Introducing Tiny Videos

This Pecha Kucha presentation introduces a new way to disseminate scholarly work across our increasingly crowded, fragmented, and pandemonic information environment. Tiny Videos condense and translate an academic output (e.g. a theory, concept, or discovery) from its conventional, printed, documentary container to a dynamic, striking, and mnemonic video counterpart lasting just 15-30 seconds. Another way to think of this novel genre is as a breakthrough advertisement for a scholarly product; or, metaphorically speaking, as an amuse bouche. Jenna Hartel, an information scientist at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, believes that most scholarly publications fall short of their circulation potentials for three reasons. 1.) They are trapped in old-fashioned packages that demand increasingly unreachable background knowledge, time commitment, and concentration to penetrate. 2.) They fail to intercourse with the visual and musical tropes of popular culture, nor speak in its most impactful and universal languages of beauty, sensuality, and humor. 3.) And finally, the quintessential journal article is not a synchronized dancer or nimble traveler on the infrastructure of this information age--social media, video platforms, and websites. For all these reasons, Hartel invented the Tiny Video concept and exhibits 22 (and counting) on her YouTube channel, INFIDEOS; their thumbnail representations appear below. Each compact multimedia artifact gives new life and forward momentum to landmark ideas in Information Science. Altogether, the collection stands as an accessible montage and buffet of the field’s best thinking and intellectual property. Indeed, Tiny Videos can function as boundary objects that bridge academic disciplines, connect research to practice, and capture the imagination of an underestimated public. However, Hartel’s primarily created the Tiny Videos to stimulate curiosity in her students, who often are not motivated to engage the scholarly literature in its current form. (She hopes the Tiny Videos become "ear worms," that is, ideas that get stuck in the head.) At a time when higher education is moving online, Tiny Videos are perfectly geared to enliven course websites, animate email correspondence, or enhance online lectures and activities. Admittedly, there may be barriers to the uptake of Tiny Videos. Scholars may lack the creativity, technical skills, or time to make them—though very capable talent is on hand through freelance marketplaces for creatives such as Fiverr. Or, Tiny Videos might seem to diminish or replace engagement with original writing—an objection that may be overly pessimistic. In addition to elaborating all that is above, the presentation will include three exemplar Tiny Videos.