Gender Lens Research Progress

My research is going pretty well so far. There’s a lot of information on why the dolls were created and it goes really well with what we’ve been learning in this class. There’s so much prior research and statistics about how there aren’t enough women role models in science and math, so I’ll be able to easily explain why the dolls were created and their main goals. Where I’m having trouble with the research is finding the actual product. I have a lot about the timeline of creating the product but it almost seems kind of hard to buy. There is one website that has a place to buy it but there’s only one of the dolls on it. Because of this, I’m going to have to try harder to find the specifications of it and how it actually works, the maintenance and the user support. I have a lot of information about social and cultural trends, so that should not be a problem at all. In the beginning stages of my research, I already have six sources and it hasn’t been hard to find the majority of the information that I need. There are also a lot of really helpful pictures that show what it is and how it works.

Research Topic: Dorothy Arzner – American Film Director and Inventor

Dorothy Arzner was born in San Fransisco, California in 1897. She started off her life studying to go to medical school, but World War I forced her to quit, so she enlisted and served as a driver in the ambulance corps. After that, she decided to get into the movie industry and she was hired by Paramount Pictures. There, she was a script writer and soon a film editor. BY 1927, she was directing her own films.

Movies were silent back in the 1920’s. In 1929, Arzner directed the first film that had sound in it due to her invention of the boom microphone. It enabled actors to be able to walk around the set speaking lines without the microphone being seen. Sound completely changed the movie industry forever.

At this time, Arzner was one of the only women working in the movie industry. While it wasn’t popular at this time, her movies often had strong, independent, free spirited women in them. Arzner was a lesbian and people often criticized her for it, but she made it known that she was not a lesbian director or a woman director. She was simply a director. She was a model for the feminist movement later in the 60’s as she was so successful in her career when there weren’t other women in her field.

Unfortunately, Arzner passed away in 1979 so it would be impossible to interview her.

Creating an RSS Feed

To add an RSS Fee, I first logged into my email and went to Google News. I clicked on the Personalize button so that I could change what kinds of news I wanted to see on my feed. I think clicked one of the posts, “women in technology” and it gave me a list of news articles that pertained to gender in technology. At the bottom of the page, there was a link that said RSS. Instead of going to the external hyperlink, I copied the link to my clipboard by right clicking on it. Then, I went to the settings of my blog and went to customize my page. I went to the widgets, and clicked to add another one. I chose to add an RSS feed, and then I just pasted the link into the widget and gave it a title. I went back into my blog and found that on my sidebar there was a newsfeed of different articles that pertained to women in technology. Just by looking at the ten articles on the side of my blog I learned that there are so many things going on with technology regarding gender in the world right now.

Second Experience Recap

I’m starting to get used to the website and its layout. I only takes me a couple seconds now to figure out where I want to be on the site. There are still a couple things I don’t really understand and I really had to play with it for a while to get the categories and pages to show up on the sidebar. It can get really frustrating but I think the more I’m working on it the easier it will get. I think it looks pretty professional and I like that it has pages and different categories.

Recap

I’ve had a pretty good experience with my blog so far. I think it’s user friendly and easy to navigate. I also really like how we can customize our posts and make it our own.

Though I usually write my own signature in every email, I like that this one will just go automatically. I think it’ll be very useful for classes and professional emails in the future.

Regarding the text-to-speech function, I think it’s convenient but I doubt I will end up using it very often. I don’t mind reading off of a computer screen and I think it’s faster. I also think I would be more concentrated on the voice than what they were actually saying.