Producing and disseminating knowledge is a collaborative endeavour. As Wolfram (2010) notes, “typically, high-quality media productions involve a number of different individuals who possess different kinds of knowledge, specialized expertise, and varied interests” (p. 794) The exact way in which collaboration will be part of your project depends on a variety of factors, such as the topic of your research, your field, what stakeholders are related to or affected by your research, and whether you are a researcher or a student.

Sharing knowledge as a researcher

As a researcher, you are faced with two options for when to share your knowledge.

The first, and probably at this point the most common, is after you have completed your research. Scholars, by trade, are a sharing bunch. They are always working on communicating their latest findings by writing papers bound for publication in academic journals, or writing book chapters. If they aren’t writing, they die. (Right? Isn’t that what ‘publish or perish’ means, or am I being too literal here.) While this is a part of the scientific method, in which like-minded scholars will read papers written by like-minded colleagues, occasionally publishing leads to a journalist learning about the latest linguistic breakthroughs, and if they think the public is interested in learning about this also, they may contact the academic for an interview. Voilà! Academic knowledge shared.

Another approach to disseminating academic knowledge is through community engagement activities done during and/or before the research process. If you’re lucky, your university might have a centre dedicated to knowledge mobilization. At Memorial University, we have the Office of Public Engagement (OPE), which is the “steward of the [university’s] Public Engagement Framework“. Depending on the type, community engagement activities can result in data that can be used for future research projects. For example, a podcast (such as Some Stutter, Luh!) can result in interviews that can be used as data in qualitative research projects related to the topic of the podcast.

If only there was a way to show how knowledge is created through community engagement…

And there is! Specifically, one concept that is useful in this respect (and used by, among others, sociolinguists) is that of the community of practice, which is:

“a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Team BE, 2011)

If the research process involves collaboration between the different members of a community of practice, this will allow for exchange of ideas not only between researchers, but also between researchers and community members and other stakeholders. By finding your community of practice, you can:

• Find people to collaborate with both during and after the research process in terms of dissemination
• Exchange ideas about dissemination and ways to improve the research process while it is still in progress

All of this is to say that as an academic researcher, your best bet of communicating with the public is by thinking about knowledge sharing from the very start of your project, not as an after-thought or leaving it up to the media to find you. By building knowledge-sharing into your project — and making it a central part of your project — you can focus on how knowledge emerges as a result of cross-sector engagement and seek to capture, generate, synthesize and share knowledge that emerges in the process of engagement.

In the next section, we will look at ways you can use a community of practice framework for your project.

Your project and your community of practice

What exactly does a community of practice consist of? Well, one possible way of defining a community of practice is the following schema, created by the organization DOCTalks (which is devoted to knowledge-based documentary media):

• Documentary producers
• Academic researchers
• Charities
• Governments
• Broadcasters
• Public and private foundations
• Academic funders
• Documentary funders

Communities of practice have often involved collaboration to produce documentary media. For example, the Challenge for Change program, which was created by the National Film Board of Canada, involved “an unparalleled effort between government bureaucrats, documentary filmmakers, community activists and ‘common’ citizens under the banner Challenge for Change / Société Nouvelle (CFC/SN)” between 1967 and 1980 to collaboratively create documentaries to “disseminate pressing issues in Canadian society, in turn generating social change” (Docs in Progress 2017).

Another example is the documentary The Linguists, which involved a collaboration between two academic linguists (David Harrison and Gregory Anderson) and three film producers (Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger) (Miller 2009). Below is a trailer for the documentary:

Before the beginning of your research or your documentary media project, it is useful to consider what your community of practice is, and how collaborating with them may benefit your project. Some possible ways of finding members who are part of your community of practice include:

• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube)
• Podcasts
  • E.g. Word to the Whys, which is made by the TILCoP (Teaching in Linguistics Community of Practice)
  • See also this list of Linguistics and Language Podcasts
• Blogs
• Conferences
  • E.g. the online LingComm conference, which is dedicated to linguistics communication

These venues can also be ways of disseminating information about your research, as well as documentary media you create about your research. For example, you may ask the producers of a podcast if they would be interested in having you on as a guest to talk about your research. You could also reach out to blogs relevant to the topic of your research and ask if you could contribute a guest post about your research.

