Portfolio Entry 1

My first impression of Melike Yucel Koc’s research was that it reminded me of

one of the readings we had recently talked about in class: “La Tía Estambolía”. In this
memoir, the narrator works to collect the oral histories of an esteemed older storyteller
in her Sephardic Jew community. Along with other community members well versed in
oral histories, La Tía Estambolía agrees to be interviewed and to record her stories so
that future generations, as well as those outside of the community, could learn about
their culture and history through stories. In this comparison, Melike Yucel-Koc is like the
narrator, as she aims to record and preserve the oral history of people who immigrated
from Turkey to the Pacific Northwest. She also aims to “investigate the notion of
identity—be it immigrant, religious, ethnic, national, or language… [and] find answers to
how immigrants define themselves and what identity continues to mean in the Turkish
American culture”.
As an assistant teaching professor at UW, Melike Yucel-Koc teaches elementary
and intermediate Turkish, as well as classes on Near Eastern languages and culture. Her
research consists of interviewing Turkish immigrants to the PNW, and is building up to a
larger goal: creating a digital archive. One modern aspect of this digital archive is social
media. As part of the research team, I will be working with other students to edit video
clips and posts to eventually be published on multiple social media sites. Although I
only have non-professional experience with social media and video editing, I am excited
to learn more from the other students on the team and be able to assist in the
preparation of a large store of content to be released to the public in the fall. I will also
be able to add in the perspective of a student and an outsider to the project who will be
able to watch through the recordings and pull out sections that are of interest or are
meaningful to me.
I’m really interested in learning about a Seattle community that I previously had
never known existed. Just as it is easy to look at Seattle landmarks and assume that
they were always there and that mundane things are ahistorical, it is easy for me to look
at people and think of them as individuals without history or community. In reality, every
person belongs to multiple overlapping cultures and communities that deserve attention
and understanding. I often feel detached from my dutch heritage, and it has only been
through rekindling traditions, learning the histories, and listening to the stories of my
dutch family members that I have been able to better understand myself. My connection
to Seattle is a story I have only just begun to explore through this class, but I have
already learned just how much Seattle has informed my identity and my beliefs. By
connecting my story to other immigrant’s stories of how they came to and interact with
Seattle, I hope to gain an even deeper understanding.
 My goals for this project are to be able to assist both the social media and video
editing teams, learn new skills for dealing with online content, familiarize myself with
the Turkish American community in the Pacific Northwest, and better understand my
own relationship with Seattle through the lens of other immigrants. If all goes well and I
have the flexibility in my schedule to stay on the project, I may even continue
volunteering after the class ends.

