Making better research videos, part three
Engagement potential on the fringes
But my research is too niche, nobody’s interested!
Researchers whose work is centred around a topic of broad public interest, such as climate change or drug discovery, can leverage their personal and their institution’s contacts and relationships with journalists to see their work promoted by the mainstream media.
But some scholars believe it is up to researchers themselves to take control of their narrative and tell their own story.
From venomous snakes to military history, there is incredible potential for engagement at the intersection of academic research and popular culture and niche- and sub-online cultures.
This is especially important for researcher’s whose work lies outside of mainstream interests1. So, regardless of a research topic there will be an audience to connect it with. You just have to find it, and position your research accordingly.
Consider the following four papers.
These are research projects which, in my experience, institution marketing and media and communication teams wouldn’t know what to do with. It’s far too niche. Would have limited, if any mainstream appeal. And which would receive minimal, if any, funding or resources for creative content such as videos or podcasts.
However, as you’ll see, each of these papers has great potential for rich and meaningful online engagement.
The Harmonic and Rhythmic Language of Herbie Hancock’s 1970s Fender Rhodes Solos (2009) by Jon Opstad. Published in Jazz Perspectives.
Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes electric piano solos of the 1970s, recorded primarily within the jazz-funk contexts of his Headhunters band and other projects (on albums such as Head Hunters, Flood, Man-Child, and others), represent a high-point of improvisation over groove-based forms. These solos built on the developments of Hancock’s piano work from the 1960s to reach new heights of harmonic and rhythmic sophistication. Predominantly in riff-driven settings based on a single harmonic area or few chord changes, he masterfully balanced elements of tension and release over this, with elaborate harmonic development and rhythmic modulation juxtaposed against his harmonically and metrically stable backings, drawing on both jazz and funk aesthetics. This article explores these solos from an analytical perspective, aiming to identify specific harmonic and rhythmic devices and shed new light on this period of Hancock’s output.
And Herbie’s Rhodes Vocabulary (2021), by Open Studio with around 50,000 views.
Reconceptualizing David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in the Age of Social Media (2019) by Jeffrey S. Podoshen. Published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
This article, from the burgeoning perspective of finding value in films that were once derided as “transgressive,” conceptualizes Videodrome in today’s world dominated by social media culture. Moving beyond existing work on the film that is largely centered on interpretations examining themes related to pornography, body horror, simulation, and related politics, the work presented here is more in line with more recent work on the film in the age of digital media.
And Videodrome - Renegade Cut (2017), by Renegade Cut with over 120,000 views.
“The key to this immense metallized landscape” reading J. g. Ballard’s Crash as an ecological Structure of Feeling (2018) by Andrew Hageman. Published in Extrapolation.
This essay aims to expand the range of approaches to studying Crash, and perhaps Ballard’s fiction more broadly, by exploring the eco-ideological forms and structures within this novel. Specifically, the essay reads Crash within a historical context of emerging ecological awareness and concern—an era that included the nearly concurrent publications of Arne Naess’s theory of Deep Ecology, Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, and Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, to name a few key cultural influences. By attending to the landscapes, especially as they converge with infrastructure, and other nonhuman elements of Crash, this essay shifts the heretofore overwhelming critical focus on the human body in scholarship on this novel to an ecocritical focus on its narrative of systems and structures within which people live and evolve. Ultimately this essay claims that ecocritical study of novels like Crash provokes us to work through retrograde ideologies of Nature and what it means to be human as we can plan for our existence in the Anthropocene.
And Crash - J.G. Ballard BOOK REVIEW (2021), by Better than Food with over 30,000 views.
And finally, Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa (2022) by Benjamin Nicoll. Published in Games and Culture.
