While language comes naturally to a large majority of humans, writing does not, and will not unless someone — a parent, teacher, professor — teaches you how to write. For instance, many of us, at one time or another, learned that one of the rules of academic writing is to leave yourself out of it — don’t refer to yourself as the author; never use first person pronouns. At times, this can run counter to understanding the process of research and communication — who is the person whose words you’re reading?

So, to bring you up to speed, we want to introduce ourselves. Luca is an undergraduate linguistics student at Memorial University of Newfoundland. After taking a course taught by Paul on linguistic variation in Newfoundland and Labrador, he was invited by Paul to create a series of surveys designed to assess the presence of barriers to accessibility of services for people who stutter in Newfoundland and Labrador. He is currently co-editor of the Some Stutter, Luh! podcast, which is Newfoundland and Labrador’s first podcast about communication differences.

Paul is a tenured associate professor of linguistics at Memorial University of Newfoundland. This project intersects with two of his interests: audio/video documentation and sociolinguistics. He teaches and does research about sociolinguistic variation and dialect change, linguistic ideology, and recently started the solidarity research project on communication differences that Luca mentioned earlier.

With linguistics being our base, we’ll often refer linguistics research in this guide. Don’t worry though, we’re well read in other areas as well and we’ll draw on ideas, philosophies and methods from other domains such as education, media studies, and copyright.

Another important point we hope to hit home with this guide is that Telling Stories Is Central To Research. As Larsson (2017) notes, “A press release is not enough and facts alone will not do the trick”; rather, “Digital stories capture the driving force behind the research, are sustainable and reach a larger audience,” such that they “open new opportunities” (Larsson 2017).

Research reports versus research-based storytelling

Before we get to the technical parts of digital essay production, we touch on a few elements of research communication. Let’s look at a good example of a video about sociolinguistic research:

This video has all the hallmarks of a video about research:

• The video includes a scholar; it shows her talking about her research, as well as how her research has been funded and rewarded
• The visuals in the video show the researcher in a scholarly environment (her laboratory); that is, the visuals show the research process from an academic perspective

As clear and useful as this video is at communicating about research (on sociolinguistics at the University of Ottawa), it’s not the type of video we hope you will make. Rather, consider the following video:

Lara Aysal’s short video “Hul’q’umi’num Heroes” is distinctly different from the first:

• While the video does include the researcher talking about her project, she talks about how the project (about Indigenous people “reclaiming language through the medium of theater”) is important for the community she is working with. In order to support her comments, the video includes interviews with community members involved in the project discussing the importance of their Indigenous language.
• Besides what is said by the individuals in the video, it also includes visuals of people, objects, and events in an Indigenous community in order to show the viewer the community that is involved with the project.

That is, Aysal’s video is community-focused or subject-focused rather than research-focused. Hul’q’umi’num Heroes both documents and tells about research that is part of a bigger, more accessible story.

And this leads us to our first principle in creating the types of documentary media covered by this guide: first, tell the story to communicate the research.

With this in mind, we move on to the next chapter where we provide some principles of story-building for communicating your research.

Further reading about storytelling and research communication

Bresland, J. (2010). On the origin of the video essay. Blackbird: An online journal of literature and the arts, 9, 1. https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v9n1/gallery/ve-bresland_j/ve-origin_page.shtml

Petrarca, D., & Hughes, J. (2014). Mobilizing knowledge via documentary filmmaking—Is the academy ready?. McGill Journal of Education/Revue des sciences de l’éducation de McGill, 49(3), 561-582. https://doi.org/10.7202/1033547ar

Reagan, A. J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ Data Science, 5(1), 31. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1

Walker, E. B., & Boyer, D. M. (2018). Research as storytelling: The use of video for mixed methods research. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 3(1), 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40990-018-0020-4

Youngblood, N. E., Tirumala, L. N., & Galvez, R. A. (2018). Accessible Media: The Need to Prepare Students for Creating Accessible Content. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 73(3), 334–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695817714379

Sources cited

Grierson, J. (1933). The documentary producer. Cinema Quarterly, 2(1), 7-9.

Larsson, R. (2017). My Story or Your Story? Producing Professional Digital Stories on Behalf of Researchers. In G. Jamissen, P. Hardy, Y. Nordkvelle, & H. Pleasants (Eds.), Digital Storytelling in Higher Education (pp. 167–184). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51058-3_12

Media attributions

“Hul’q’umi’num’ heroes: Reclaiming language through theatre” is available on the SSHRC-CRSH channel. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=505aXvwiJjg

“Shana Poplack – SSHRC 2012 Gold Medal for Achievement in Research” is available on the SSHRC-CRSH channel. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=altYsakS_TI