terrible punctuation, the most common mistake in my story was the use of the word “so”. In the short story about my running I used the word “so” 6 times. Another really obvious mistake that I made was that I switched from third person story-telling to first person story-telling. Both of these mistakes would not be acceptable in formal writing. 

Despite a number of mistakes throughout the written text, I believe that Speechnotes did a decent job of converting my story to text. A literate culture would most likely be able to read this story and identify the main character, the plot and the lesson learned. 

Oral storytelling differs greatly from written storytelling. Oral storytelling lacks linear development, whereas written storytelling is organized and orderly (Aboud, 2014). Scripting my story would have allowed for a more organized and easy to follow story. Due to the lack of linear development, oral storytelling can take a long time and many tangents, whereas written storytelling is deliberate and precise (Gnanadesikan, 2009). Therefore, if my story had been scripted it would have been much shorter and more precise. Oral storytelling is often less formal, uses slang or sayings and allows for the listener to hear the intonations and feel the emotions. Often these intonations and emotions are less apparent in the written narrative (Gnanadesikan, 2009). Finally, a large difference between the two types of storytelling is the story’s ability to be reproduced. Each time an oral story is told there will be changes, additions and deletions, the same can not be said for a written story. 

In conclusion, Speechnotes is a good application to use if you are literate and want to quickly record an idea or have physical difficulty writing. However it is important that the user is aware of the many mistakes such as terrible punctuation and incorrect words that will require editing after the text has been dictated. It is also important for the user to note that scripting a story will most likely result in a more organized, linear and precise version of the story. 

References

Aboud, A. (2014, Sept 8). Walter Ong – Oral cultures & early writing. [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo

Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781444304671

 

 

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Task #1: What’s in my Bag?

Examining my Gym Bag

My name is Emily MacDougall. Here is a picture of me getting ready to start a triathlon at my local beach in my hometown of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Although the gym bag is not visible in the triathlon photo; it is the bag that I use almost daily to help prepare to participate in this triathlon each summer. 

 

The contents of my gym bag have the necessities I need to train for the swim and run portions of the triathlon. The swim suit, flip flops, goggles and bathing cap are essential for swimming laps in the pool; whereas the running shoes, exercise bands and water bottle provide me with the necessary equipment for the running portion of the event. I have transitioned to biking outside so the bike gear has been moved to my garage. The deodorant and shampoo remain in my bag for my after workout showers. In addition to the essential gym gear, you can see that I take my cell phone and Airpods for both music and communication and I take my car keys for transportation. Although I take my phone to the gym, I prefer to write my workouts on paper and you can see two of these old workouts in the picture. One is written on the back of a paint swatch which is evidence of a current renovation project. Finally, there is evidence in this picture that we are still in a pandemic: hand sanitizer and a mask are still staple items in my gym bag. 

For most of these items the text is physically printed on the object: the label on the shampoo and hand sanitizer and the wording on the deodorant. The written workouts are physical texts produced by me and digital texts would be evident if my cell phone was turned on in the picture. These texts indicate to the observer that I am an active individual who plans her workouts and who lives far enough away from the gym that transportation and showering at the gym are necessities. 

Text technologies are any item that facilitates communication, therefore the labels on the materials (hand sanitizer, shampoo, deodorant) can be considered text technology as they help communicate the functionality of the item. The written workout communicates the gym plan for the day and the cell phone helps me stay connected in case I need to communicate with my husband or children. 

This activity has been interesting as each bag that I commonly use would provide a different image of me. If I had chosen to show you the contents of my purse; you would see a disorganized mom, who has large to-do lists and kids that constantly need snacks. If I was to show you the contents of my school bag, you would see an organized teacher who is slightly behind on her marking. However, I decided to show you the contents of my gym bag which gives the reader an accurate impression that I am an active and competitive person. We are all multi-faceted humans and I decided to show the reader the active side of my personality. 

A gym bag from 25 years ago would have three obvious differences from my current bag. First, a cell phone and Airpods would not exist, thus, a Discman or walkman would have been the means to listen to music. Second, the swimming and running gear would still be present, but the technology would not have been as advanced. My googles would have been bulkier and less streamlined and my sneakers would have been less cushioned and perhaps heavier. Finally, 25 years ago there was no fear of a contagious virus therefore a mask and hand sanitizer would be absent from my bag. 

I imagine that an archaeologist would examine the contents of my bag and quickly be able to identify the time period based on the hand sanitizer and mask. The cell phone technology would also provide tools to identify the time period. Running and swimming are pretty basic activities in which the gear has not changed much over time; I wonder if the archeologist would be surprised at the lack of improvements or if they would laugh at the basic training gear that we used in 2022. 

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