Docent Spotlight: Kim Grimm
This month’s Education Blog Post features guest writer Kim Grimm. In this article, Kim describes the process of adding closed captions to the Museum’s YouTube videos. She has been a member of the Evansville Museum Docent Association since 2020.
As luck would have it, I completed my docent training for the Evansville Museum just as the Covid Pandemic drove the State of Indiana into lock down in March 2020. After months of training, I was ready to start leading tours for the school children. You can only imagine my disappointment as we pass that anniversary, and I am still unable to conduct tours. My desire to contribute remains unshaken—I have volunteered for anything I could do from home that would benefit the Museum. I just wanted to continue to learn new things as I contributed.
In time, I was asked to provide the closed captioning to the Museum’s videos. In my naivete, I had assumed that the words automatically populated when you selected the CC at the bottom of the video. Was I ever mistaken! The process is long and painstaking but very rewarding.
People do not usually speak in the same way as they write—the grammar and diction are not typically the same. They often use the placeholder words “um”, “uh”, “like” and “so”. Many speakers gather their thoughts by repeating the first few words of a sentence multiple times. When in groups, they often speak over one another as well. Often, I get to experience watching a video many times over to gather the context of the words the speaker is using—which helps to fulfill my desire to learn new things. On average, the amount of time required to produce the Closed Captioning for a video takes about four times the length of the video itself. Even with the amount of time spent on one video, I still found the process to be enjoyable. It must be my ‘accountant background’ coming out in me to find the penny or find the right word—details matter a great deal to me.
I get so excited when an email arrives from the Museum in which the sender has included the words from the video in the email. It’s my practice to immediately copy and paste the words from the email to a Word document. Sometimes there would just be words with a lot of spaces in between them and no punctuation or capital letters. This doesn’t prove daunting to me--it reminds me of the game ‘Word Search’ in which you have to find the word in the middle of a bunch of letters in a square. I jump right in and start capitalizing words such as I’ve, Evansville Museum, city names, and states. After that, I begin to read the script and investigate the correct spelling for words that are not familiar. This always proves interesting, and I find myself spending extra time reading about the author or about the time period of the painting. I enjoy the learning aspect as much as the detail work. My favorite experience was learning about Eleanor of Toledo as I completed that project.
Even after completing 45 videos in the last 12 months, I’m still looking forward to receiving the next email with a request for closed captioning. I am still hopeful that I’ll be able to conduct tours (for the first time) in 2022.