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Blog 8: Final Reflection

 What inspired me to create this project was wanting to learn more about the world around me and share the information I’ve learned with others. Especially in a setting like Hawken, we are too often caught in our own private school bubble, when the real world is nothing of the sort. It’s not particularly anyone’s fault. However, I think it is important to understand the flawed systems that we live in, and part of that learning is being exposed to the issues around us. I definitely was not thinking about these important inequities until COVID-19 and The Black Lives Matter movement really exacerbated issues of inequity in the health system in 2020. I think that especially with the COVID-19 vaccine, we can see how disparities in who is getting the vaccine based on race and socioeconomic status mirror inequities that have been present for many years. Initially, we had planned on producing just one episode, and I’m glad we made that decision because we just were able to finish with th...
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Blog 7: Production

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Evergreen Podcasts has given us access to their subscription to a website filled with music that can be licensed for a podcast called soundstripe.com. I really liked soundstripe because you can search by Genre, Mood, and type of instrument amongst a plethora of other options.   I went a little crazy with it, as I made a playlist that had 40 songs. We narrowed it down to 10. We used the music we found as transitions to enhance our playlist. Music definitely makes a difference in podcasts because it helps contribute to the mood of the podcast and to keep listeners engaged. We have run into a few obstacles with our editing software. On two separate days, certain parts of our edits in our ProTools session mysteriously disappeared. Luckily, we were able to re edit those parts by dragging out the previous and later edited parts that still remained in the session. Nevertheless, it was frustrating and impeded our productivity. We also had a meeting with a member of Evergreen Podcasts, ...
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Blog 6: Narration

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 Today, we met up with producer Hannah to record our narration. We have spent a lot of time on our script, and we had scripted lines as welll as general points that we wanted to talk about in the narration. The way that we wanted to structure the podcast was through the a conversation between Sweta and I that introduces quotes from our interviews at the appropriate times. A good chunk of the podcast would be Sweta and I talking however. Recording ourselves was really cool because up until now, we have only been using Squadcast to record our interviews. We set up into two different rooms that were adjacent to each other, with me in one and Sweta in the other. There was a mic, headphones, and stand in each room, as well as a big window where we could see each other. This way, we could record ourselves on two different audio channels while being able to see and hear each other. We also had producer Hannah in another room who set up the levels and recorded us. The narration we fi...
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Blog 5: Evergreen Studios

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 We are now working at Evergreen Podcast Studios in Lakewood, Ohio! It's a little out fo the way for both of us but we were so happy to be able to have an in-person experience with our mentors! We first came in and learned how to use the Pro-tools editing software with sound engineer Eric. We learned how to export, import, and upload audio files to Pro Tools.  After spending an hour learning the ins and outs of how to edit with Eric, we took a crack at it ourselves by starting the editing process by picking out clips from our interviews. This was a long process that actually took us a few days to do. Although we had taken the time to create a script where we could envision certain parts of our evidence to appear, it was still difficult to edit all of it because we liked so much of what we were hearing.  One tool that made this process a lot easier was happy scribe. The application (which Evergreen Podcasts graciously allowed us to use). Is an application that transcribes ...
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Blog 4 - Interviews Galore

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 We have had many interviews in the past few days.  We interviewed Taneisha Fair, who works at Cleveland Comunity Center. She helped write an article on the Center for Community Solutions Blog titled “Inability to miss work contributed to vaccine hesitancy and likely, lower vaccination rates”. This post showed how the same areas of the county that have both lower vaccination rates and more low-wage workers are also the communities that have more people of color than the affluent communities with higher vaccination rates. These communities are more on the east side of Cuyahoga county, zip codes like 44103, 44104, 44106, 44108, and many others. Refer to my last post for more details about the article. She talked to us about an issue that has come from discussions around Black people and the vaccine that I hadn't talked about before. She talked about how she has heard a lot of people attribute that because of the Tuskegee syphilis trials, Black people don't want to get the vacci...
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Blog 3: Our First Interview

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       We had our first interview! Of course, there were technical issues but that's okay! First, the microphone and speaker outputs I wanted wouldn't work together (which I still need to figure out), and then one of the sound engineers helping us had to hook our first guest, Mr. Waverly Willis, through a phone call because Squadcast isn't supported on mobile devices. Nevertheless, it was a success. Mr. Willis talked about his experience being a liaison between his community and the medical community.       Mr. Willis opened Urban Kutz Barbershop in 2008, where he has a history of looking out for his community in terms of health. He told Sweta and me about how he started this by simply just checking in with his clients about their health and holding them accountable for their medical responsibilities, such as taking their medication every day/week or listening to their doctor about diet recommendations. I think it's only natural that he start...
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Blog 2 - Squadcast

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Sweta and I have been hard at work researching our topic and progressing in the creation of our podcast. We have started to reach out to different people and have already had a few conversations about our topic with various people over Zoom and email. Through new and old, connections, we have been able to schedule 3 interviews so far. Our first will be an interview with Waverly Willis, who owns a hair salon where he also has held vaccine clinics for community members. I think he is a perfect subject for this podcast because I believe that he can speak for both the inequities that have presented themselves in respect to access to the COVID-19 vaccine as well the initiatives made to combat and alleviate these inequities.  Evergreen Podcasts has graciously allowed us to use an outside recording software called "Squadcast" (a platform similar to zoom) to record our interview bookings. This platform is similar to Zoom but is different because each speaker's voice is recorded i...
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