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tags: anna
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# Slavic 132: Russia's Golden Age Video Essay Workshop

## Part 1: Discussion of video essays
- Have you seen video essays? Do you watch video essays?
- Why would you make a video essay? What

<iframe width="1341" height="786" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_V10kWLh71U" title="Why this chair is on so many album covers" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

- What moves is the model making? How does it communicate visually? Think about the moves you make in an essay... When we see a block quote, we know you're working with a text. When we see your thesis statement at the end of an introduction, we are grounded in your argument. When we see a new paragraph, we know a new idea is coming! When we see the word "However" we might expect contrast. What does this video do?
- Showing many images at once: a lot of visual data that helps us compare, build patterns
- How many examples (texts) do you use in a literary paper? Probably 1-2 in a short paper, but here, you have dozens of album covers
- The music guiding us through the ideas and changing at specific points to let us know that something has changed (26-30 seconds in, for example, when the "they were all sitting in the same chair is revealed")
- Talking about how we can support our ideas and guide our audience with multiple "tracks" (audio, video), without them even knowing it
- Use of text to highlight certain ideas, annotate, but not to make the big points
- Zooming in and out to emphasize
- Many more examples! Students were great at coming up with these

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## Part 2: Thinking visually
We designed three stations to help students think visually about literature. How would you use visuals to make an argument or present an idea about literature? We don't want to replace an essay; we want to use the strengths of this medium! We aren't going to jump into making videos here. Instead, we're going to practice thinking visually about literature and using visual data to structure your ideas. Three stations:

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### Station 1: Character mapping
* The idea of this station was structure & narratology. In many ways, it is how people already tend to think visually about literature: if you're reading a text with a complicated timeline, you might draw out that timeline, or you might draw a family tree or a character map to remember the character names and relations (especially in a Russian novel!), or a concept map, or a spatial map, etc. These complex structural things can be communicated quickly with visual data, and then you can zoom into your analysis! Here, we started with character magnets, and students visualized the relationships between characters in specific scenes and throughout the work.
* Students added a lot of nuance to this, especially with the role of characters who might not fit into a traditional character map so easily (the narrator, a not-present husband whose mere existence is the significance of his character) and with characters over time (what happens when someone dies? how to represent a connection that is through absence?) They found many great ideas through their visualization, and we heard a lot of "I hadn't thought of that character/that relationship that way until I tried to visualize it!"

Examples of work from this station:

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### Station 2: "Exploding the text"
Inspired by the Perusall annotations but making them dynamic, this station was all about working directly with the text to make a visual argument. With arts supplies and copies of some stanzas of Chapter 2 of *Eugene Onegin*, students were instructed to work visually with text. This could take multiple forms:
* They could follow the model of the Perusall annotations but add dynamism, illustrations, Zooming, size changes, color changes, etc, to make a visualization of their reading process or annotation for an audience! Students visualized multiple moments of a video essay, by having different elements move around to point out different parts of the analysis in different scenes.

* They could work with visual data with the text to find stories, patterns, ideas, and communicate those visually. Here, we talked a lot about the idea that you don't have to have your thesis before doing this! Working visually can help you figure out a pattern, idea, argument, and you don't need to know it ahead of time. Visual drafting in this way helps you build up to a project like a video essay, but at this stage, you don't need to know what the final product will look like
* For example: if you see a few words related to age, you may highlight all the ones connected to youth in blue and the ones connected to older age in red. All of a sudden, you take a step back, and you have a very red page, when you thought the chapter was all about youth! You might not know that pattern before visualizing! Students did a great job with this, and several of them discovered something about the text by visualizing first, like here:
Examples of work from this station:

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### Station 3: "Context"
Students love Professor Buckler's mini-lectures about context, and we talked about how having that context completely changes your reading of the text. For example, if you didn't know about dueling in the Golden Age, your reading of *Onegin* would be totally different! Here we talked about the types of stories that one could tell that have to do with the world around the text (maps, artwork, cultural context, historical context, social context, etc.) and about the possibilities for doing that visually and even integrating the text. They were given two example packets, [one about balls](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dT4ThgnMK2Uim18Clsxmzaau8qW4eLwE/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103284312964269259301&rtpof=true&sd=true) (including paintings and information) and [one about duels](https://https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eLVtCehErQDDb7c6ekevcT661WHXMbUm/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=103284312964269259301&rtpof=true&sd=true) (including paintings, representations of the duel scene for the stage, information) and were challenged to work with it visually to tell a dynamic story. They did an amazing job!
* We talked about exploring the relationship between context and text and doing the type of visual drafting discussed above. For example, students were challenged to work with the materials and the text together and make dynamic scenes. By highlighting the directions of faces in the ball scenes, they produced pieces about observation and cultures of looking, and by cutting out information about the rules of the duel and the positions of the men, they discussed how Evgenii was and was not engaging with social rituals and how this sits in the context of such an intensely tragic scene.

Examples of work from this station:

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## Wrapping up

- We did a mini-tutorial on video editing (with a reminder that they are welcome to come back to office hours, 3-5 every weekday and 9-5 on Fridays for more help).
- Final conversation about thinking visually about literature: what was surprising, what was effective, what was difficult, what work would you like to share?

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