One question you may be asking is why you would want to create a narrative-based documentary media essay instead of using one of the more traditional methods of describing research. For example, some other ways of describing your research might be to write a paper, give a TED Talk, have a journalist interview you, or create a talking head video where you look into a camera and explain your research.

However, there are a number of ways in which documentary media has advantages over other formats.

2.1. Community engagement and acceptance

Writing a paper or giving an interview involves a scholar imparting knowledge to a lay audience on a top-down basis, with little to no opportunity for the audience to participate in the research to describe in their own words the content and significance of the research. This can be problematic in terms of community or public acceptance of the research, since “the public understanding of science represents an interactive process between lay people and technical experts rather than a narrowly didactic or one-way transmission of information packages” and “public uptake (or not) of science is not based upon intellectual capability as much as social-institutional factors having to do with social access, trust, and negotiation as opposed to imposed authority” (Wynne, 1991).

Community engagement can facilitate acceptance of research by fostering trust and positive relationships between researchers and community members. As Dobrin and Schwartz (2016) note:

“linguists are more aware than ever before that language documentation does indeed involve ‘linguistic social work.’ While this term was originally used by Paul Newman (1998, 2003) to question the disciplinary legitimacy of community engagement, we wish to claim for it a more neutral sense: that of establishing and maintaining positive, mutually beneficial social relationships with speakers and other community stakeholders.” (p. 260)

By showcasing community members discussing the ways in which the research is relevant to them or affects them, narrative-based knowledge-sharing not only constitutes a form of community engagement, but also enables research to be disseminated in a way that better reflects its origin in collaborative community-based work, makes the research more meaningful to the audience, and facilitates acceptance of the research by community members.

2.2. Broader dissemination

Another advantage of documentary media compared to a purely academic format such as a paper is the potential for disseminating the results of the research more broadly. Documentary media can be promoted in a number of avenues not typically available to work published in academic contexts, as Wolfram (2010) has noted:

Documentary production often expands the role of a linguist well beyond traditional venues of presentation and professional expertise in the field – to the world of film festivals, premieres, publicity, marketing, vendors, and virtual stores. Few linguists have thought seriously about setting up an opening or premiere, designing a media display at a bookstore, or designing and distributing a brochure for DVD and CD products – and maybe they should not. At the same time, these practical, marketing, and distribution aspects of documentary production are essential to the goals of outreach, perhaps as important as the products themselves. If we want our efforts to reach as wide an audience as possible, we cannot afford to dismiss these practical dimensions of outreach. (p. 800)

2.3. Increased accessibility

Besides the additional opportunities for research promotion, the use of documentary media can also make the research findings more accessible for members of the public. Academic articles are often published in paywalled journals that are prohibitively expensive for those who do not have subscriptions through their universities, and they may be written in academic jargon that non-academics may find difficult to understand. As Petrarca and Hughes (2014) note, “Academic research is typically written in a style and for venues that remain largely inaccessible by the general public and even by the practitioners who might benefit from it” (p. 562).

Documentary media can help with both of these challenges, since documentary media can be made available for free (or for prices significantly lower than the cost of a journal subscription), and it can use audiovisual content and plain language to make the content more comprehensible. Indeed, Petrarca and Hughes (2014) have noted that documentary film is “accessible and perhaps more palatable to a wider audience than those who subscribe to academic journals” (p. 580).

2.4. Academic and social advantages

While the main focus of documentary media should be on the communities who contributed to or who are affected by the research, producing documentary media can be advantageous for researchers as well.

Dobrin and Schwartz (2016) state that non-academic collaborative activities engaged in by field linguists to serve communities’ interests may “lead to outputs [such as dictionaries, native-language coloring books, and translations] that rank rather low on implicit scales of academic value,” such that “collaboration can require linguists to make some significant compromises from the perspective of their other professional commitments” (p. 257).

