After reading different feature articles this past week I find it interesting how they are put together. Take Junod’s piece, for example, he writes about people’s first-hand experiences. Living archives are what ground his article and each new person introduced is bold faced and a new section of the article. Interspersed between paragraphs about the people involved are commentary on different related subjects like the resistance to the image or how photographs lie. I’m hoping in my article I can seamlessly go between facts and people like Junod does in his. I also see how just taking one thing like a photograph can lead to so many different avenues for research and reporting. It is all about the questions Junod had to ask like what is the history behind the photograph and the implications. Overall, what is it all about?
I’d also like to incorporate a bit of the science behind the most popular New Jersey brands of wine and I look to Nutt’s article on Sarkin’s illness to see how to incorporate technical ideas and still make it interesting. I do not want my piece to just become a how to on wine making. Instead I’d like to contextualize it within a larger framework like Nutt did. She used other devices like dialogue to make it read like a story and less like a biology lesson. I’d like to do the same. Here again is a man with no story until the reporter asks questions like what is he all about? I feel like I have a broad category of wineries in South Jersey, but I need to ask the right questions to make it entertaining.
Something that I think Wallace and Ross have in common is how to transport the reader to the setting. Ross starts out with, “It’s July, and hotter than hell on the sage,” and, “The air is thin, the terrain rugged, and his body—64 years old, bowlegged, and 15 pounds overweight—seems tired and heavy to me.” Wallace describes a porthole descriptively: “The cabin’s porthole is indeed round, but it is not small, and in terms of its importance to the room’s mood and raison it resembles a cathedral’s rose window. It’s made of that kind of very thick glass that tellers at drive-up banks stand behind.” I think as I go do field work it will be important to notice everything even down to how things smell and feel. I have to remember to be detailed like these two writers to make for a better story. Another thing I notice about Wallace’s writing is throughout his story he describes things as if he was an ethnographer or an anthropologist, the outside looking in. I really like this technique and I think I will try and employ it in my piece of writing.
In all of the above examples a multitude of archives was used from newspaper and stats paper archives in Junod’s piece to memory archives in Ross’s piece. When I first thought of research I thought of paper archives and living archives but I can see now how I may use visual archives, electronic archives, and experiential archives as well.
Antonia DiBona's Research Blog 