- [Voiceover] Hello everyone, it's Rowan.
Today something a little bit different from me
instead of my face on screen you are going to be
seeing this lovely laptop screen.
I'm gonna be taking you through a brief overview
of how I research and script my videos.
This is for the YouTube Girls Project.
Essentially encouraging women and girls
who create on YouTube to
share how they make videos
to kind of demystify the process,
share some tips with each other but
also maybe encourage some other
women and girls to jump on board
and make their own videos as well.
So the first thing I'm gonna talk about is
sort of the inspiration for ideas
for me they kind of come from
anywhere and everywhere.
Basically just have to be something that
really holds my interests and that I wanna find out
more about.
So, as soon as I have an idea,
I'll put it down in a document.
I always have my ideas on separate pages.
Just because I like to give them
a lot of space.
As soon as I come up with an idea
I'll immediately write down my initial
thoughts and ideas about it.
What made me interested in it, often a lot of questions.
So I thought I'm just gonna paste in here
my original notes for a video which
is gonna actually become part of a larger project
which is about the trouble with LGBT history.
So the idea of you know particular words
not existing before a certain date
so how to classify or label
those people in history that
would be called bisexual now for example
in this instance, stuff about erasure
about closetedness,
a lack of continuity of information,
et cetera et cetera.
These are just my own thoughts,
I ask myself a lot of questions in these
notes, stuff that I want to be thinking about
when I actually do my research.
That's the first thing that I do.
If it's a topic that I know,
I'll write down sort of ideas for
sections or headers, and if it's not a topic
that I know, I go straight into research.
You can see this is actually
my actual document
that I use for my ideas.
It's over 17,000 words now.
And, there's a lot there.
I'm not the kind of person who can go
straight through and just research and write a script
all at once, I find that quite difficult to do
so I tend to jump back and forth.
And sort of whichever one I finish first
ends up going up.
So, in terms of research,
what I essentially look at is a few different places.
So JSTOR I'm really lucky to have
unlimited access to JSTOR,
which is essentially if you don't know
a catalog library archive of different journals,
books sources stuff like that
that often people use at university
or in academia.
So, I'm lucky enough to have this,
and if you are at university I would encourage
you to use it, if you make the kind of videos
that need a lot of research.
I'm gonna go with an advanced search here actually
because I know that if I search women and robots
I come up with literally thousands
and thousands of results, so,
women and robots
I'm gonna kind of utilize this advanced search
by going with a title so I know it's
very very specifically to do with both
these subjects, 'cause often if you were to just
type this in normally I imagine a lot of the
results would be about robotics
and women might not be front and center.
I'm also gonna have a look at
the results for discipline,
and I'm gonna specify feminist and women's studies
just 'cause I think it's gonna be closer to the
kind of text that I'm interested in.
If I search this, it comes up with one result
Lifting the Burden of Women's Care Work:
Should Robots Replace the Human Touch?
Now this doesn't have a PDF to download
and I know I can't buy it,
so essentially what I'm left with is
a piece of content that I can't
technically access the whole thing.
So there's a couple of ways around this
one if you wanted to
if it was a project that you really really wanted
to know about, I would contact the person
who's written it or the department that they were from
to try and talk to them and see if you can
get a copy.
Sometimes they'll just say it's behind a pay wall,
sometimes like this one which isn't available,
it might be that they have a scan of it somewhere
that you can use.
But, for my purposes I'm not necessarily interested
in going that far with this particular source,
but what you can do 'cause they will often have
the first page, which will almost always have some
kind of abstract.
So rather than using it for equating
this particular person as a scholar
or as an expert in your video,
what you can do is just have a look at their
ideas and see the kind of conversations
that was happening around this topic.
So this idea of
women's work in robotics is actually
gonna be one of the videos in my robots and women series
so, this is actually kind of interesting for me.
So there's a little bit about
kind of women's labor being free
so women who look after family members
and they do that full time and yet they don't
get paid for it.
The idea that robots could take over that job
and free up women's time.
And also this kind of counter idea
that it could undermine social relationships in some way.
So already I have a couple of ideas
to bounce off.
You can also if you don't have access to something
like JSTOR use something like Google Scholar.
