Assignment 6 - Twitter Moment - Building a Story on Twitter

Map created on Tweeted Trips: http://tweetedtrips.com/map/940/inte5340-east-coast-road-trip

This week, I have been on the road taking a trip from New Jersey to Washington DC and then down to North Carolina. My intention was to document my trip -- to collect and create artifacts along the way. The idea was to capture a bunch of experiences and with each experience create a microstory. Through the sharing of numerous microstories, I would bind them all together with a Twitter moment at the end of my week. This is something I've never tried before, and I thought this would be an interesting way to keep all these artifacts together and share on social media. I wanted to create a mix of media on this trip -- video, audio, graphics, dialogue, photos, links, daily create challenges and tweets used to crowdsource information from others in the Twittersphere. In some ways, this is similar to creating a story map or interactive timeline with the added dimension of having (and keeping track of) social interactions on Twitter. I guess this is also similar to doing a Twitter essay. This essay is a personal one, sharing more than just content pertaining to digital storytelling. The experiences shared on Twitter are small glimpses into different aspects of my life. Some of the tweets are meant to give a sense of place -- to show a place from my eyes via photographs or video clips. Others are meant to share a familiar experience or share aspects of a road trip that seem universal. And then other tweets are meant to share my experience of creating media while traveling. All these short media-based vignettes are meant to evoke feelings of familiarity, curiosity and a sharing of common ground.

I created media primarily with my smartphone and Android apps. For videos, I tried using Alive, Boomerang, and GoPro Quik. To prepare and record interviews, I used the StoryCorps app. To edit photos and create graphics, I used Photo Lab, Aviary Photo Editor, Instagram, Desygner and Prisma. To create gifs, I used the Assistant on Google Photos. Audio clips were uploaded to SoundCloud and then shared on Twitter. A map of my tweets was created using Tweeted Trips. One of the biggest challenges I faced while creating media from the road was trying to do everything from my phone. I had my laptop with me, but only accessed my laptop in the evenings. Since I was tweeting throughout the day, I used my phone to capture and edit the artifacts I was creating. Not being able to use a screen bigger than a few inches or a trackpad/mouse made editing graphics and videos a bit challenging, but I was able to figure out how to do everything I wanted from my phone. It just took a little bit of researching online with a sprinkling of trial-and-error learning. In the end, I was able to identify and use an app for everything. I guess the saying is true: "There's an app for that."

This was a fun week-long project that allowed for me to try creating a number of different forms of media. It gave me a chance to become more familiar with using my smartphone to create and share my microstories. Having the intention of sharing media throughout the week gave me a fresh set of eyes for what I was seeing and experiencing. This intentionality made me really think about what I wanted to share and how I wanted to share it. It made me think about ways to keep what I was sharing fresh and interesting to me, as well as to anyone viewing my Twitter moment. Throughout the week, I tried to post a mix of photos, graphics, videos, audio, dialogue/interviews, daily create challenges, and social interactions on Twitter. Every day, I would find things I wanted to play with or remix, and I ended up creating a lot from the road. But this creative burst was a labor of love.

#inte5340 takes an East Coast Road Trip

Creating a Twitter moment is relatively straightforward. After clicking "Create New Moment," you can start building your moment by adding a title, description and whichever tweets you want to be a part of this moment. Any work put into the moment can be saved until you are ready to hit "Publish." Once published, you can share your moment, and you also have the ability to embed the moment into your website, just as I have done here. I like how user-friendly and intuitive it was to add or delete tweets from the moment. And I like how the end result keeps all related/relevant tweets in one place. You can arrange the tweets in any order your like, giving you extra control over how you tell your digital story. I can definitely see myself creating more Twitter moments in the future, since this was a nice way to categorize, organize and share tweets of a single theme. If you haven't tried creating a Twitter moment yet, give it a shot!