This blog post is primarily intended to help my students find resources for creating digital compositions—texts made up of some combination of visual images, audio, video, and so forth. But I post it to this blog in the hopes that it’s useful for other instructors and students as well.
Tech Help, Campus Resources
- The Student Technology Resources Center (STRC) at Langsam Library. They provide instructional technology resources and services to assist students who require specific software or equipment to complete course assignments
- Login to Lynda.com, a a UC–licensed online video-training library that has more than 1,400 online tutorials for software and more.
- Don’t forget the magical powers of YouTube for troubleshooting tech problems!
- Access to tech equipment:
- Here is information on (and a list of) multimedia equiptment you can borrow from Langsam.
- Campus computer labs equipped with Macintoshes have Audacity, Adobe Photoshop, and more.
- Don’t forget that we’re still engaging in acts of composing, in this class—I encourage you to seek out feedback from tutors at the Writing Center, when composing and revising your projects.
Editing Software, Programs, Tutorials
- Audacity (a free , open-source, and cross-platform software program for recording and editing sounds.)
- Also, a third-party LAME mp3 encoder and/or FFmpeg library
- Audacity 2.0.3 Manual on Sourceforge
- Christina’s Quick and Dirty Audacity Tips handout (or, download the Word version and edit for your own use!)
- A FANTASTIC video on Audacity basics (recording, editing, and mixing) by Kyle Stedman
- Photoshop:
- Tool Basics (PDF)
- “Working with Photoshop” (.DOC)
- Gimp (a free, open-source image editor—i.e., stripped down, free Photoshop)
- iMovie:
- iMovie ’09 Handout by Tim Jensen, also useful for iMovie ’11 (PDF)
- iMovie ’11 Advanced Features Handout by Krista Bryson (.DOC)
Storyboarding, Comics, etc.
- StoryboardThat (storyboard creator)
- Scapple (a good brainstorming tool)
- Pixton (comics creator that allows for a lot of customization and artistry)
- Make Belief Comix (you may appreciate the resources for teachers, as well as the simplicity of the strips)
- Stripgenerator (comics creator—not a lot of customization options, but frames can be adjusted and characters can be saved to a personal library for later use in other strips)
Sound Editing, Resources
Some places to find free, legal sound:
- Freeplay Music Website (free music downloads)
- opsound (free music downloads under Creative Commons licensing)
- Free Music Archive (library of high-quality, legal audio downloads)
- Musopen (free music from 150+ classical composers)
What is a sound editor? According to the Audacity manual:
Sound editors clean up dialogue tracks, cut layers of special effects, place sounds at certain times, create ambiance tracks by cutting out unwanted stuff and mixing in interesting or necessary sounds. Music production engineers may cut pieces of vocals away or shift them to a another spot in a song.
Editing is about cutting, placing, fading, cross-fading, shifting, duplicating and adjusting the volume (also referred to as level) of audio material. Mixing is a form of editing too of course.
Interested in submitting a narrative to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN)?
- Text-and-image instructions for submitting are available
- A YouTube walkthrough is also available
Images
- How to attribute creative commons images in your finished composition.
- Flickr’s advanced search (under the license drop-down, which defaults to “Any License,” change to a creative commons license or U.S. government image)
- Getty Images free embed (embed Getty images onto a website or blog for free; note this doesn’t seem to apply to downloading their images)
- Library of Congress’ Flickr Photostream
Video
Below are resources for shooting video:
- “3 Steps to Easily Identify When You Need a Release” (useful general guidelines)
- iRelease (Smartphone app for managing release forms for filmmakers, photographers)
- Model Release Form (gives you permission to record an individual)
- Location Release Form (gives you permission to record on private property—a home, business)
Below are resources for finding and saving video:
- How to attribute creative commons videos in your finished composition.
- Video section of Archive.org
- Prelinger Archive
- Creative Commons search: use to find CC videos on YouTube and more
- Downloading YouTube videos:
- DownloadHelper (Firefox extension for downloading videos from YouTube and other places)
- KeepVid (downloads YouTube videos, slightly less spammy than Clip Converter)
- Clip Converter (downloads YouTube videos, converts to your format of choice)
Video editing resources:
- Trim video with Windows Media Player (PC; helps save time by importing smaller files into MovieMaker!)
- Trim video with QuickTime (Mac; helps save time by importing smaller files into iMovie!)
- WeVideo (browser-based video editor)
Copyright
Slightly different from copyright, but here is a resource on attribution best practices for creative commons sources.
- “A Fair(y) Use Tale:” Eric Faden’ impressive mashup video explains copyright law and fair use through Disney movie clips.
- Tons of resources for understanding copyright law
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an advocacy group—helpful for keeping up with copyright news. Also has useful press releases.
Design
(see also accessibility resources below)
- Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines
- Visual organization: Gestalt Principles
- ColorPicker (quick picker tool to generate HTML codes for colors)
- Design Seeds (beautiful color palettes)
- typsepiration (inspirational web font combinations with ready-to-use CSS codes, color schemes and web-safe font families)
Building a site:
Accessibility
- Resources from the Disability Studies Special Interest Group at CCCC
- Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) by the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium
- Designing for accessibility: Web Accessibility for Designers (from WebAim)
- See also WebAim’s web accessibility evaluation tool, WAVE.
- Color Contrast Checker (from WebAim)
- Captioning:
- Add Captions to YouTube video uploads
- Captioning standards key
- 3PlayMedia Captions Plugin (a free plugin that will allow you to create captions for video embedded onto a website)
Archives, Curation
- The Internet Archive (includes WayBack Machine and lots of creative commons resources)
- The September 11 Digital Archive (a born-digital archive; mentioned in our reading by Johnson)
- Library of Congress’ Flickr Photostream
- AP Archive on YouTube
- British Movietone Archive on YouTube
- Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Presenting, and Preserving the Past on the Web (free online version of a book by Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig)
More Teaching Resources
- NCTE Position Statements on 21st Century Literacies
- WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing
- Short of the Week (potential pool of video stories?)
Other Software Programs
- HootSuite or TweetDeck (Twitter apps. Why? Enhanced usability, particularly for mobile users, who may only be able to see “top tweets” on a hashtag stream).
- bit.ly, Google URL shortener, Tiny URL (things to make your links small in tweets)
- VLC media player (a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.)