Portfolio Entry 2
At this point in my service learning, I have created a set of goals for my
contribution to the project, and I have begun to work towards their completion. First I
met with fellow student volunteer Wiqaa Al Jubeer and we worked together to determine
what my contributions to the project would be. Those working on the project have
recorded a large collection of oral histories over the years, and now plan to edit them
over the summer to create promotional content for the project. They will also prepare
content to publish on their website and social media pages once fall comes and the
project is released to the public. For my contribution, I had two options: either I could
help out on the social media team, creating edited photos and creative captions for their
instagram page, or I could help out on the video editing team creating edited clips from
the longer recordings. The decision of which team to be a part of was a difficult one. I
have had plenty of informal experience with social media, and so that was the most
comfortable of the two options for me to help with, but they already had a large amount
of content created for social media, and a number of students already working on that
aspect of the project. As for video editing, I have much less experience, having only
edited 3 short videos for classes in the past. However, the team was far smaller and I
felt that I was more needed in that area, so I decided to challenge myself. This decision
was not easy, and will be difficult, but I could use the experience and the project could
use my help.
Once I decided to join the video editing team, Wiqaa and I then had to determine
what kind of video I would attempt to create. To my surprise, it turned out that they had
not yet created any edited videos yet whatsoever, aside from a few 30 second social
media videos, so I would be creating their first video to introduce the project on their
website. This was a lot of pressure, since I have almost no prior experience, and not a
lot of time to learn. Wiqaa advised me to try and edit the video on iMovie, and keep it
around the 5 minute mark so as to be short enough to be consumed casually, and
interesting enough to draw in the viewer to watch the longer interviews. After our talk, I
began watching through as many of the interviews as possible. This soon presented
another challenge, as the interviews were often over an hour and a half in length, and
were not always in English. Even the ones that were in English were heavily accented,
and the audio quality of the interviews left a lot to be desired. Clearly the videos were
taken without much knowledge of how to adjust for background noise, or with any
knowledge of framing the subject in a way that is standard for interviews: the camera
was both too close to and too high above the subject, creating an awkward situation that
often required the interviewees to look above them to talk to the camera. All in all, I had
my work cut out for me.
After finding an interview that I liked that was in English, I combed through the
transcript for quotes that I found emotionally impactful and captivating. I planned to take
around 4 minutes of quotes from that interview that related to a common theme in the
woman’s interview, and turn that into a short but captivating video. I created a document
where I highlighted and collected the quotes I found important, and decided to use the
quotes to tell a story of her love for the multiculturalism of her home country, as well as
her passion for travel and love of the Pacific Northwest. This seemed to me to be a
good way to introduce the larger oral history project. However, when I began to try and
edit the clips together into one video, I found it difficult as the interviewee didn’t pause
when I expected her to, or put emphasis on the same words I thought she would. This
made it hard for me to extract impactful and concise clips from the 90 minute recording.
I realized that I simultaneously had way too much content, and also not enough of a
hook to entice the audience to continue watching other clips.
I returned to Wiqaa and asked for her advice, and she recommended that I try to
take clips from a few different interviews that all deal with a common theme, and try to
weave them together. I agree that this will have far more potential to be engaging, and
is an overall better way to introduce the project as a whole, but it will be much more
difficult to work with, as my computer is already struggling to load the single interview
that I did download. In between each edit I have to wait multiple minutes for the video to
load, and I have a lot of edits to make. I also know that the ideal video will include
transitions, additional photos overlaid over the audio to capture the attention of the
audience, and perfectly curated clips whose audio fades together seamlessly. This is a
high bar, and I will need to rework my plan quickly if I am to create a usable video by the
end of this next week.
Portfolio Entry 3
There were many times throughout this project where I thought I wasn’t going to
be able to reach my goals. Due to a myriad of technical difficulties, time constraints, and
limitations of the content I was working with, I began to feel that completing the project
would be a miracle in itself. I didn’t want to settle for a mediocre video, since I was going
to help introduce the entire project, and I felt I owed the interviewees, the researchers,
and the other team members my best effort. So instead of giving up after having to
scrap my first video, I started over again from scratch. I watched every single video,
categorized them by main themes, emotional appeal, and audio quality. I then began
the arduous task of collecting quotes and compiling them into one unified narrative. This
was a much harder process the second time, as I was sifting through 10+ 90 minute or
longer videos for 5 minutes of quotes. Finally, after hours of watching the videos and
searching through the transcripts, I had enough quotes. I was able to create a storyline
that answered the four biggest questions of the project: Who are they, why Seattle, what
were their struggles, and what brought them joy.
Now it was time for the part I struggled with the most during my first attempt to
edit the video: downloading and extracting the clips from the half hour video segments.
This part was not necessarily a technical challenge, though it was not trivial to learn how
to navigate the software, but it was a test of my patience. Each video segment took
upwards of 15 to 30 minutes to download, and just as long to extract all the necessary
clips and import them into the editing software. At this point I had switched to a different
editing service as iMovie kept crashing. Finally I had all of the required clips, and it was
time to polish them and do the detailed editing to make them flow together. I needed to
adjust the audio however, and add transitions, so I had to painstakingly transfer the
entire project onto a different computer so as to use iMovie again. During the detailed
editing process, I must have watched the short video I was editing over 50 times. The
finished product was worth it though, as I was able to take immense pride in what I had
created. I can still see areas of improvement for the video, but since this was my first
ever project of this caliber, I feel that I achieved my goals.
I learned a lot through this project, both about the technical skills required to edit
a video, and about the importance of sticking through the challenging parts and being
willing to start over when necessary. It is never fun to start over on a project, especially
when you have limited time, but I made an important judgement call that inevitably
allowed me to create a better product. As for the organization as a whole, or in this case
the research project as a whole, I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I am incredibly
grateful that Melike Yucel Koc gave me this opportunity, and for her kindness I would
recommend this project to other students. The project itself was, however, a bit messy.
The videos were poor quality, the google drive was disorganized with folders named
incorrectly and files misplaced, and I was given very little technical support when joining
the project. When agreeing to be part of the video editing team, I was under the
impression that I would have someone to guide me as I learned the software, but in
reality no one else had any more experience than I did. Even the other student who
assisted me, Wiqaa, was unable to do more than give vague suggestions such as “try
googling it” due to the fact that we could not work together in person. All in all however, I
enjoyed the project, and I hope that my schedule will allow me to help out more in the
future.