This book is an open educational resource designed to introduce basic principles of media production that students can easily use to craft a new type of research project: the digital media essay.  Digital media essays (DME) may be any of the following:

• short documentary videos
• podcasts
• radio shows
• interactive websites
• video games
• augmented or virtual reality applications

But, let’s cut to the chase. As a student, you’re busy enough already. Why take the time to learn how to produce digital media essays when there’s nothing wrong with writing an essay anyway? This is a fair argument BUT we think that precisely because you are busy, the work you do at school should be worth your time and effort.

More and more often, students are conducting first-of-its-kind research. And you may not know this, but the research project you’re working on right now might be interesting – or even important – to people OUTSIDE of your class. For example, there are over 200 community foundations in Canada that work on a not-for-profit basis to address and solve challenges faced by local communities across the country. Research that you’re doing may contribute to the knowledge base these foundations are building. So, how can you get your work out there – how can you communicate your own research with those who don’t sit in class with you?

As you probably know, a common way to approach a research report is to put together a scholarly, written presentation of the facts you discovered while doing your research, with the structure and style of these reports reflecting the expectations of the academic audience that is supposedly meant to read the report. These reports typically are not organized around a narrative, nor designed to be meaningful or impactful for members of the public or the communities who may have participated in the research.

Rather than try to offer ways to improve a research report, this textbook will teach you how to design a multimedia project centred on the “creative treatment of actuality,” a highly influential idea coined by documentary filmmaker, John Grierson (1933). Put simply, “a documentary is a creative treatment of actuality, not a faithful transcription of it,” such that “documentaries marshal evidence but then use it to construct their own perspective or argument about the world, their own poetic or rhetorical response to the world”; that is, they transform “evidence into something more than dry facts” (Nichols, 2001, p. 38).

Because of the appeal of narrative-based media, Larsson (2017) notes that “storytelling in general, and digital storytelling in particular, is a powerful way to communicate science outside academia and to create an impact” (p. 169).

Accordingly, this textbook will show you how to produce a DME that uses narrative structure to communicate research in ways that are meaningful to you and your course instructor, and impactful for the general public and community members.

Why a DME? Well, while producing a written report or paper may be a useful way of learning to communicate information to other scholars via academic journals, it does not necessarily provide a way to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to disseminate the results of research to the public in other formats such as audio or video. This is an unfortunate gap, since research should ideally be known to the public and not just to academics. Therefore this textbook will guide you in producing, recording, editing, and publishing a digital media essay about scholarly research.

This textbook also aims to be accessible and also promote accessibility. Although it might seem that accessible design might not be relevant for most people, the U.S. General Services Administration notes that “everyone experiences some form of disability.” There are multiple types of disabilities (permanent, temporary, and situational), and most people, if not everyone, experience at least one of them:

• Permanent disabilities
  • Example: Permanent hearing loss due to illness
• Temporary disabilities
  • Example: Temporary hearing loss due to exposure to loud noise
• Situational disabilities
  • Example: An inability to hear a video due to being in a noisy environment

As Copeland and McGregor note in their Guide to Academic Podcasting, “Accessibility is essential for some, helpful for all.” Implementing principles of accessibility increases the usability of multimedia content for people with and without disabilities, enabling it to be disseminated to a wider and more diverse audience.

This textbook is accessible in the following ways:

• It provides tutorials that are accessible for screen reader users
• It describes a number of ways to make digital media essays accessible to all
• It encourages students to approach research that can be made useful to populations that typically have limited or restricted access to participating in research

In this guide you will find sections on the recording and editing process and on publishing platforms. We also discuss principles of public engagement that university researchers are increasingly being encouraged to consider, as well as a model of community collaboration that enables stakeholders invested in social science and humanities issues to participate in creation and sharing of their own knowledge. While you may not incorporate all of these ideas into your research project, they are presented here to paint a larger picture of what DMEs can do.

In summary, our goal in this guide is to make the time and effort you spend on course-based research worth it by showing you how (and why) you might want to create a digital media essay for your next class project. What follows are short tutorials for producing a digital media essay (specifically, short documentary videos and podcasts) that document your research practices and make your work shareable and accessible to a wider audience – stakeholders outside of your classroom. Our goal is to help you meaningfully engage with partners who might benefit from your research.

The Digital Media Essay for Research Communication is based on our experience as members of the Communication Collaborative. The Collaborative formed a bridge between Memorial University and stakeholders in stuttering and communication disorders communities to tackle stigmatized communication differences in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. This guide is the result of discussions with and encouragement by those members. Together we have learned (and still learning!) to produce a weekly podcast series, Some Stutter, Luh! , and two short documentary films, “Getting the Words Out” and “A Short Film About Discommunication”. We gratefully acknowledge these fine folks and recognize financial support from the Office of Public Engagement, The Smallwood Foundation, and the University Student Summer Internship Program at Memorial University.

This guide is freely available under a Creative Commons license. It is subject to revision by the authors to provide current and up to date content when needed. If you spot content that is out of date or links that no longer work, or to report any other concerns please send an email to pauldd@mun.ca. We hope you enjoy this guide and would love to hear about your own experiences with digital media essay production.

Further reading about accessibility

accessCAN. (2021, July 18). The State of Disability. https://access-can.ca. https://www.access-can.ca/news/the-state-of-disability

Digital Education Strategies, The Chang School. Introduction to Web Accessibility. https://pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca/iwacc/

Goldberg, L., & Freed, G. (1998). Making multimedia accessible on the World Wide Web. Technology and Disability, 8(3), 127-132.

Miller, M., & Parogni, I. (2022, February 18). The Hidden Image Descriptions Making the Internet Accessible. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/18/arts/alt-text-images-descriptions.html

UDL On Campus. (n.d.) Media & Materials. CAST. http://udloncampus.cast.org/page/media_landing

Sources cited

Copeland, Stacey and McGregor, Hannah. (2021). A Guide to Academic Podcasting. Books. 2. https://scholars.wlu.ca/books/2

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

Nichols, B. (2017). Introduction to documentary. Indiana University Press.

U.S. General Services Administration. (2019, December 4). An introduction to accessibility. Digital.gov. https://digital.gov/resources/introduction-accessibility/