Four down, four to go

I have been scanning like a madwoman the past couple days, in a hopefully-not-futile attempt to get all of the novels for this Spring's English classes converted to e-text and mp3 before classes resume. I am, clearly, reaping the rewards for having had the audacity to take some of my vacation time as an actual, you know, vacation.

In slicing and scanning these books (side note: I am considering starting a business called the Slice 'n' Scan), I have learned several things:

a) Mass market paperbacks SUCK. Slicing out the pages without thoroughly mangling them takes more concentration than I would like to give to such a task. Also, they have less of a white-space border around the text, so as you inevitably get farther away from cutting right against the spine of the book as you get deeper into the book, there is way less room for error. Also, when you put tape over the inevitable errors, it obscures the text beneath it, meaning text editing, which is a pain.

b) There are two settings for scanning--single-sided, and double-sided. Generally I leave the program set to double-sided, as that's most of what I scan. However, I haven't figured out how to make that the default, which means when I have to re-start the program after an error, or have selected single-sided to rescan a page, I have to remember to turn double-sided scanning back on. Who wants to guess how many times I only copied one side of the pages from an entire chapter before realizing I had failed to do so? Who wants to guess how many times I did that twice in a row?

This process makes my brain get a little. . . squishy.

c) It would be so much less mind-numbing if I could somehow do something else, at least while the pages were scanning, but this task requires *just enough* attention that you can't do something else at the same time. Not that that stops me from trying. I have managed to get the number of unread items in my reader down to 70 (from 532), though I did make use of the "Mark All As Read" button more than once, and neither task really gets my full attention, leading to the types of errors mentioned above.

d) The optical character recognition program is really, really good, but far, far from perfect. It's hard to explain, even if I did have a visual, but I'll try. The text you see on the screen from the page you scan is not necessarily the same as the text the program "sees" and reads. Sometimes I can tell, while editing, what underlying text needs to be corrected. Oftentimes I have no idea until I save a copy as a text file, and see a random string of symbols. And I'll admit that I don't always go back and correct these errors because there is just so much I can do. In reality, I should be doing a LOT more text editing (and I won't get into the details of the types of errors I see and routinely force myself to ignore), but I have to make a decision between having good quality copies of all the books or excellent quality copies of a few of the books. I hate having to make that compromise, but I think I've made the right one.

Also, I can only correct one word at a time. I have no words for how aggravating that is.

I am moving to a system in which I will use ark-based metaphors exclusively. You have been warned.

As you know, earlier this week I turned a paperback book into a series of mp3 files. Then, again with the help of my amazing IT department, we posted it on an internal webpage (thus avoiding those pesky copyright issues), meaning that students would be able to download it to their own computers before leaving for Thanksgiving. Meaning that in less than 36 hours the answer to the question, "Is this available as an audio book?" went from, "No" to, "Sure. Here are the instructions for downloading."

I think this is one of those, "It's amazing what one can accomplish when one doesn't know what one can't do" situations, as even a week ago I didn't think that this would be possible, and certainly not so quickly.

The response from the teachers teaching this book, other teachers who've wanted to see this happen, learning specialists (including two people who are, allegedly, in charge of implementing assistive technology), the head of school?

Nothing.

Which was annoying and frustrating and (at the end of the semester when I'm over-tired and burnt out) actually kind of upsetting. After finishing the project for the person mentioned in the earlier ark-themed post and not even having it acknowledged, let alone getting a thank you, I was also feeling extra-sensitive to issues of gratitude, and gratitude-denied. I wasn't looking for a ticker-tape parade (though, honestly, I wouldn't turn one down), but the 30 seconds necessary to hit reply on an e-mail and say, "Thanks for your work on this" would have been nice.

To be fair, my immediate supervisor, the assistant head of school, gets it and was just as excited as I was. She is, for the record (and I'm saying this even though I'm fairly certain she doesn't even know this blog exists) an amazing, inspiring woman and one of the main reasons I work here and will continue to do so. I went to her on Thursday to talk, in part, about how frustrated I was that this thing I'd done that was, for me, a major accomplishment had been greeted by such thundering silence.

She pointed out that yes, we'd built this ark, but now we need to build a ramp up to the ark. If all your life you've been able to easily access information in print (or—and this is where our conversation got sort of confusing—been able to use stairs and not needed a ramp to gain access to a building) you don't necessarily get what a difference something like this can make.

If it's not raining where you are, it's hard to see the point of building an ark.

Which makes sense to me. 'Cause even though the "powers that be" seem underwhelmed, students—who have been standing at the bottom of that ramp for years, waiting for someone to build the ark—have sought me out to tell me how cool it is that they'll be able to download the book. Two of the students I talked to directly about the book and how to download it hugged me. One girl said, "Wow. You must really care about us."

Which, when I take a step back and get some perspective, I remember is why I really do what I do.

How man cubits in a paperback?

I understand that undertaking a project like deciding to do in-house conversions to e-text and audio files is not a task to be taken lightly, and that it's necessary to establish a system and do it in a deliberate way. I understand that making such a shift in how we do things is a big change and requires thinking differently about our jobs and how we do things. I understand that taking on a task is not a small thing (despite how underwhelmed the headmaster seemed to be when I told him what I was working on). I understand that the technological hurdles can seem daunting.

But there's a point at which talking about how you're going to approach a task has to turn into action; sometimes the only way you can figure out how to do something is to just go ahead and do it.

Today, I turned a paperback book into a series of mp3 files.

It wasn't exactly seamless. I spent quite a while scanning (and a bit more time re-scanning). Getting Kurzweil to recognize the mp3 encoder was a longer process than one might have liked it to be (and I am indebted to the amazing IT department for making that happen). Organizing the files, determining a structure for the saved files, deciding which file formats to save the book as for optimal accessibility (.kes, .rtf, and .mp3, for the record), figuring out how to get these files to students before they leave campus (a still-unfinished project, but should be taken care of tomorrow morning)—all of this took time, and all decisions are the result of previous training and discussion. Completing this project would not have been possible without all of the conversations leading up to it.

I have been up a long time. I spent entirely too much time staring at a computer screen today, often squinting in either concentration or confusion. My level of exhaustion could best be described as "skull-crushing."

I am not the type of person who does things for the recognition. Generally speaking, I'd much rather not draw attention to myself; I am happy to do my job and let the results speak for themselves.

But today, I turned a paperback book into a series of mp3 files.

And that's pretty fucking cool.