Themes and tags
Here's a quick review of the five themes I'm following in my long-form analyses of the interviews and the tags [tags] that will indicate each (subject to change):
1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]
2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]
3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]
4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]
5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering civic actors (including journalists). [practice]
[Note: I have edited #5.]
no set # exists
Submitted by acline on Wed, 2005-05-25 09:42.
I don't plan to limit the number to five. I have no number in mind. These first five appeared to me to be the most important following the Plante analysis. I'm simply going to use them as a guide as I move through the interview. I'll add, subtract, and edit as I go.
At least three of these five seem to me to be excellent candidates for your final cut. I'll the answer to the obvious question open for a while :-)
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Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Journalism
Missouri State University
The Rhetorica Network
rhetorica.net
Sounds good
Submitted by kentbye on Wed, 2005-05-25 09:56.
You start at the top. I'll start at the bottom. We'll meet up halfway.
It looks like your five themes could be considered a taxonomy, and it'll be interesting to see how much overlap you have with these themes.
When the Drupal module is set up to document the folksonomy/taxonomy tags for each soundbite, then this type of overlap will become much clearer.
I started to organize my footage in Final Cut Pro according to a strict hierarchy with soundbites located in one thematic folder. And then I started to forget which folder I stored the file in, and it wasn't very useful.
Hopefully, a more informal folksonomy will help solve this problem by storing tags in Final Cut Pro's metadata fields like "Comment," "Log Notes," "Reel/Take," and about 10 other fields.
I'm playing with this technique in FCP a little bit at the moment.
But it'll be interesting to see what other themes emerges from free tagging soundbites with multiple tags.
Are 5 Themes Enough?
Cool -- Are you going to expand on your 5 themes as you read through all of the other interviews?
I may only have time to cover 7-10 themes in the final film, but I made the interviews and subjects as broad as possible in order to transcend the narrative bias that the media usually falls into.
So I probably have at least 20-30 themes, and the spillover can happen with short vignettes that can be posted online and as DVD extras.
It'll be interesting to make both of our themes more explicit when I get the custom tagging module up and running.
Using a large number of themes gives me more flexibility in the editing, and this broad focus can be narrowed by the open source community of volunteers as well.
I also decided to take a much broader focus on this topic than the media did. There were a lot of perspectives not heard in the daily build-up to war, and I was trying to demonstrate that there were perspectives that didn't fall into the trap of massive groupthink.
Ultimately, I've been trying to take a more holistic approach to this topic which means that I analyzed a number of angles from the political, cultural and journalistic perspectives.
I have attempted to limit the time period from 8/26/02 to 3/19/03 -- but the political context of our Iraq policy goes back for many decades and is difficult to take a completely reductionistic approach.
But it is my intention to focus on this time period for the final film.