It seems intuitive to conflate the gamic gaze with the player’s act of looking. To do so, however, would be to inherit from the first wave of psychoanalytic screen theory a misleading presupposition that the gaze is synonymous with the look. Taking influence from new Lacanian film theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, this article contends that the gamic gaze is an object in the visual field of play that disrupts the mastery of the player’s look. I develop this argument through an analysis of the 2017 videogame Gorogoa. By confronting the player with the gaze, Gorogoa reveals that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play consists in the player’s unconscious drive to fail rather than their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. To borrow terminology from Copjec, the gamic gaze marks the point of the player’s culpability—rather than visibility—in the visual field of play.
And Gorogoa and The Nature of Time (2018), by Jacob Geller with over 130,000 views.
I acknowledge that each of these examples presents research from the arts. In part, this reflects my own tastes and interests. But more importantly, the arts and other non-STEM disciplines are the fields of research that typically lack institution (and mainstream media) support.
The arts needs our help to connect its value with society.
Also, academics have made significant contributions to understanding why and how scientists can engage audiences with video2. From chemistry to astrophysics, it’s easy to find successful case studies. And it can be easier to conceive the creative translation of scientific research: visually compelling experiments can be conducted and field work can be documented.
Unless trained otherwise, humanities and social science academics (as well as criminology, law, education, business, the creative and performing arts etc) aren’t equipped with the skills or imagination to present their knowledge in abstract, creative ways.
This is easily illustrated by the fact that there is a field of science communication, but not of humanities communication.
And then there’s institution support. I could be wrong, but I’d guess that if you present an ultra-niche science paper, such as Encapsulation of metal oxide nanoparticles inside metal-organic frameworks via surfactant-assisted nanoconfined space3, and an ultra-niche non-science paper, such as Castles made of sand – a psychodynamic interpretation of Jimi Hendrix's life and music4, your average institution’s media and communication and marketing teams will still have a far better idea of how to work with the science material.
But the Hendrix video would probably be more engaging.
Why this is exciting
Research projects and examples of successful online content like this are really exciting. Each of these projects would, typically, be considered too fringe to receive attention from either an institution’s media and marketing team or the mainstream media.
But these projects represent untapped engagement potential for researchers at the intersection of academia and all types of cultures. For each of these academic publications there is a video with tens of thousands of views, far outstripping the download count of the academic publication5.
And in the case of Reconceptualizing David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in the Age of Social Media, there is the opportunity for creative decadence that many researchers could only dream of.
As well as evidence of engagement potential, these video references provide some ideas about the types of videos academic researchers can create to share their work. Including tutorials, video essays, book reviews, and game-play videos.
Remember: for every internet rabbit hole, there’s a research project at the bottom of it.
Next, is part four: Things to think about before standing in front of the camera
If this is your first article in this series, head back to the start
As well as institutions’ interests.
Brennan, E. B. (2021). Why Should Scientists be on YouTube? It’s all About Bamboo, Oil and Ice Cream [Perspective]. Frontiers in Communication, 6.
Danylchuk, A. J., Morgan, C., & Ring, N. (2018). So You Want to Make a Film: An Introduction to Creating Videos for Broader Impacts in Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. Fisheries, 43(3), 144-151.
Maynard, A. D. (2021). How to Succeed as an Academic on YouTube [Perspective]. Frontiers in Communication, 5.
Velho, R. M., Mendes, A. M. F., & Azevedo, C. L. N. (2020). Communicating Science With YouTube Videos: How Nine Factors Relate to and Affect Video Views [Original Research]. Frontiers in Communication, 5.
Wang, S., Yu, Y., Yu, J., Wang, T., Wang, P., Li, Y., Zhang, X., Zhang, L., Hu, Z., Chen, J., Fu, Y., & Qi, W. (2020). Encapsulation of metal oxide nanoparticles inside metal-organic frameworks via surfactant-assisted nanoconfined space. Nanotechnology, 31(25), 255604–255604.
Lehtonen, K., & Juvonen, A. (2012). Castles made of sand - a psychodynamic interpretation of Jimi Hendrix's life and music. Nordic journal of music therapy, 21(2), 133-152.
Far outstripping the download count of even the most popular peer reviewed journal articles.