Putting Verified to practice

Hello y’all,

During class, someone brought up how to handle video essay content, so that got me thinking, I should put this stuff into practice, especially the stuff from this week.

So lets first look at what we learned this week.

Chapters 6-9 of Verified

Chapter 6

Chapter six of Verified concerns itself with scholarly articles. Not only how to find them, but when to know that they are trustworthy. The chapter showcases Google scholar and how to use it.

Google scholar does a pretty good job of trimming the fat. The fat being untrustworthy sources, but it’s not perfect. As such, we have some tools that we can use. One feature, that I have fallen in love with, is the cited by feature. If you find an article that’s been cited by a lot of people, chances are it is pretty solid, not always (for example they could be looking at why the article sucks) but it’s a useful tool.

Moreover, the chapter goes over the practice of peer review, which I will attempt to summarize. Peer review is a process that many academic papers have to go through, and while it is not a perfect process, it is decently effective.

1. First a paper gets submitted to a journal, where an editor will look the paper and decide if its a good fit.

2. Then the paper will get submitted to some reviewers. These reviewers will look through the paper’s argument, evidence, and value. If they decide it’s good, they will approve it, if not the paper will be rejected. Most of the time the paper will get put into a nebulous category of “Review and resubmit.” This means that the paper gets sent back to the author to make corrections.

3. The author will rewrite the paper and resubmit.

4. The process starts again until a final decision is reached.

So that’s how you can use scholarly articles.

Chapter 7

Chapter seven covers Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and its value.

Wikipedia is useful for several reasons.

1. You can use Wikipedia to gain a quick understanding of a topic.

2. You can use Wikipedia to quickly fact check a claim.

3. You can use Wikipedia as a starter for deeper and better research.

When you look at Wikipedia to gain an understanding of a topic, you can use the table of contents to quickly jump around to where you need to look. (Both apply to 1 and 2).

For three, they further cover how to use references to your advantage. By looking towards references, what they say, you can often quickly find a source that will better put you on your feet for a given topic, which can now be better cited.

But wait, I thought Wikipedia sucked.

Uhhh, not really. Wikipedia has so many measure in place to prevent Wikipedia trolls. I will go ahead and share my understanding of Wikipedia moderation (as someone who enjoys watching Wikipedia wars). When you create an account, you have to gain points to be able to edit locked posts. The easiest way to do that is to correct posts that are not locked. But, if you have too many errors, you will not be able to gain those points. In a sense, you have to build a reputation to be able to edit more pages. Basically, make a name for yourself within the community.

So yea, Wikipedia is pretty neat.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 covers Deceptive video practice. Briefly, do not trust what you see on the internet. Go and find other sources first and foremost.

The most important part of this chapter in my mind is the importance of waiting. We often get super attached to claims made by other people, so when the truth comes out we have a hard time accepting it. They emphasis the importance of waiting, we do not have to jump to conclusions based on something we see.

Chapter 9

Chapter nine covers stealth advertising, the process of advertisers paying journalists for an article, which makes puts a bias onto the thing we are reading.

The best way to avoid this is to look for a tag saying something along the lines of “Sponsored by” at the top. It is really hard, because advertisers do not want us to know that it is an ad, so we have to stay safe.

HBomberguy

Hbomberguy is one of my favorite video essayists. I know about his reputation as I have been following him for a long time, but I think it is time to actually put in the leg work.

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So, let’s check his Wikipedia page.

So the intro states, “Brewis produces video essays on a variety of topics such as film, television, and video games, often combining them with arguments from left-wing political and economic positions.”

Good news, this is nothing new. I already knew that Hbomberguy was left-leaning, being someone who has supported transgender charities and “critiquing right-wing and antifeminist arguments” (also from Wikipedia). He is also pretty upfront about his biases in his videos, he is not trying to convince people that he leans in the center.

Let’s go ahead and check the reception. Two magazines write about him in a positive light.

The first is Slate. It seems to be a pretty standard magazine. The writer is Emily St. James who has a pretty detailed history, so she does have reputation to lose if she supports someone who is weird.

The second is TenEighty which doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Looking at it, it seems to focus on the internet and culture. Let’s jump to the author, Quinn Rose, who… also doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. This doesn’t necessarily mean the info is bad, but it seems closer to a Buzzfeed article than a Vox article.

Jumping back to the reception, his, Hbomberguy’s Climate Denial: A Measured Response was nominated for a 2019 list of the best video essays of the year.

This was for Sight and Sound so let’s find out what that is.

That list comes from BFI which is the… British Film Institute. So this is pretty high praise.

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So in short, Hbomberguy is pretty trustworthy seemingly. Sure, you may wanna brace yourself for political takes, but overall he gets a solid thumbs-up.

So I hope this exercise demonstrated how you are supposed to utilize these strategies.

My question I leave is: How are you all employing Verified‘s strategies?