Remixing research: How to translate research into multimedia stories
By Matt Carroll <@MattatMIT>
A well-written story is a thing of beauty. It sucks you, word by word, sentence by sentence. You are informed, thrilled, and engrossed. Before you know it, hours have have passed, the sun has dropped past the horizon, and your head has barely lifted from the page or device.
But writing a well-written story is not easy. It can be a brutal, hair-pulling experience. Writing well — except for the inordinately talented natural writer (they make it look so easy)— is often an exasperating experience.
That’s part of the attraction for the session, “Remixing research: How to translate research into multimedia stories,” held at the MIT Media Lab on Saturday, Oct. 24.
The goal was to help people translate often complicated research or work into comprehensible, interesting work, using multimedia. The event was aimed at researchers, but many others from different disciplines showed up. About 50 people attended. (btw: This same story, with a very different contextual structure, using FOLD. Check it out.)
In a few short hours, five speakers (transparency alert: I was one) sketched out ways writers can use video, audio, data, film and a new contextual platform called FOLD to create interesting work.
It was a whirlwind tour of a variety of media and how it can best be used to create interesting yet informative stories. (Here’s another take on the session by Eric Convey of the Boston Business Journal.)
Here’s some highlights:
- alexis hope talked about a new platform called FOLD that makes it easy to tell complex stories. Hope, who is creative director of FOLD, said the idea was to create a platform so that anyone could write their own explainer. The system uses a vertical spine for the main story, while context cards are placed on a horizontal axis. The cards can contain text, video, images, maps, even tweets. It’s an intriguingly new way of storytelling and a prime example of the new style of “atomizing” stories by breaking them into their component pieces so they can be reassembled in new and creative ways.
- @GideonGil, a managing editor with @statnews, talked about how the new vertical will try to cover complicated health and medical science for a broad audience — not an easy chore. One way is through the use of metaphors. He showed a short, effective video in which a scientist compared making changes in genes to repairing typos in a story. The Stat site, which will employ heavy use of multimedia, launches in a week or two.
- James Maxwell Larkin, a producer at Radio Open Source,talked about the advantages of podcasting as a medium. It turns out that people can get much more wrapped up in a long podcast than in some other mediums, he said. Perhaps it’s because they enjoy listing to an interesting program on their long commute. Or maybe it feels like you are “in” on the conversation. There is a certain intimacy as well.
- Phil Gara, a documentary film maker and graduate of the MIT Sloan School, talked about how the power of film — and how (relatively) inexpensive it has become. There is a power in film that resonates with people. And while quality filmmaking is a plus, the content is what makes a good film, He listed some tips for people: Make sure the audio is good. Poor audio is a sure sign of an amateur production. Bad audio is a bigger turnoff to people than even bad video.
- Matt Carroll talked about nonlinear storytelling and the atomization of news. For instance, an example of nonlinear storytelling is a data story done by myself, Alvin Chang, Andrew Ba Tran, and Catherine Cloutier called “Dreamtown” for the The Boston Globe which allowed people to use an interactive site to find good towns to live in.
Matt Carroll runs the Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He also writes the “3 to read” blog.