You may find it useful to read pages 10-16 of DOCTalks’ guide on Cross-sector Collaborative Practices for Knowledge-based Documentary Media (which cover the sectors mentioned above) and ask yourself the following questions:

• How is each of these sectors related to my project?
• Who needs to know about my research, and can they be involved in the research itself or in the documentary project once the research has been completed?
• Who is in my community of practice?
• What do I want my community of practice to learn from me?
• What do I want to learn from my community of practice?
• Which sectors can provide assistance for the project?
• How can I let the community of practice for my project know about the project?
• How does the community of practice of my project affect the structure of the project?
• How does the community of practice of my project affect what the target audience of the project will be?
• How does the community of practice of my project affect the content and tone of the project?
• How does the community of practice of my project affect the resources available for producing and promoting the project?
• What venues exist for me to contact or interact with members of the community of practice of my project?

The following are some examples of how you might go about answering some of these questions.

Collaborating with other researchers

If you are planning on collaborating with other researchers, you need to know what sort of help you might need and what researchers might be able to provide that help.

Ways in which a researcher could provide assistance for your research and any subsequent documentary media project include:

• Providing contacts (such as community members) who could participate in the research or appear in the documentary
• Appearing in the documentary to discuss a topic relevant to the research
• Providing resources that may be relevant for the research or documentary (such as academic sources that could be referenced in the write-up of the research or mentioned during the documentary)
• Providing consulting for aspects of the documentary that are beyond your main specialization (this can be useful if the subject of the documentary is multidisciplinary)

There are a number of places you could look to find researchers who might be interested in collaborating:

• Bibliographies in your present and past academic work
• Bibliographies in any academic sources you may be consulting
• Documentary media about a similar topic to the one you are working on
• The scholarly community at your university

Once you have found researchers who have expertise that may be relevant to your project, you may be able to contact them using the contact information on their faculty page or (if applicable), or on social media.

Collaborating with community members

Similar considerations apply when deciding on how to collaborate with community members. As with researchers, collaboration with community members may involve their providing contacts who could be research participants or who could appear in the documentary, or providing suggestions for the documentary.

Wolfram (2010) describes a number of considerations that should be taken into account when creating knowledge-based media (his examples are about language variation documentaries in particular, but the general principles can apply to documentaries about other topics as well). The following section titles are taken from Wolfram (2010).

Definition of a community

When creating a knowledge-based documentary about a community, you should know what factors are relevant for defining who belongs to that community, as this is relevant for determining who to collaborate with.

It can be difficult to define who belongs to a given community, since “Speakers are invariably affiliated with a number of social groups at the same time” and “Target communities for media presentations may be bounded or fluid and based on geography, ethnicity, sociohistorical background, or other social, economic, and political factors” (Wolfram 2010, 794). Whichever of these factors are relevant in your case, Wolfram (2010) notes that “the definition of community should be readily apparent and make sense to collaborating participants and targeted audiences” (p. 795).

Productive community collaboration

A number of considerations must be taken into account in order for community collaboration to be effective.

First, it is necessary “to actively involve community participants during at least three stages in the process – in the initial conception of the project, during the active collection of footage, and during the final editing stage before the product is released to the public” (Wolfram 2010, p. 795). In particular, this means that opportunities should be provided for community members to provide feedback, such as after “the first rough cut of a documentary” has been created (Wolfram 2010 p. 796).

Second, the community members consulted should include not just community leaders, but also ones “who have little or no vested political interests within the community” (Wolfram 2010, p. 796).

