My first week working in a new environment with new people all over the country was an interesting experience! Especially when it is all being done virtually as well! Before meeting everyone I was unsure of what topic I was going to do. After meeting everyone, I got assigned to work on a special type of REU project along with one other student researcher as my teammate for this project, Ramzy Oncy-Avila! Our project focuses on “captions UI/UX” and we are really excited to see what we can discover and contribute some solutions to improve the captions experience for deaf and hard of hearing people and all other people who use captions.

Heading into the week was very heaving on the reading as we try to find research articles/papers relating to Caption UI/UX and proceed to document all articles that we found into a Google Sheet to keep all our readings documented along with keywords, summaries, takeaways, future discussions, and other important topics that might be important to discuss or consider in our Literature Review. This will also help us access certain information that we are looking for easily. Throughout the numerous papers, our team has been reading into many various topics such as aspects of captioning, inclusive design, user experience & accessibility, studies on various captioning systems, history of captioning, and many more. As we approach the upcoming next week, we want to focus on gathering a few more research articles/papers to consider for our Literature Review and document it in our Google Sheet. Then proceed to figure out major themes that appear through all our readings by doing some form of theme mapping technique. From those themes, we hope to develop some possible research questions and proceed to form our review as that will help guide our thinking on how to construct it. Along while we are doing this, we also have to manage and finish up another project, a study on Speaker IDs with a Ph.D. student from Rochester Insitute of Technology, and we need to gather 20 more studies to conduct and analyze the data. I am looking forward to starting the second week of this REU strong!