Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Introduction

Since this is a digital storytelling class, I thought the most fitting medium for my reflection would be a bog with interactive features. This format allows me to insert video clips, images, and sounds, so this makes it easier to truly reflect upon and show how much I’ve learned in this course.

Without further ado, this reflection will explore my understanding and experiences with digital storytelling, working with different modes, composing a research-based digital story, and my composing process throughout the duration of WRT 233. I’ve dedicated one blog post per category to distinguish and expand on my ideas, and in the end, I hope that this blog appropriately highlights my academic growth in this area of composition and rhetoric.

Digital Storytelling

Walking into this class on the first day of the semester, I knew next to nothing about the genre of digital storytelling. I knew that it existed and that people specialized in this area of rhetoric and composition, but that was the extent of my knowledge. After taking this course, my understanding of the genre has grown tenfold, and I’ve learned to value and appreciate certain digital elements that I’ve taken for granted in the past.

One of my fondest memories of our class is the day we experimented with netprov. This was the first time I had ever been required (or rather, allowed!) to Tweet during class. Back in high school one of my teachers did this texting activity where we would text in answers and they would appear on the screen, but this activity transcended that kind of interaction. Not only were we able to utilize social media that we use in our everyday lives, but we were able to create a story with it and publish it in a digital format, which combines all different kinds of academic and social elements.


Our netprov

I never would have considered Twitter to be a hub for digital storytelling, but I can see now how it can be a good platform. Twitter is a very collaborative and interpersonal site with people favoriting, re-tweeting, and responding to others’ Tweets, and that fits in with what Wesch talked about in his video about “unboxed” stories. He noted how technology today has allowed for “new types of stories unfolded across multiple channels in unplanned, unscripted, emerged collaborations,” and that’s exactly what our netprov proved. We were all contributing to the story and adding in our own elements to the story in an improvised, on-the-fly fashion, which is a characteristic that it unique to this kind of storytelling.  Some of my classmates mentioned how their friends asked them what they were doing on Twitter with those #wrt233 posts and one of my friends even asked me what was up with the white van, so this speaks to the power of Twitter (and social media) and its potential to reach various audiences in addition to being able to involve various contributors.

As Joe Lambert (2010) mentions in The Digital Storytelling Cookbook, “the process of moving from a journalistic, technical, or official voice towards a more organic and natural voice is often difficult” when telling stories, and I would argue that the transition between mediums of storytelling can be just as difficult (p. 3). In my case, that was definitely true. Up to this point I have primarily told stories with words (be it through vocalization or through writing), so it was rather daunting for me to think about telling a story digitally, which is vague and open enough in its own right.

When you break down the words “digital” and “storytelling,” you might get a bit puzzled since they seem to contradict each other in a way. Most people associate “storytelling” with words (books, oral legends, etc.) and, from what I’ve experienced, most people associate “digital” with computers and animations, so namely, not necessarily words and stories.

Indeed, I think what was most interesting yet confusing to me about entering the world of digital storytelling was understanding how words themselves can be used. Perhaps it was because I was stuck on that idea of an “unboxed” story, but initially, I didn’t really consider using much writing in my research-based digital story. In my proposal, this is what I said regarding the format of my project:

"By incorporating video interviews of participants, images I took during the trip, a voiceover, and various other audio clips, this project will follow people and ideas that  all lend to the overarching theme of how I’ve (and others can) overcome the challenges of  studying abroad. Specifically, I plan on opening the video with images of Montreal and my voice setting the scene and my emotions at the beginning of the trip. After that, I’m thinking that I’ll then cut to a blend of videos, text, images, and the voiceover to tell my story and then provide advice."

Clearly, I was thinking more of an image/video/audio kind of project, but in all actuality, I ended up expanding this idea and situating this video into a blog with words and writing that more directly conveyed my message.

From even this brief example of my initial expectations and the eventual reality of my final project, it’s easy to see how my understanding of this specific genre grew and changed. It was actually during Create and Share 12 when you listed we could use wordpress or blogger to frame our digital stories that it finally dawned on me to create a blog post incorporating my videos, thus more fully understanding how “digital” didn’t have to exclude words in the traditional sense.