So this is available to anyone
if I type in the very broad topic of women and robotics
just to see what kind of stuff is coming up
when I search for it.
We have things like Love and sex with robots
The evolution of human-robot relationships.
So sex relationships and robots is
coincidentally another one of the videos
that I'm gonna be doing about robotics.
And so this might be really useful for me so
when you click on these essentially they will
bring you to a scan in of this particular article.
Which is really great you can go through
if there's any quotes that you wanna take
or any stats or anything you can then
kind of copy and paste.
And you also have this great thing where we have
references that you can then
follow up as well
and see if anything that's been used in here
sparks your interest.
Sometimes it can be sort of a black hole
of going through and researching.
It is for me I write a lot a lot of notes,
do a lot of research, and then delete a lot of it.
Because it doesn't sort of fit into a YouTube video.
You also if you don't wanna go with academic text
because I do understand that using academia
within liberation movements, feminism,
stuff like that can be a little bit elitist
potentially, so
instead you can just Google it.
So I specifically searched for can robots replace caregivers
which is sort in reference to some stuff we're thinking
about at the JSTOR article.
So things that we have here is
the New York Times has something
so there's gonna be a lot of opinion pieces.
Which is kind of interesting to see people's point of view
and what's in people's consciousness at the moment.
We also have particular websites
which focus on the topic.
Sometimes these websites can be super biased
but that's kind of interesting to see someone's
point of view who feels very very strongly
on either side of an issue.
I would also say if you are Googling,
have a look through
for things that have PDF next to them.
Especially if they have something like related articles.
This is very very likely in my experience
with the kind of topics I search for
to be an academic text of some kind.
So, if we click on this one,
we ca see that it is
if I remember correctly a Master's Dissertation.
Yep, Master of the Arts.
So this might be something that you
can look for even on Google that you don't
have to have this access to
sort of university texts or a library
anything like that.
So another thing that you can try is
clicking on the News tab for what you're
searching for, this kind of gives you a lot of
up to date stuff.
I found with the robot things
there's always a robot story every couple of days
so it's interesting to go and search that for me
and see what else is happening in that area.
So essentially what happens is,
I do all those notes, I take them into
sort of the script document,
I copy and paste them all together.
As I said earlier if it's a topic
that I already know about I might already have
an idea about the different topics that I'm gonna
broach and so I will just copy and paste
the quotes under the heading that they most correspond with.
If I haven't really researched this topic before
what I'll do is just copy and paste all the notes
in as they are.
And I'll make my own notes and I'll put things
in my own words, and then once I've done all the
research I think I can do I'll print off
that document.
I will use a pen, and I will go through
and basically in the margin write a word or two
next to each paragraph
with just what that paragraph is about.
And what that kind of helps me do is
sort everything together, find patterns,
so that when I go back to the Word document
I can have a look at that sheet of paper
and my markings and my notes,
and I can sort of paste all of the ones
that are to do with a particular topic together,
see if that's gonna be long enough for a paragraph,
see if I need to sort of find more about that
particular topic.
Stuff like that and then reorder each of those topics
into an order that makes sense to me.
And then gradually bit by bit
turn those notes into a paragraph
and then do the next paragraph so
as I said before I sort of work very
methodically and randomly and I'll skip between different
topics and different scripts.
So it sort of all comes together in the end,
as you can probably tell from this document I have a lot
of different fonts, I often use different colors,
so when I'm writing
paragraphs when I start to write my paragraphs
the actual script, I'll change the font to green
when I'm happy with a sentence so,
the script sort of fills up with green
and the black writing sort of gets
less and less as I delete notes
that I don't need anymore, until it's all completely green
and then I'm happy with the script.
I'll do maybe one read through
just to double check.
But I sort of edit as I go along.
So yeah that was a very quick sort of whiz through
of my research and scripting methods.
I hope that was helpful in some way.
As always if you have any questions
for me leave them in the comments
but I think also if you have any tips
if you're a creator for people who want to
start making videos, or if you're interested
in starting to make videos any questions that you have,
leave them below and hopefully we can get some
conversations going.
All right, until I see you next time, bye.