Back in March there was a call for short videos describing digital humanities centers. These videos would be displayed at the July annual members meeting for centerNet, an international network of Digital Humanities Centers. Since CDS is a member of centerNet, and I am the Executive Secretary for centerNet’s International Steering Committee, I asked if I could put together a video showcasing our work at Brown.

The video was created in Keynote, Apple’s presentation software — think PowerPoint, but actually attractive. I also used Omnigraffle, a great graphic design program, to make the abstract models of the Rockefeller and Science Libraries. The SciLi was easy to model, the Rock involved a lot of standing outside my office counting the windows . . .

Photos were contributed by the talented Lindsay Elgin and Ben Tyler from Digital Production Services, and of course, I used Bruce Boucek’s graphic as the “splash page” and background image.

Once the graphics and slides were complete I used Keynote’s built-in transitions to create movement and flow between the slides. Then I brought in editing support.

Arlando Battle, a recent Brown Graduate, helped me capture the Keynote presentation as a QuickTime video, timed to my reading of the voiceover text. I had been hoping to use Keynote’s automatic export to QuickTime, but you can’t vary the time between slides, so we had to improvise. Arlando then played back the quicktime video and recorded my voiceover separately. He took those files and cut them together in FinalCut Pro along with the 1971 field recording of Ghanian Postal Workers whistling a folk tune while canceling stamps in a syncopated rhythm.

By the time Arlando mixed in all the components I was on vacation and the resulting file was ~3GB — much too large for me to post online from my parents house in Brooklyn. After several failed attempts involving my personal YouTube channel and DropBox, followed by a flury of emails, Arlando loaded the video using Brown’s high speed connection and posted it to the Library’s YouTube Channel in time for the conference.

The final video can be seen here. Enjoy!