As a digital storyteller, I also grew and matured in my ability to effectively tap into emotions and tell more nuanced stories. For example, in my initial feedback for my image story, you said that you “[saw] the story being a day on the farm with a storm in the evening” but that, ultimately, you wondered “if there [was] a way to tap into more emotion though, perhaps surrounding the storm.” Indeed, when I looked back at my image story, I noticed that the “emotion” didn’t necessarily come across the way that I had imagined it. Upon revising my image story, I added more images depicting some of the benefits of farming and then some of the results of having a big storm, and you noted that my “revision has a much clearer story with the addition of the farmers and the food” and that it “made [you] think of the circular pattern of farming - seeds lead to life and food, which die, and then the circle begins again.”

I had been going for the impression and takeaway that you highlighted in your feedback of my revised image story, but I didn’t get there until after someone else looked at it and reacted to it. As I’ve been learning from all of my writing and rhetoric courses, audience awareness is a vital part of the composition process and the overall product, but I believe that it’s even more important in digital storytelling. Not everyone views things the same way (i.e., I was born and raised on a farm, so I instinctively know all about its importance whereas someone with different life experiences wouldn’t necessarily know that), so it’s crucial to be extra clear and to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. I tried to do that in my subsequent projects (with varying degrees of success), and this course as a whole has increased my level of audience awareness and has given me a new perspective on the concept. I’m thankful for this since it’ll be very useful in my graduate studies.

When reflecting on the concept of digital storytelling, then, I’ve covered three main categories in this post: the platform for digital storytelling, how to use words in digital storytelling, and how to convey the story and adhere to the audience in digital storytelling. My experiences in this class have led me to not take things at face-value and to allow myself be open to different kinds of storytelling. I previously never would have dreamed of composing a story solely out of pictures, but now that I’ve done it, I can see myself trying it out again in the future because, hey, it’s a thing. Digitally storytelling is continuing to evolve and may end up in more directions than we can accurately predict, but it’s still important for me as a learner to continually test and challenge my understanding of it and to keep trying new things and growing in my ability to compose all different sorts of stories.

References
Lambert, J. (2010). Digital Storytelling Cookbook (4th ed). Berkley, CA: Digital Diner Press. 

Wesch, M. (2015, August 10). Unboxing stories (Video file). Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/135868142

Working with Images, Audio, and Video

To break down the digital storytelling process, we worked with three main modes in this class – images, audio, and video.  Some assignments required us to only use one mode (such as the image story assignment and the audio story assignment) while others (the video story assignment and the research-based digital story assignment) required us to use multiple modes.

In order to more clearly flesh out my experiences with each mode and to describe how rhetorical principles can be applied, I’m going to break this post up into three sections that center on images, audio, and video, respectively.

Images


The image story was sincerely the most difficult assignment for me this semester. In a way, I felt inhibited since we could only use images, but what I learned later is that such a limitation can be very powerful.  I’ve often heard the saying “less is more” and have often scoffed at it, but I finally saw the validity of that statement while composing my image story.
My image story consisted of a bunch of farm-related pictures that gradually shifted from a happy, early-morning scene to a damaging storm to a peaceful night of restoration. In order to evoke those kinds of emotions, it was necessary to imply them by paying attention to the little things. I chose each transition carefully and set each picture’s duration to achieve a specific effect (the longer pictures were meant to promote peacefulness, the shorter ones to portray sudden, intense movement, etc.).

My revised image story is included below, and as you go through it, you can almost “feel” the change of pace through both the transitions and the length of each individual picture. You noted in your feedback to me that the lightning scene “seem[ed] like the most stand-out and change-like moment,” and you probably came to that conclusion because the images beforehand were light and their pacing was slow and smooth, whereas the lightening image and the one before that were rather abrupt and rough.



One might not think that such tiny details are important, but they truly are. I was surprised to find myself agonizing over such minute things because, more generally, I’m always concerned with my words when I’m creating a story. In this case, though, there weren’t any words, so all of the smaller details added up to share the weight and importance of the project. Rhetoric in this sense was shifted from paying attention to how words are read by readers to how images and their transitions come across to the watching audience, and it was interesting to see how that core attention to audience is still present and very influential when composing an image story.

Audio


The audio story brought about its own challenges, but for me, the most difficult part of the assignment was telling a complete story in a two or three minute timeframe. I started it off as more of an introduction to my larger project, but I realized that, like with the image story, the smaller details were the ones to add up and make the most impact. Concerning audio, these are things like the pitch, inflection, and pacing of a voiceover, little sound effects, the duration and intensity of music, and various other things. My audio story is included below.



In order to be rhetorical with it, one has to really think about how his or her audience will react to things. I didn’t anticipate things well at first (in your feedback to me, you mentioned that you didn’t understand why there was the sound of a gas burner at the beginning, and I had actually thought that sound was the “coolest” of my story and didn’t think it would be a problem). I relied heavily on what my immediate audience (my mother) thought (she loved it), but I didn’t check with other people to get different viewpoints and thoughts.

