I bent down to fix the uneven tripod, which held a camera to film a 360° video of Pepperdine’s Waves of Flags display — 2,977 flags to represent each life lost on September 11, 2001. Anastassia and I held a brand new $500 Insta 360 One X camera with the goal of recording this special tradition. The grass was wet and the ground was slanted. The tripod had already fallen twice.
“Make it happen” were our only directions. An idea traveled from President Gash’s office to Dean of Libraries, Mark Roosa, to Anna Speth, Librarian for Emerging Technology, and then to me and my partner, fellow Pepperdine senior Anastassia.
This assignment came during the first week of my internship in the Genesis Lab — Pepperdine’s maker space where students come together to create through the use of emerging technology. I thought that this video would be a fairly straightforward task. I had made short films in iMovie before. I was wrong.
Working with 360° footage adds many layers to the process of making a video. We could not have expected all the problems which arose, such as how to combat motion sickness when viewing the video in virtual reality (VR). Google became our best friend.
62 distinct clips of footage taking 30 GBs of memory shot over four days. And that was just the beginning.
So much still needed to be done. The script was non-existent. Our team lacked the skills to edit out the tripod and shadows. We needed permission to contact President Gash to be our narrator. And that all had to be done before stitching the final video together could begin.
Trial and error was our only guide. It took at least ten attempts to completely cover the shadow and tripod in just one of our clips – we had six clips. It took two tries to convert all the footage to files accepted by Adobe Premiere. It took three drafts to get the video to a quality good enough to show President Gash before he could narrate.
The Waves of Flags video project was a group effort with Anastassia and me learning to be videographers, editors, and screenwriters. We both brought different fields to help think of new solutions to problems. We had an International Studies major and an English Literature major (me). The need for differing fields and skill-sets to work together represents the essence of the Digital Humanities (DH), the kind of work we were doing.
DH is a newer academic field that is focused on how computational tools and methods can be applied to traditional humanities disciplines.
I learned about DH during my third year at Pepperdine. A DH class was added as a requirement for the English programs, so I enrolled. It completely changed how I view the world and what I want to do after graduation.
I was learning about the process of digital preservation in that class when the Woolsey fire hit the Pepperdine community last fall. I fled the wildfire at 3 am on Friday, November 9, 2018. I learned that I lost my house at 10 am on Saturday. My perspective on what I was learning and why changed after experiencing how quickly a fire can cause devastation. Wildfires do not pick and choose their victims. They do not care if the victim is a Shakespeare folio or not. They just destroy everything in their path.
Woolsey did not just take my physical home. It took my ignorance in thinking that we will always have the things that we care about. I am not talking only about the objects that were in my house but about pieces of history which live in libraries and museums around the world.
Woolsey came too close to ripping our special collections from the safe hands of the Payson librarians. This fear of loss changed my worldview. I now know that we have a job as humans to preserve our history. With the introduction of the DH, we can now preserve our history using tools that do not seem to belong to the humanities field.
Since I added a minor in the Digital Humanities, I often get the question, “Why are you in this class?” My peers do not understand why a literature student is taking computer science classes. I explain to them that it is this dissonance in study that helps to not only preserve history but to create projects that spread the access of historical artifacts. I find the dissonance to be beautiful.
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