Explore and read Virtual Vaudeville research project. (Click the “Launch project” button to read the piece.) This is an online multimedia piece that presents research into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatric performances of vaudeville. In some ways, this piece is a traditional piece of research: it shows that its composers have read about their topic in a wide range of authoritative sources and then brought together their research into a single piece—but this piece also contains 3D models of a theater and 3D movies of vaudeville performances, and it allows viewers to move through the piece in an order of their choosing—none of which one finds in traditional research papers. How do these differences from a “traditional” research paper or a television documentary change your responses toward the research? Compose a paper or online presentation in which you compare the purposes and strategies of such online presentations of research with “traditional” research papers or documentary films. What can you do with interactive online pieces that you can’t on paper or with film, and vice versa? What kinds of arguments can you make in the different media that you can’t in the others?
To do this, you’ll need to draw on several examples of each of the kind of research you are comparing; for more examples of research presented online, look at other examples on the Vectors site or look at the other links listed under the Examples link to the left.
