Composing a Research-Based Digital Story

While I have a great deal of experience with research-based writing assignments from my time here at OU, a research-based digital story was very foreign and complicated to me when we first started the semester. From my experience, research is very straightforward (you look some information up, paraphrase it/quote it, and then stick on the citation), but as we’ve learned in this class, there really isn’t a straightforward way of conducting (and attributing) research in a digital form.

Indeed, the secondary research part of this assignment was actually the hardest for me. I had some great primary research since I interviewed (and recorded) my professor and one of my classmates (who I didn’t end up including in the video), but since I was going more for a documentary/quick video, I didn’t know how to include the information I had looked up online. I also built off of other videos and tried to mirror their authors’ methods, but I didn’t realize that was considered secondary research until you mentioned in sometime in March (so, yay for naturally trying to model my project after examples!). The primary research was the part that really grounded my project (it built a sense of ethos to have both a professor and a student talking about study abroad), but I still wanted to include some secondary information, even if it wasn’t the most important part of my specific project.

Originally, I wanted to include this information in my actual video. In my second research check-in on March 13, I stated that “I plan[ned] on incorporating [secondary research] into my video by interweaving text between the interviews,” but in the end, I created a blog and was able to link the actual websites in my blog for my readers to visit and look over themselves. I felt that this was better because it didn’t make the blog look choppy and overly formal with citations, and I think it was also more interactive and useful for my readers.

Regarding the citation of both the primary and secondary sources along with any pictures or music I found online, that was another challenge. At the beginning, I tried to make the research part more straightforward – I read some blogs about studying abroad, and I listed the full citations in my research check-ins. As we carried on in the class, however, I realized that my formal citations “stuck out.” I decided to make my citations for my second video in my digital story flip through as post-it notes at the end, and as Melissa shared on my Create and Share 11 post, “with the topic being studying abroad, the post-it notes influence the context of studying and learning, so in that sense it mirrors the topic.” This was a way to formally cite my research as one has to do with a research project, but since the digital story itself wasn’t quite as strictly formal, I could go about it in a different way. The citation sequence is featured below.

Research aside, the actual format of the project was my biggest concern, and I used some rhetorical consideration before finally settling on a format. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make some kind of video featuring myself and my French professor giving advice/sharing experiences about studying abroad, and I did, though it was just embedded into another platform.

When thinking about what would be most effective and most useful for a person thinking about studying abroad, I sat back and reflected on my own experiences. I know that I personally hate watching long videos (like five or more minutes), and since I’m sure other people feel the same, that option was out. I also really enjoy reading about people’s personal experiences online (I frequent reddit and love it!), and since I also wanted to include a short-ish video, I knew that a blog was the way to go.

Since my project did ultimately end up including writing, I was able to use a lot of traditional rhetorical knowledge. I established a friendly, informative, yet smart tone that was meant to captivate my readers, I balanced words and videos to keep their attention, I tried to make sure each paragraph wasn’t too long so that it wouldn’t hurt their eyes, and I tried to make the overall post short enough to make them read it yet long enough to provide enough information (basically, I listened to the Purdue Owl).

I’ve been noticing that these types of goals seem to be associated with more “real life” rhetorical situations than academic ones. In all sincerity, you don’t have to worry about your professor not reading your paper because he or she has to, you might have to adhere to a certain word limit but that’s something established and something you don’t necessarily have to set, and your tone (for most academic papers) is kind of uniform and standard (this all reminds of Consigny’s article on rhetorical situations). In fact, I’d argue that this blog post (though still for class) verges more on the “real life” spectrum since I’m writing for it be published publically and am thus writing in a way that I wouldn’t write in a formal paper (using the second person tense, including exclamation marks in my post, using some more informal transitions, etc.).

Stemming from this idea of “real life” vs. “academic life” projects, I feel that I’ve learned how to better humanize my writing and composing skills after making this research-based project. This is my first writing and rhetoric course outside of the discipline/writing studies track, so it was really my first and only exposure to writing outside of the ivory tower of academia (or inside of it in a different, non-paper way). I feel better able to adapt to my audience now after having to do so multiple time in multiple ways for multiple people, and more practically, I’ve learned how to use both blogger and wordpress to create blogs and have sharpened my MovieMaker skills. For future compositions, I’m confident that I’ll be able to tailor my project to my specific audience, and if any of my future endeavors entail digital storytelling, I’ll know from my experience in this class that it’s possible to blend research and creativity in a way that doesn’t always end up with APA citations and a packed reference page.