Assignments Due
Week 11 checkpoints should be submitted by Monday, 03/19/2018 at 11:59 PM PDT.
Perform
Group 3: Documentary Critique (100%, 10 points)
You will choose an expository documentary film or television show that attempts to provide a theoretically and factually correct description or explanation of a posited phenomenon. You will analyze the storytelling structure of the film as well as the validity of selected claims made during the film. Try to learn from the strategy and tactics used by the filmmaker, while paying attention to the risks to accuracy and truthfulness inherent in storytelling techniques.
Figure 32: Trailer for The Human Face of Big Data
a.k.a. Excavating Story Structure
For this assignment you will choose an expository documentary film or television show that attempts to provide a theoretically and factually correct description or explanation of a posited phenomenon. You will analyze the storytelling structure of the film as well as the validity of selected claims made during the film. Try to learn from the strategy and tactics used by the filmmaker, while paying attention to the risks to accuracy and truthfulness inherent in storytelling techniques.
Selection
Teams should choose a film that aims to generalize claims beyond the particular cases documented on screen and that presents at least some scientific or statistical evidence in the course of the exposition. Films like An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman, Fog of War, Forks Over Knives, and The Waiting Room are appropriate.
Other documentary genres, such as interview documentaries like The Human Face of Big Data, participatory documentaries like Sicko, or journalistic documentaries like The Merchants of Cool, may interest you even if they do not make heavy use of statistics. These can also work so long as the claims are meant as facts rather than as opinion or poetry.
Avoid shorts that may have too simple a story structure. Forgive the biases of your instructors; the films need not be made by Americans, be in English, or be about bleeding-heart social topics. Films like Particle Fever may also work, but note that a film that does not understand itself to be controversial may be less explicit in its use of evidence.
Each team member should propose a film by sharing trailers, and then the team should deliberate about or vote on which to study. Try to watch the film as quickly as you can, to save time for analyzing it after. Unfortunately your instructor can not help you acquire films. Depending on the service you may be able to organize a viewing party to watch together online using an app like TogetherTube, Showgoers or Gaze.
If you are conducting this exercise with your final project team, consider watching a documentary that may also serve as background for your project. A film may or may not exist in your topic area, so this is not mandatory.
Analysis
Structure (max. 5 slides, max. 5 min.)
- Title
- Provide basic background, including topic, filmmaker, and premier or air date.
- Identify target audience(s). Explain whether including one audience excludes another.
- Identify armature(s) and counter-armature(s), whether expressed or implied. How, if it at all, are competing arguments treated?
- In a format of your choosing, diagram the film’s story structure and substructures.
- Identify transitions, not all of which may be explicit.
- Assign a “weight” to each section. This could be, for instance, its duration in minutes or another magnitude conveying its relative importance.
- When applying an external template (e.g. Act 1–Curtain–Act 2–Act 3) be careful not to efface the real structure of the film.
- You are “modeling” the story structure; choose a level of granularity that achieves accuracy within the time limit and attention span of your audience.
- Describe some other invisible ink or device that is important to the film’s story.
Save for your title slide, in this structure section you may organize the above information in any sequence or configuration within the slide and time limits.
Validity (max. 4 slides, max. 5 min.)
- Identify three armature-relevant truth-claims made during the course of the documentary. One should be credible, one incredible, and one uncertain or somewhere in between. Include approximate timestamps pointing to at least one instance of each claim.
- For each claim explain:
- some evidence, if any, marshaled to support the claim,
- some non-evidentiary methods, if any, used to persuade the audience to accept the claim,
- some bias or logical fallacy affecting the audience’s interpretation of the claim,
- and, if you haven’t done so already, some specific feature of the target audience that may affect their interpretation of the claim.
- Play data science critic: What overall score, as a letter grade (including +’s or –’s), would you give the film as a measure of its ability to tell the truth? What chance does an audience member have to walk away with the right idea? If they do, will it be for the right reasons? What does it matter?
Your critical reflection should come last, otherwise in this analysis section you may organize the content however you like within the slide and time limits.
How to submit
You may treat this as a casual teambuilding exercise for your final project team. Decide on a documentary as a team and then have one person post a trailer of the film to Slack. Upload a single slide or image diagramming the story structure as a PDF to the appropriate bDrive folder using file names that identify the team following the template format.
To keep the fatigue factor down we’ll take things easier this week and you won’t actually have to present formally. That means no video pre-recording and no in-class presentation. Preparing the slides will require you to conduct an analysis as a team of a professionally crafted story.