Storyboarding an academic text (course content)

Who, what, when, why

Storyboarding. We do it in comic art. We do it in film and photography. We do it in design — designers even storyboard “experience” these days. And we can storyboard as researchers, too.

Wikipedia says: “A film storyboard … is essentially a series of frames, with drawings of the sequence of events in a film — like a comic book of the film … produced beforehand. It helps film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Beyond this, storyboards also help estimate the cost of the overall production and save time. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.”

Now, me: Even though academic storyboarding is a recent fad, it isn’t all that surprising. I mean, a storyboard is basically just an outline, right? With more boxes, usually, and less text, usually.

One key advantage to storyboarding academic thinking and research is that the pieces in a storyboard beg to be rearranged, to be tried out in new formations (unlike, perhaps, a regular old, top-to-bottom, left-to-right, Roman numeral filled, textual outline).

Further into this semester we will storyboard our own research projects. Before that, though, I would like us to play at storyboarding research in already published form.

But Nancy didn’t do it

Things of which I am certain: Nancy Scheper-Hughes didn’t storyboard her now assembled research projects and the resultant articles you just read. Neither did most (any?) of the other authors whose works you are considering this semester.

What I can suggest to you, however, is that the tight organization of ideas in each of the articles I’ve placed before you this week (and this semester) could have come from storyboarding.

If you are unsure what a storyboard is, click here. Or here. Or here.

Your task this week is to take what is already in article form and, using at least 15 post-it notes (scraps of paper work, too), turn that article into a storyboard.

This is a reversal of standard storyboarding practice. You are starting with the finished work, and then picking out the pieces of that work rather than trying to assemble pieces to create a future finished work. In so doing, you will be making visible the structure of the article.