Whenever there is injustice, inequality, discrimination and unrest in the world, there will be musicians speaking up. Throughout the decades, brilliant artists like NWA, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Public Enemy, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, and Childish Gambino have used their music to shed light on issues they view as problematic.
For this project, you’ve chosen one song of protest. You’ve run the song through Voyant. You’ve eliminated all filler words from your most frequent (words like oh, yea, uh, or anything else that doesn’t add to concrete meaning). To eliminate filler words: Click on ‘Define Options for this tool’ (top right of Cirrus word cloud box), click ‘Edit list’ next to Stopwords, add the filler word(s), save, confirm — this will eliminate them from the data. You’ve looked into history in order to shed light on the lyrics.
Now it’s time to take all these pieces and, using StoryMap JS, curate a multimodal project about your song of choice. Curation involves taking mass amounts of information and distilling it into a concise, logical presentation. Think of a museum exhibit. Curators don’t just dump everything they have in one display; they pick and choose so that their curated items tell a story.
Each StoryMap slide should have a title, an image/video, 50-80 words, a map location, a credit, and a caption (except the title slide, which will not need a 50-80 word explanation).
Required Slides:
Title Slide
Voyant: Most Frequent Words Interpretation Slide
Voyant: Data Interpretation Slide (2+ hyperlinks)
Five (5) Protest Background Slides (2+ hyperlinks for each slide)
Using song lyrics as titles, break the song down into its historical context(s). Hyperlink your credible sources to add a layer of ethos.
Bring it All Together Slide
Connect your original Voyant interpretations to your historical song lyric research. Tie everything together here.
‘What Can We Learn From This?’ Slide
Set the location to GSU (Atlanta, GA)
If you need more than one slide for any of these required categories, feel free to add more! The key is to keep each slide short, so that viewers don’t have to scroll. Have fun! Be as creative as you like!