Audio seems to be a very personalized mode. Music taste (which is a specified genre of audio) is one of those things that is unique for each and every person, so audio effectiveness is definitely a hard thing to fully predict since different people might react in their own ways. It’s still important to tamper with, though (I mean, how can we do anything right if we don’t know what we do wrong first?), and though I changed many things throughout the making of my audio story, I could have done more.

It was interesting how I used many seemingly simple things to create audio sounds. I recorded the gas burner of my stove, my fingers snapping, and my mom and I clapping, to name a few of the sound effects in my audio story. I relied heavily on Dorwick’s work with recording mundane sounds and making them sound eerie or distorted (even though I chose not to necessarily go that route). In the end, I feel that the only digital resources I really used for this project was my phone, voice-recording app, my computer, and Audacity, but it all came together to create a simple yet complete audio story, though I could have revised the sound effects and music to make it more effective.

Video


My video-making abilities have developed tremendously over the course of this class. I actually used the same video-editing software for my video story/digital story that I used in the past (Windows MovieMaker), but my rhetorical training and knowledge (both from this class and from my writing and rhetoric major itself) really came through to make a difference.

To better help you see this transformation, I’ll show you a clip from a video that I made during my senior year of high school and then a clip that I made in this class (during my senior year of college). The high school assignment was one where we had to make a multi-media project that addressed the concept of “the other” in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The drama geek that I was, I decided to film and act out a type of documentary using my smartphone and the resources available to me at the time (aka, not much except for my phone, computer, and house).

Here’s a video in which there is an image sequence:

            

You’ll notice that I used a popular song (at the time) to play during the sequence, and I also had pictures devoid of any words. I didn’t give any attribution to the song or pictures (disclaimer: it was used for educational purposes), and in sum, it just feels very simple.

Here’s an example from my research-based digital story where I used images, sound, and words to evoke a certain meaning:



Hopefully it’s clear that this image sequence is more nuanced and purposeful in its duration. I timed and matched sounds to create an eerie sort of feel, and I put words atop of the images to more clearly convey my message and be clear to the audience.

One of the things that I know now at twenty-two and didn’t know at eighteen is that so much more goes into an effective video than just the video itself and a couple captions. Audio (either a voiceover, music, sound effects, or other elements) can really have an impact on an audience. As Lambert notes, “in a story, we are listening for the shape of an organic, rhythmic quality that allows us to drift into reverie” (p. 18), and this rhythm can be attained mostly through sound but can also be enhanced by images and the interaction of different modes (so words on videos, music on images, voice on videos, etc.).

What I learned overall from experimenting with video-making is that some of the principles of writing can still apply. You want to obviously consider your audience and make sure you’re appealing to them in some way (in this case, the audience is both you and, for my final project, students who are looking to study abroad), and you want to still draft revise in a way that you would when writing a paper. Another post later in this blog details my drafting and revision process throughout this class, but as it relates to working with all these different mediums, I’ve learned that some of the basic drafting methods can still be employed but that the changes and previewing shifts to a different kind of form (i.e., mainly visual and auditory, not necessarily written).

Conclusion



Overall, I did a lot of trial and error to complete the image, audio, and video assignments for this class, but my process still mirrored that of my writing process. It required me to think in different ways, of course (for example, when writing a paper, you don’t have to worry so much about font and background color since everything is uniform), but still, there was some transfer of basic skill sets. I was able to draft and then revise as I agonized over small decisions (video transition, audio clip, slide duration, font color and size, etc.), and in the end, I learned how to (and how not to) compose my digital stories by trying everything out and then adjusting according to the feedback I received. 

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.

My Process for Composing with Different Mediums and Modes


In this post, I will elaborate on my composing process for the various projects in this class that required using different mediums and modes. I generally limited myself to only a couple of software platforms for the creation of my projects. I’ve been using MovieMaker since high school (although not very well, if I’m to be honest), so I felt most comfortable with that program to create my videos. I did expand my understanding of the program and actually updated it halfway through the semester, so I got a lot out of it. As I hope this post can demonstrate, I also learned how to communicate using different media and modes of expression and learned how to better draft and revise multimedia projects. I know that I can take with me as a graduate student in composition and rhetoric.
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As a writing and rhetoric major and a writing center tutor, I feel that I understand a decent amount of communication strategies, and after taking this course, I can add digital communication to my communication repertoireIt's not all that different from written communication, really. As I've been talking about a lot on this blog, there are similar rhetorical strategies for each mode. You're always appealing to your audience and predicting how they might react to your product, and as you go about making your product (written or digital), you also follow a clear drafting and revision process. 