Third, collaboration should involve “Both local organizations and individuals apart from these organizations,” such as “Historical and preservation societies” (Wolfram 2010, p. 796).

Fourth, collaboration must take into account disagreements or political conflict within a community in order to represent “the widest range of community interests” (Wolfram 2010, p. 796).

Representing the community

Beyond the question of which community members to consult for the documentary behind the scenes, it is also necessary to determine which community members will appear in the documentary itself so that the documentary will be accepted by the community (Wolfram 2010, p. 797). Wolfram (2010) suggests including “respected community leaders and personalities,” as well as “different social, groups [sic] and different community voices within the community” (pp. 797-798). In the case of a documentary about linguistic variation, this means selecting a speakers of a range of varieties rather than only the most vernacular speakers (Wolfram 2010, p. 798).

Another way of facilitating collaboration is to minimize the role of experts and the producer in the process of creating the documentary, since “Over-narration and the frequent use of non-community, talking-head experts explaining the community to the viewing audience can deprive a film of its collaborative soul as quickly as any other documentary format” (Wolfram 2010, p. 798). Film producer Neal Hutcheson notes the following as possible strategies for doing this (Wolfram 2010, p. 798):

(i) minimize narration

(ii) use multiple community voices

(iii) provide space for interview comments

(iv) casually reveal the recording process

(v) avoid trick shots, clever composition, and fancy transitions

(vi) use (show) local performers (e.g musicians) in contextualizing

(vii) use experts cautiously

Balancing Linguistic Expertise and Community Perspective

An issue that may arise is that of erroneous community beliefs about the subject under discussion. For example, in the context of language, community members who believe in mainstream language ideology may not believe in the worth of non-standard varieties and thus “not want socially disfavoured linguistic traits of their speech highlighted in the representation of their language” (Wolfram 2010, p. 799). In such cases, Wolfram (2010) suggests “flying under the ideological radar” as a possible solution, noting that “positively framed presentations of language variation hold a greater likelihood of being received than those that directly confront language ideologies considered to be unassailable” (p. 799). That is, a possible approach is to describe scholarly consensus in positive terms rather than to directly combat erroneous folk beliefs.

Executive Power and Community Collaboration

While the producer is responsible for the final version of the film, it is important when producing knowledge-based media involving a community that the final product be the result of a collaborative effort between the producer, experts, and the community. As Wolfram (2010) notes:

Balancing input from linguistic experts, the community, and the editing producer in the final version is the concluding collaborative decision in the production process, and its significance cannot be underestimated … The penultimate viewing by linguists, community, and producer and subsequent final editing cannot be considered as pro forma or trivialized; some last-minute editing decisions may prove critical to the final version of the film. (p. 800)

Collaborating with broadcasters

Collaborating with broadcasters can be useful both during the research process and during the process of creating documentary media. For example, during the research process, you may contact a broadcaster to ask them to allow you to put out calls for research participants. Once the research is complete, you may be able to use your connections with the broadcasters to ask them to allow you to promote your documentary project once it is completed by, for example, appearing in an interview on one of their programs.

If your research is relevant to a particular community or region, then it may be useful to reach out to local or regional broadcasters in particular (such as TV or radio stations), since the research would be related to their audience, and they may be more willing to promote your work.

Collaborating with funders and foundations

There are a number of types of organizations that offer funding for research, documentary media based on research, or both.

There are a number of possible sources of funding for documentary media projects. DOCTalks divides these sources of funding into three main categories: Public and private foundations sector funding; academic research sector funding; and documentary film sector funding (De Decker 2020).

