Jun 21, 2010 0
Multilinear writing
I have been thinking lately about how I could bring writing closer to my documentary practice. Some notes I made in a forum recently on project-based research for my GRC presentation. This is in regards to writing the exegesis.
This week I attended a forum discussion on writing up project-based, research in which Peter Downton described (the exegesis) as potentially being a project. This has got me thinking about how the writing could be developed in terms of it having connections with the practice. One idea is that the themes could become categories and the paragraphs tags were the exegesis is formed in the same way I would construct a multilinear documentary. The writing is seen as being a documentary – a story of my practice and the research inquiry being made through my practice.
So this got me thinking about a few things including what tool I could use to write in a multilinear way. I have been working towards getting to know (tinderbox) lately (and I am only scratching the surface). If I see paragraphs as being like (video shots) each one could be tagged and categorised with the idea to bring the writing together later on under specific conceptual themes. In tinderbox you would use agents to cluster these paragraphs. In tinderbox I need to figure out how to bring the chunks together into a linear document. Of course the writing could be developed in tinderbox then published in a blog.
BM showed me Scrivener which really suits the film and TV writer in terms of thinking about things in shots and sequences. This is useful because the chunks can be assembled at the end into a linear document. It is also works with endnote.
The other idea I had was to go back to wordpress and produce a blog as the exegesis itself. This is interesting because the research blog could be tied into this including the previous reflective writing. Working live online means the work can be really intertextual, with loads of external links to references and other notes etc. The drawback here is assembling the chunks which is covered in Scrivener. This would have to be done manually. The blog could be used to draft the exegesis which is then edited from that draft. Another advantage is that video works could be linked to directly which bears all those tedious pdf images in mac word. Maybe the final exegesis could be a blog instead of a hardcopy pdf? Or it could be both? I need to do some tests. The other consideration is referencing – zotero works nicely online.