For the past few months I have been collaborating with DCC faculty advisor Dr. Evan Golub and three other DCC members on a project which seeks to create a comprehensive guidebook for local community members who would like to document and archive information about a non-recurring event. The project comprises large amounts of team field work as a method of researching the best ways to tell and preserve the stories that are told. I will be using this project as a springboard for my own project, which will delve deeper into the ways we tell stories in the media and how different media can affect the way a story is told.
For the larger project, we will be travelling through the DC-Virginia-Maryland area to document a few different events and do research. At each of these events, I will be collecting data to use for my capstone project. Because I am researching methodologies, I would like to focus on three or four specific media types to truly analyze their impact on a story. The methods I’d like to employ are videography, blog posts, photography, and possibly one more. I will use each of these types of media to gather the same story in different ways. For example, I may take my video camera to three people and ask them why they’re attending an event, but then I may take just my reporter’s notebook and do the same thing. I will then analyze the way the story is changed, either by the way people respond to the questions, the way I document the responses, or by the way I then disseminate the information I have received with the public, or likely, some combination of the three. I will also analyze the way all of these different types of media can come together to tell one complete story, and the way that can be done, whether by hashtag grouping, sections on my blog, or by using Storify or other kind of web aggregator.
I will host all of these on a WordPress site for several reasons. First, the larger project that this will be a part of is hosted on a WordPress and the research I do will be valuable for the larger scope of what I’d like to accomplish. Second, I think WordPress is a very useful hosting site, especially for the archival component of my project, but also for design components, it’s extremely versatile. Third, I already know how to do some things on it and have an account, so I will not waste so much time with learning how to use the basics of the site when I could be spending that time doing more in-depth work, research and analysis.
I will also be drawing on outside research to complete this project, as is essential for any good research project. I want to get a grasp on techniques that are used for telling good stories that I could employ to enhance the stories that I tell. When all is said and done, I would compile all of my work and research and findings into an analysis paper which would be posted on the site along with my stories.
The timeline I’m looking at is in the next few weeks getting the website up and running and beginning my preliminary research. I have already gathered a little bit of information because we began work on the larger project in January by going to the Inauguration. By late February I should have already completed at least one more event and I will be posting and editing the stories I have gathered. By March there should be at least one, and likely two more. The ideal number is three sets of full stories (not counting the Inauguration). During the end of April and May I will work on my analysis paper and put the final touches on the website and stories.
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