The research half of your day

As an EPSRI scholar, you spend half of each day observing and documenting your class, and the other half of the day developing insights, questions, themes, and so on inspired by what you observed. Here are basic instructions for what to do with that time.

Preparation

• Set up your laptop to access the Energy Project server, where the video files are stored. To access the server, connect to smb://physicsdata.spu.edu/classes. The login is "scherr" and the password is "EnergyProject." Be sure to plug your computer into an ethernet cable, since the wired connection is much faster than wireless and these are big files. Navigate to 2011 Summer; you should be able to figure out where your data is within that. Dates are YYMMDD (July 7, 2011 is 110722).
• If you have trouble downloading files from the server, you can also get them from the hard drive where backups are stored. (Previous EPSRI scholars have recommended bringing your own hard drive so you can take home files if you want to continue research collaborations with us.)
  
• Obtain QuickTime Pro from us if you don't have it already.
• Obtain InqScribe if you don't have it already.

Episode selection
The EPSRI accumulates data at a startling rate. Each week of data collection produces approximately 120 hours of video and 200 pages of field notes. Episodes are the gold coin of the EPSRI realm, because they are entry points into an otherwise intimidating library of data. Try to produce an episode every day.

• Think of an interesting event that occurred in your last observation session. If it's something you found yourself telling someone else about at lunchtime, or it's been kicking around in your mind overnight, it's almost certainly a worthwhile episode. Your field notes will guide you, especially if you flagged moments for later investigation. Use the field notes to identify the time of the event.
• Find the long movie containing your event on the project server. Locate your event within the longer movie. Find a reasonable beginning and end for your episode. Try to keep a single episode down to five minutes or less, so that it's easy for another viewer to get a sense of things quickly. (If you find yourself wanting to produce a longer episode, consider identifying a short episode within the long one and keeping both).
• Use QuickTime Pro to create a new movie file consisting of only your episode: Select the part you want with the sliders below the playback cursor, then choose Edit --> Trim to Selection. Immediately "Save as..." so that you don't overwrite your whole movie. Label episodes as follows: E1 110808 CatchyName.mov
• Store the episode you created on the server in the relevant "Episodes" folder.
• Add to your field notes where you created an episode, by writing "** episode: E1 110808 CatchyName" (or something similarly searchable).
• If you can, transcribe and caption your episode using InqScribe. Transcription is analysis, and transcribing short episodes is often quite interesting and satisfying. Use the expensive headphones. InqScribe makes captioning as painless as it could possibly be (instructions here).

Reflection and sharing of insights

• Make a blog entry. Every episode you create should get a blog entry; otherwise it is likely to go unappreciated. All kinds of blog entries are welcome, as you can see from how others have used this space.
• Read someone else's blog post and comment on it.
• Talk to your fellow scholars about what you have seen. Yes, this fun task is one of your important responsibilities!