However, there are a number of factors due to which collaborative activities can be professionally useful and even necessary.

Jaeger et al. (2016) noted that “influential funding organizations are beginning to shift the tide by requiring researchers to provide evidence of intellectual merit and broader societal impact in their grant applications” (pp. 152-153). Documentary media can be an example of such evidence, since it can be used to effect change both broadly and within the community:

• The documentary may be useful for educational purposes within the community. For example, if the documentary is about an endangered language, community members may want to use it in language courses to show students the importance of preserving the language.
• Documentary media may reduce stigma among viewers. Burmeister et al. (2010) found that “negative attitudes, desire for social distance, and belief that individuals with obesity deserve equal rights improved” (p. 49) when participants watched a documentary on obesity-related stigma. Similarly, Penn et al. (2003) found that participants who watched a documentary about schizophrenia were “less likely to blame individuals with schizophrenia for the disorder” (p. 383). Thus, documentary media (such as Getting the Words Out, a short documentary about stuttering) can serve to alter societal attitudes towards people with stigmatized conditions or identities.

Furthermore, the academic import of documentary media is not limited to the documentary itself, as scholarly work can be produced based on the documentary. As Dobrin and Schwartz (2016) have noted in the context of documentary linguistics, the creation of papers that describe field linguists’ work for a community can “translat[e] field linguists’ otherwise invisible social labor into something that can be comprehended by existing standards of disciplinary value,” such that “Developing a native-language coloring book might not be considered a legitimate professional accomplishment, but an article that describes the process of producing such a coloring book in a peer-reviewed academic journal is” (p. 260). Similarly, documentary media can enable the creation of traditionally scholarly work in the form of papers published in academic journals that describe the process of creating the documentary media in question.

2.5 Educational benefits

Beyond researchers, documentary media essays can also be useful for instructors seeking to assess their students’ ability to describe their research in formats other than text. The use of video productions in educational contexts has been found to result in benefits such as increased engagement, technical skills, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, and one study involving a video-essay-based assessment found that 60% of students preferred the video essay format (Zainal et al., 2022).

Sources

Agostini, G., SturtzSreetharan, C., Wutich, A., Williams, D., & Brewis, A. (2019). Citizen sociolinguistics: A new method to understand fat talk. PLOS ONE, 14(5), e0217618. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217618

Baugh, J. (2009). Linguistic Diversity, Access, and Risk. Review of Research in Education, 33(1), 272–282. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X08327188

Bucholtz, M. (2018). White affects and sociolinguistic activism. Language in Society, 47(3), 350–354. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404518000271

Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, B., & Richardson, K. (1993). Ethics, advocacy and empowerment: Issues of method in researching language. Language & Communication, 13(2), 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(93)90001-4

Labov, W. (1982). Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor. Language in Society, 11(2), 165–201. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500009192

Lens, W. (1987). Theoretical Research Should be Useful and Used. International Journal of Psychology, 22(4), 453–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207598708246787

Morin, S. M., Jaeger, A. J., & O’Meara, K. (2016). The state of community engagement in graduate education: Reflecting on 10 years of progress. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 20(1), 151-156.

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.

Rymes, B., & Leone, A. R. (2014). Citizen Sociolinguistics: A New Media Methodology for Understanding Language and Social Life. 29 (2), Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol29/iss2/4

Svendsen, B. A. (2018). The dynamics of citizen sociolinguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22(2), 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12276

Wolfram, W. (2010). Collaborative Issues in Language Variation Documentaries: Collaborative Issues in Language Variation Documentaries. Language and Linguistics Compass, 4(9), 793–803. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00238.x

Wynne, B. (1991). Knowledges in Context. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 16(1), 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/016224399101600108

Zainal, Z. I., Deni, A. R. M., & Arifin, A. (2021). Challenging yet Rewarding!: Group-Work Video Essays in the English Literature Classroom. Malaysian Journal of ELT Research, 18(2).