Blog post up for another SfAA session and a lesson learned the hard way
I have very little experience with recording, editing audio files, and podcasting for that matter. Sometimes, no matter how much you've practiced and prepared something will go wrong. Yesterday, as I was editing the sound files for the Florida Public Archaeology Network (FPAN) session, the files were lost. I tried software recovery programs, searching my computer, looking for back-ups and nothing worked. We had all of the files from each session stored on an external hard drive, but for some reason this particular session was not backed up. There is a blog post up about the session here. I'm thankful that all of the participants of this session are involved in an organization that has a fantastic website, so interested people can still find out about their work.
The lesson I've taken away from this mishap is to always double check to see if the file is backed up before editing. Also, this was a Saturday session, we were all exhausted at this point. This is most likely the reason for this file not being backed up- it slipped our tired minds.
My summer project is to institutionalize the podcasting project. Develop a short training program for volunteers that would like to help record, create a time line and "to-do" list for the project, document all of the "problems" from this year into one document that can be passed on and to try to find funding to be able to pay volunteers. The fact that the two sessions that did not record properly were both on Saturday and that this file from the FPAN session was not backed up on Saturday tells me that four days of recording is too much for one small team of people. I knew this going in of course and did it this way only because I couldn't find help- but this all reaffirms it.
I'm trying to take each mishap as a learning experience, what can be learned from it and how can we avoid it in the future rather than just being hard on myself. The important things to remember is what the project means to the field of anthropology and that a lot of people are really excited about the project.