Social Media Digest of Paper on Early Caribbean Foodways
Background
I created this piece as part of a midterm assignment for my Introduction to Archaeology class that I took my senior fall as, ironically, the last required class to complete my minor. For this project, I wanted to explore the space of paleoethnobotany as it pertained to archaeological research in the Caribbean, which is one of the areas that I'd like to hone in on during my graduate studies. The instructions—create a social media post breaking down a research paper—left me with a lot of creative freedom to use the graphic design skills that I had been honing up until that point.
Note: if you look closely, you might be able to spot some starches in the background of the slides!
Reflection
One of the most difficult parts of translating research into a post that is acceptable for social media is condensing the message into easily digestible pieces that have to be aesthetically pleasing for people to take the time to read. Taking that into consideration, I drew heavily from posts that I'd seen from Instagram accounts dedicated to activism. I also wanted the format to follow logically from the structure of the paper that I was writing about, so the slides follow a template of Title, Summary (abstract), Data, Methods, Findings, and Conclusion, which for me was a lesson in translating traditional research principles into informal settings like a social media post.
I'm very happy overall with the way that this project came out—for instance, the color scheme maintains a nice balance between professionalism through its darker tropical colors—but there are also many things that I would change. For one, some of the slides are especially difficult to read depending on the difference in screens, something that I did not take into account when I was designing them. Going back, I would probably change some of the fonts and color choices to make the important content more legible. Something that I've also enjoyed during my further archaeology classes is prefacing presentations of others' research with a short biography of the author(s) to contextualize their perspectives. It's also a way to humanize the research, and it's a practice that I have started to incorporate into my work where possible. A single slide introducing the authors and context of the paper would enrich the post greatly for any readers by allowing them to perform that contextualization for themselves.