Tag: best practices

Research Reading: Week 4

This past weekend I went to the What is Radio? Conference in Portland. I attended about 16 hours of panel presentations on a range of topics including: radio’s past, radio in India, community radio, college radio, radio education, radio theory, cultural representations in radio, news radio, new forms of radio, web radio, the difference between radio and audio and finally radio’s future. It was a lot to take in one weekend, but this conference will definitely be a shifting point in my career, though unfortunately not because I found a perfect fit for my interests in collaborative storytelling. In fact, this conference actually proved that I should not be looking into radio, or at least the classic radio paradigm. There was very little discussion of collaboration at this conference and it seems that there is a definite divide between broadcast transistor radio that favors the professional producer and podcasts that can be easily made by community members. Since my interest is in community cultural development, I a more interested in using the tool of audio recording to create projects like storytelling podcasts. I did not meet or hear of anyone involved in this kind of work at the conference. Most of the presenters were either academics who study radio or radio hosts who’ve worked in news. There was some cross over with community radio and web radio, but those weren’t storytelling based. Thus, while I don’t know if I’ll be using any of the presentations directly for my research, I do think this conference has shaped how I see the radio field. I now know where not to look and that my interests in storytelling community projects could be an emergent form of radio, but not generally supported by the field. I also heard some ideas that I think will shape how I approach looking at collaborative projects:

  • Community radio is focused more on locality than quality: “Production values don’t matter in the face of connection to local community”
  • Western society tends to value performance of participation above all else regardless if people are listening – Kate Lacey
  • It is difficult to translate small localized community radio to an urban landscape
  • Social media can be used as a way to create dialogue and reciprocity from radio broadcasts
  • Transistor radio is still more accessible to a larger audience than internet radio
  • Increased autonomy in production has lead to more competition and less distribution: too crowded to hear
  • Podcasts are seen as disruptive media (fragmented, delayed); Live broadcast radio as public good (collective, simultaneous)
  • Younger generation does not see streaming audio as radio although they are listening to the same content (NOT ME)
  • Radio art happens where it is heard, not where it is made
  • Radio as conversation ender; audio as conversation starter
  • Radio takes us out of our me-egotism and into a collective experience – John Durham Peters

I’ve also been collecting more materials as can be seen in my Diigo list. I’ve discovered some storytelling organizations that have lists of ethics for how they do collaborative projects. These will be perfect for forming an understanding of best practices. I have also worked on a conceptual framework which I will be posting soon. When I post that I will explain the direction my research process is taking including my methodologies, scope and question.

Research Reading: Week 2

In the first 2 weeks of the term I read the book Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound. This book is a collection of essays written by well-known and respected radio producers on how to create storytelling radio. As one of the mediums I am most interested, I felt this book could give me a good overview of the field. It also serves as a selection of best practices in facilitating storytelling, at least in a journalistic context. I will have to spend some more time over the next few week writing up quotes from this book (since it is a library book), but my overall impression is that best practices for creating storytelling radio are very variant. Each producer had their own style and their own opinions on how to approach the process. While this book may provide some great quotes on storytelling, I don’t know if I’ll be able to use it to demonstrate overall best practices. However, once I start copying down the quotes and coding them, some themes might emerge. I will be posting about my findings in this regard in the next post.

That being said, I believe I am already leaning towards one of my questions: best practices for facilitating storytelling. I’ve been thinking about what I’m most interested in, what will help me and my field and what is  feasible. This question seems to fit all those criteria. This realization is partly through reading an article about the Scribe Video Center and their collaborative video projects. They work with community organizations on video advocacy projects and bring facilitators to guide them. The article talked about the difficulties of facilitating these projects and making decision democratically. These discussions brought up a lot of issues for me around how to facilitate in a way that both ensures quality but doesn’t squelch the storyteller’s confidence. This lead me to the question: How do you facilitate storytelling that supports creative agency? I will have to refine this question, but I think this is the new direction my research will take. I would get to research and learn facilitation practices while still looking into creative agency. This also connects to my interest in community cultural development and can be applicable to the whole community arts field. I’m getting really excited about this idea!