Indeed, one of the most valuable takeaways from this class for me is learning how to organize and manage my drafts and revisions. I'm fairly organized when I write papers, and I usually have both a digital copy and a printed out version of my various drafts. That's naturally different with digital storytelling, though. When creating my video story (which was an eventual part of my research-based digital story project), I had various drafts of my video at different stages of the composing process (see below).


Whenever I finished a “complete” version of the video, I saved it as a draft; whenever I made substantial changes to a video that in turn made it seem unique in its own right, I created a new version (see the examples below of drafts 1 and 3A).

Draft 1

vs.

Draft 3A

In these two drafts, the biggest change that you can see is the shift from voiceover-focused (the audio tracks dominating Draft 1) and video-focused (less audio used in Draft 3A). When I first started my video story, I envisioned myself using my professor’s voiceover (and my own) to narrate and situate my story. I had the files and had the ideas, but even in my other drafts (Draft 1A and Draft 1B, pictured below), it still didn’t feel right.

Draft 1A

Draft 1B

As you can see, Draft 1A still had some voiceover material toward the end there whereas Draft1B started to drift away from that format (though was still very much incomplete). I feel that this project in particular best showcases my composing process because, as with most projects, I change my mind halfway through creating it and completely change directions (just look back at Draft 1 compared to Draft 3A. Total opposites, right?). I always have an ideal version of a paper/project/presentation in my head and then end up adapting that example as I go along. This is of course a typical method that I employ with all projects, but in this class particular with all of the different modes and media going on, I had to be extra careful to document my experience or to at least understand where I was coming from when composing everything.

Indeed, even when I change the direction of a project, I keep the previous drafts saved so that I can look back at them and remember where I wanted to go, what ended up happening, and why I ultimately decided to shift gears. I was more unorganized during the process of my image story (see below; I just had a collection of pictures assembled in my folders and saved different MP4 and WMV files instead of having established drafts in MovieMaker). I learned from this rather sloppy organization, though, as evidenced by my aforementioned meticulous structure of my video story. In a way, then, my composing process transformed just like the actual projects themselves.
Image Story Draft 1

Image Story Revision

It was slightly different for my audio story since I had all the raw audio files ordered to remind me of where I was going with the idea (see below), but in the end, I still organized my data and my ideas in a strategic manner. I also didn’t revise this project (which meant less versions to keep track of), but I did edit the original Audacity track without saving new drafts, which is an approached I changed when making my video story.

Audio Story Files

Regarding my research-based digital story, it was harder to keep track of my drafting since the final product (a blog post) wasn’t something that I could save multiple drafts of. I suppose I could have saved every update and draft as its own blog post, but that would have made the overall blog look messy, so I opted to just update the post each time I revised it. In the beginning I put a rough version of my video story up along with a Create and Share video with the intention of changing it, but I still really wanted to make it look neat and clean, even in the early drafts. In her response to my Create and Share post, Paige said that “it look[ed] very professional,” and Greg added that “with all the text, videos, and links” that I had in my blog, the overall product “[felt] as though it ha[d] been around for a while,” so that was very encouraging. I knew then to not change up too much relating the layout and to focus more on the content, which in this case, was the two videos and the actual writing of the blog.

In her response to my Create and Share, Paige also wondered “if the picture at the top was something you chose or if it just came with the template” and said that “[she] couldn't really tell exactly what it was so maybe think about changing it,” so I indeed changed my picture from the one with the template to a picture of my textbook from Montreal (to add both a “study abroad/school” feel and add some authenticity to the post). I also messed around with the colors and went with white text on a dark background instead of the reverse, and from there, my revisions mainly concerned the video story, which was detailed above.

In the end, then, my composing process using different mediums and modes has evolved tremendously throughout this course. I started off disorganized with my image story, organized yet draft-limited with my audio story, and then organized and draft-happy with my video story.


Looking forward, even though I'm not yet exactly sure where I will end up in the field of composition and rhetoric, I know that in the fall, I may end up taking a digital editing class with Tim Lockridge. WRT 233 was my only digital media course at OU, so I hope to be able to build from my budding skill set to more thoroughly learn how to communicate and compose in a digital matter, which has thus far proven to be very similar to the written composing process that I know so well.