Completing this assignment was surprisingly time-consuming (and kind of frustrating), in part because I had no experience with screencasting or video editing, but also because, despite the fact that I had to describe my workflow in writing for the previous assignment, I didn't really have a true workflow which could easily be emulated in the screencast. That said, learning to show what I did when I worked—especially in a concise way that other people could watch, (perhaps) learn from, and understand—rather than simply describe it, ended up being a really useful exercise insofar as it forced me to truly develop a more consistent system of working that could be exhibited, and thus, also be mimicked—even by myself. In this way, having to develop a workflow to exhibit for this assignment resulted in a system I now use to perform my own work. And so, while there was something artificial about having to develop and exhibit a workflow I had never really used, this exercise made my actual working-life more productive and efficient as I became the pupil of my own process. There is, of course, sometimes nothing more educational than teaching itself.

When I came back to edit this assignment for the book, I had a more sophisticated understanding of how to use Scalar and decided to remediate what had been a long series of bullet points (describing my workflow in the first version) into annotations that correspond with what is happening in the video. Scalar's various options for how content can be viewed (and written) made the editing process interesting and productive. Commenting on my workflow using annotations rather than a page of bullet points allowed the digital object (my workflow video) to become the central content of the assignment, as opposed to the writing. The assignment reads much differently as an annotated video than it once did as a written description of my workflow accompanied by a video.

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Author: Emily Smith
Word Count: 323

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