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# System prepended metadata

title: 'Elitza Koeva: Media & Design Fellow'
tags: [report]

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tags: report
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# Elitza Koeva: Media & Design Fellow

## Course Support

### PSY980T
Students in this course are introduced to the key concepts related to the psychology of eating disorders, learning to read scientific papers that contain significant amounts of complex data. Students analyzed some examples of figures and visualizations from scientific papers. They thought about the elements of those visualizations that were particularly effective and which aspects they'd like to change. They then thought about their own research projects and using art supplies, they developed visualizations that they could use to convey their research findings. 

### GENED 1049: East Asian Cinema
Elitza helped run a number of workshops for GENED 1049: East Asian Cinema. Elitza supported a workshop that introduced students to the basics of shot composition, blocking, and lighting using films as the course as models. At three different stations, students had the chance to recreate scenes from these films. One station introduced students to three-point lighting and hard versus soft lighting techniques. Another station taught students about shot-reverse-shot and a third station taught students about camera movement. Elitza also taught students about the basics of video editing in several industry-standard tools. Elitza also co-designed and led a workshop about audio in films, including "natural" or diegetic sound and sound created in post-production. One station introduced students to Foley sound effects, another to the range of microphones used to capture sound for films and on set, and another station introduced students to audio editing. 

### Expos 20: Beyond the Freedom Trail 
In support of students' podcasting projects, Elitza facilitated a workshop in audio capture and the fundamentals of the podcast form. Leading students in an activity that encouraged them to reflect on the fundamental mystery that podcasts establish in order to unpack, Elitza helped students create and share 30-second "live podcasts" that comprised some mysterious audio (a kind of primary source data), a music bed that establishes the tone of the podcast episode, and some high-quality voiceover from the student-narrator, establishing their authority as the podcast host/guide. Because this particular section of Expos was about the politics of monuments in communal spaces, students were provided for this activity with a map of Harvard Yard and asked to choose a location/building and explore it sonically, record audio on their phones, and reflect on what the sounds were telling them about the space. Students thought about what is strange/ perplexing about the space, and what they noticed about the space, and what it seemed to be conveying to them.

### PSY1018: The Science and Psychology of Music
Elitza helped facilitate a workshop for PSY 1018 in visual communication. In advance of the workshop, students had to read in advance a paper titled: *A pilot choral intervention in individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum conditions; Singing away loneliness* by Laura H. Adery and Sohee Park  (2022). Students thought about what comprises an academic article, thinking about the functional role that both text and images play. How are text and images structured, and how could they be structured differently? Students conceptualized how visuals can be deployed to convey complex data, using arts supplies and then graphic design and video editing tools to perform the key moves of visual storytelling. Each group was assigned a specific section of the article and used visuals alone to paraphrase the contents of the academic article. This helped students parse complex data and distill it in a manner that made it (visually and conceptually) legible, displaying their proficiency in the content itself.

### OEB 50: Genetics and Genomics
OEB 50 students visited the Learning Lab for a workshop in multimodal scientific communication. Students rotated through four stations that presented them with distinct challenges related to conveying highly techincal scientific content to a generalist audience. At the station Elitza led, students were tasked with paraphrasing an abstract from an academic journal article, going sentence by sentence to produce a concise and accurate summary of the article's contents. Because students in this course engage with podcasts, Elitza had students do this activity using microphones and an audio editing tool, giving students a sense of a media form that has increasing relevance in scientific disciplines. At other stations, students drew an image from the article from their partner's oral description of it; they made the case for why a particular scientific finding was socially significant; and they learned the basics of editing a podcast.

### Expos 20: Telling Her Story: Narrative, Media, and #MeToo 
Elitza helped document an activity in this Expos 20 course, where students learn about contemporary feminist politics and how those politics are articulated on and through social media platforms. The students learned about visual analysis through an activity where they unpacked social media profiles and material objects supplied by the instructor. Students learned about how much you can learn through the visual channel, how powerful it can be to extrapolate meaning from visual forms and their various components. Learning to see visuals as a form of evidence was a key outcome of this lesson, and Elitza's documentation of this workshop will help the Learning Lab adapt this activity for other Harvard courses.

### Expos 20: Animals and Politics 
Elitza helped document a series of social media activism workshops for Expos 20: Animals and Politics. These workshops were led by vegan activist and author Ed Winters (who is, like Elitza, a Bok Media & Design Fellow); the workshops instructed students in the fundamentals of social media content production, specifically with an activist sensibility. Elitza produced documentation of these workshops that helps preserve the lessons for students and instructors who intend to use social media to share academic research with a public audience.

### GENED 1042: Anime as Global Popular Culture
This workshop introduced students to the techniques and platforms that enable animation. Students learned by making stop motion animations, animated filters for use on social media platforms, and animations using the Learning Lab's green screen. Elitza facilitated an activity at a station where students learned After Effects, an industry-standard animation tool. Students thought about how these animated forms, which they interact with very regularly, are actually made, gaining first-hand insight into the production process and aesthetic and formal choices that inform all animated filmmaking.

## Learning Lab Training

![alt text](https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T0HTW3H0V-F04CBN2JTEU/img_3181-edit.jpg?pub_secret=4eba9c6029)

Media & Design Fellows identify key tools they need to learn in order to complete their projects. They join internal labs to receive training and practice using these tools. They also shadow experienced MDFs and Learning Lab staff as they design prompts and lead workshops.

Elitza learned with other MDFs about scrollytelling, a form used by publications like the New York Times. Elitza helped design and facilitate a workshop for students in interactive close-reading and visual analysis, deploying the moves of web-based interactive storytelling (i.e., isolating, re-arranging, redacting, highlighting) as they analyzed a series of texts and images. 

This working group discovered that tools like arcGIS could be useful not only for the presentation of academic/intellectual insights, but also for guiding the process of arriving at those insights.  The group started to develop a list of "intellectual moves," or ways of interacting with images and/or textual excerpts, that can guide students' analyses and syntheses of primary or secondary source materials.

Elitza also designed a mock website exploring the possibility of using a third-party platform, Cargo Collective, to host various types of media materials, from text, images, videos, and sound, while also accommodating the scrollytelling format. As part of this project, Elitza was interested in how questions related to absence and gaps in the archive could be addressed, retold, and remembered, as well as approached through multimodal research or a creative capstone project and alternative ways of mapping. Elitza researched the complex story of a removal of a century-old red oak tree during the renovation and extension of Andover Hall at the Divinity School. During her research, Elitza talked to former students and faculty, created sound recordings, and mapped the story into a website. Elitza also composed a sound piece evoking the sounds of the tree as a technological projection. In addition, the materials collected were tested in a designLab at the Learning Lab.