Allentown

a sense of place

Documentary Research
Final Project Guidelines

Com 231 Documentary Research Sense of Place Guide, Page 1

 Allentown, actually.

Most documentary work--indirectly or directly--is about place. This project

requires you to apply the documentary methods learned this semester in a
2-3 minute digital story documenting a place in central Allentown. The
project calls upon you to broaden the boundaries of your own awareness of
the city of Allentown: your preconceptions, experiences, attitudes, and
interactions with the city, its places, and its residents. Your work will be
evaluated on its ability to create a strong sense of place that captures--does
justice to--Allentown’s particularity.

Com 231 Documentary Research Sense of Place Guide, Page 2

 To Render a Place
Reading the City
Cities express the choices made by their inhabitants: choices about
where to live, how to get around and how to interact with the
surrounding environment. The cityscape reflects the collective and
contested values of the city’s diverse residents, yet as individuals we
rarely understand the impact our choices have on the shape of our city.

City Stories
This project engages the complex
questions of urban planning and
regional identity by exploring how
people participate in and
experience their city. Where do we
see the tensions between growth, economic development and
quality of life in Allentown’s downtown areas, in local
neighborhoods and surrounding regions?

Here in Allentown
How is space used in Allentown? What issues of equity and fairness are
tied to particular places? How do places illuminate some of the struggles
in this community? Struggles over what makes a healthy community,
over race and class inequities, over urban planning and land use, over
open space and economic development?

Com 231 Documentary Research Sense of Place Guide, Page 3

 Assignment Guidelines
Project Specs
A 2-3 minute documentary created in iMovie according to the same methods used in your
30 second piece. Each project must have a title, a a mix of documentary evidence that
includes photos, artifacts, text, and other sources, a voice over narrative recorded in a
Walson sound studio by the author, a soundtrack that abides by copyright restrictions, and
credits that correctly cite all sources of research, including texts, online sources, and photo
credits. Use APA guidelines. Projects must be submitted on-time, in QuickTime “full quality”
format, saved to the Cine server following directions and guidelines distributed earlier in the
semester. Projects submitted after the deadline or in the wrong format will be downgraded
accordingly. Tony Dalton is available in Walson 106 for technical support.

Project Parameters
Remember that we are working in the documentary tradition. These are not PR pieces,
advertisements, or slideshows. Your work should engage with the traditions of social
documentary that we have studied this semester, and connect with questions of democracy
and social justice. This is media making with a social purpose and your work must
demonstrate that awareness and ability.

Goals: Skills
Media production techniques introduced in the 30 second project are to be mastered at this
stage. Specifically, your project should demonstrate ability to successfully establish a
“voice” through selection and arrangement of images, sound, effective transitions, audio and
image effects and careful editing.

Goals: Concepts
Projects should demonstrate your awareness of the moral and psychological responsibilities
of documentarians to their subjects, their audiences, and their field. Your project should
also indicate an awareness of and sensitivity to the documentarian’s location in relation to
the story rendered. In your work, your aim is to put into practice the very course concepts
and theories that we have read about and observed in the work of key documentarians.
Documentaries should evidence a serious effort to engage with central questions of this
course: how can we do justice to human particularity? how can we render lives that may be
difference from our own? how does who we are shape what we notice and what we overlook,
and then what we offer to others so that they will understand a particular place or story?

Com 231 Documentary Research Sense of Place Guide, Page 4

Allentown Resources Online

•www.allentowngoodnews.blogsp
ot.com
•oldallentown.blogspot.com
•www.oldallentown.org
•www.allentownpa.gov
•renewlv.wordpress.com
•lehighvalley.typepad.com/insit
e
•http://allentownafterthoughts.c
om/

•theforkcity.wordpress.com
•theelvee.com
•www.thelvscene.com
•blogs.mcall.com/outdoors
•lehighlexicon.blogspot.com

•www.b
eyondsc
•12n7th rapple.c
.blogspo om
•blogs.m t.com
call.com
•allento /valley6
wncitya 10/allen
rts.blogs town
•http:// p ot.com
www.7th
streetall
entown.o
rg/

Com 231 Documentary Research Sense of Place Guide, Page 5