Public and private foundations may offer funding for projects that fall under the purview of their missions. In Canada, four examples of organizations that represent public and private foundations include:

• Community Foundations of Canada
• Philanthropic Foundations of Canada
• Canadian Environmental Grantmakers’ Network
• Circle on Philanthropy and Aboriginal Peoples

Academic funders offer funding related to academic work, and they often offer funding for dissemination purposes. In Canada, three important sources of funding are the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), which are Canadian government agencies that support academic research (De Decker 2020). SSHRC offers a grant called the SSHRC Connection Grant, which is meant to fund knowledge mobilization activities (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 2017). Your university may also offer funding for documentary media that is meant to disseminate research findings or that involves community engagement. For example, Memorial University of Newfoundland has an Office of Public Engagement that offers funding to projects that foster public engagement.

There are also sources of funding that are specifically intended for documentary media. In Canada, some of these types of funding include “federal, provincial & territorial production tax credits and grants; licence fees from broadcasters (such as CBC, Radio-Canada, TV Ontario, Knowledge Network) and web-based platforms (such as Telus Storyhive, Optik); funds from public agencies (Canada Media Fund, Telefilm Canada); equity from private funders (such as Rogers Documentary Fund, Bell Fund), National Film Board of Canada programs; financing from distributors, foundations and corporate sponsorships” (De Decker 2010, pp. 13-14).

Online, there are a number of lists of sources of funding and grants for documentary projects, such as this one compiled by Docs in Progress and this one compiled by a site devoted to advice for creating documentaries.

Sharing knowledge as a student

If you are a student and are planning on producing documentary media about research, the process of creating the documentary media may have both similarities to and differences from the process that applies for researchers. What the process will involve depends on factors such as why you are creating the documentary and the nature of the research that you are describing.

Documentary media for a class

If you are planning on creating documentary media for a class assignment, the process of doing this may involve some limitations compared to the process for creating documentary media outside of a class setting.

For example, if the assignment instructions do not allow for collaboration, you may not be able to receive feedback from other individuals, such as community members. If you are unsure to what extent collaboration is allowed, ask your instructor. Furthermore, even if collaboration is allowed, there may be fewer stakeholders who you would be able to collaborate with, such as funders or government agencies.

If the documentary media is about research you have done as part of the class, the research may have involved looking at primary or secondary sources rather than working with a community or human participants. In this case, collaboration with individuals involved in the research may not be possible.

Because there may be fewer opportunities for acquiring funding for work done within the context of a course, it may be less feasible to travel to a community to record community members.

However, if collaboration is allowed, there are possibilities for incorporating collaboration into your assignment. If the research you will be describing in your documentary is about a particular community and collaboration is allowed for your documentary media assignment, you may be able to get in touch with members of that community and ask if they would be willing to participate in a documentary about the research, even if you had not collaborated with them for the research portion of the course. In this case, if the research you will be describing involves a community or human participants, then some of Wolfram’s criteria for community collaboration may apply, including:

• Defining a community (i.e., what is the community you are describing?)
• Including community members
• Providing opportunities for participants to provide feedback on the product to ensure they feel they are represented adequately (however, this may depend on whether your instructor allows others to provide feedback on your assignment)

Grant-funded or internship-funded documentary media

If you are creating documentary media funded by a grant or internship, there may not be the same sort of limitations as with documentaries created in the context of a class.

For example, since the documentary will not be graded, there will not be an academic requirement to avoid seeking feedback from others for reasons of academic integrity. As a result, you may be able to involve community members in the production process to a greater extent (such as by asking them to provide feedback on rough drafts of the documentary). However, you may need to acquire ethics approval from your university to collaborate with community members.

In addition, as a student, though you may not have access to all the same funds or grants available to academic researchers, you may have access to other opportunities for acquiring funding. For example, your university or external organization may offer grants or internships meant for students that you can use to fund the creation of documentary media related to research in your field of study.

Conclusion

This chapter has delved into how to incorporate collaboration with communities and other sectors into both the process of doing research and the process of creating documentary media to disseminate the results of that research. It has also discussed how the process of implementing collaboration can be different depending on whether you are a researcher or a student, and, if you are a student, whether you are incorporating collaboration as part of a class, or as part of a non-class project that is grant- or internship-based.

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