Digital Narrative
In a previous English course, I completed a multimodal project. In this project, I had to observe a community in society and make notes about how they interacted in various environments. The community I had chosen was the field hockey community. At my previous school, I was on a Division II field hockey team which is part of what sparked my interest. In my observations of this community, I not only had to study my own team but I had to find various different media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube. When I went and observed each multimodal platform I took detailed bulleted notes of what I saw. From the bulleted notes, I was then able to add a few sentences between them to make it flow in a small paragraph form for the reader.
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With all the information I gathered from these platforms I then created a website to map out everything I saw along with the different assignments for the class. Sort of like the website we are making in this course I had separate tabs for each part of the project that we had to do. I believe my website was very organized and cohesive; I personally enjoy making a website rather than writing a long-drawn-out paper. The information is much simpler when it is put into sections like on a website. On the website, I had my cover page explaining what the entire project was about with a description of field hockey. From this front page, you could click any of the tabs of the specific assignments we had throughout the project. These tabs had each draft of the assignment neatly organized and labeled within them. Along with pictures and videos of what I observed to give the reader a better idea of what I was talking about. I believe this made the website much more enjoyable for the viewer and much easier to comprehend.
In this project, there were so many people involved. Although I am the only person that physically worked on the project I had my professor helping throughout the project and everyone in the community being very important to the final product. Each and every person and how they interacted with one another was a big contribution to my understanding of how the community functions and the reason I had something to observe. Although some walls I hit were on some of the social media platforms. It was harder in some than others to observe the community because there wasn’t as much to observe. To overcome the barriers I hit I used the information I found and made it into enough. I dug deeper into the posts, videos, and interactions I saw than just what was on the surface. In this, I was able to see many different sides of the community. I possibly could have gone and observed more in person to get the information I needed. Instead of just observing my own team’s lifts and practices when I could have learned much more by branching out to other groups within the community.
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Doing projects like this is more than just for grades in school. These types of projects are helpful in real-world situations. Using multimedia platforms is being integrated into various jobs today. The previous project along with this current project are both great practice with multimedia and digital work. Not only are multimedia spaces integrated into school and work but in our free time. Different types of media are ways we find entertainment like Netflix, Instagram, and Tik Tok. Then there are media platforms used to keep us in contact with one another. Last year with Covid taught us all a lot about keeping in touch with those we care about through media such as Snapchat and Zoom when we couldn’t be together. I took this course leading right into the pandemic. I feel like having this assignment at this time only made me think more about the different ways of connecting with and learning about others.
