The BookTube Community! (Project Post)

My end project was a paper about BookTubing (or booktubing): YouTubing about books! There's a whole community out there just waiting for you to join it . . . and you can also read this paper! In a way, we're already part of it, since we did those video book reviews. (The next step is to keep making videos and to comment on others' videos.) Here's the link to my paper.

I'd also like to share some research that didn't make it into the paper. Before deciding to focus exclusively on  the BookTube community, I compared presentation skills in TEDTalks and booktube videos. Here's the link to the spreadsheet of information. I chose teenage TED presenters because their demographic is similar to the main booktube demographic. Like all TED presenters, they receive special coaching from the TED speaker team (source).  I chose the TED videos based on age and high views. These are the teenage presenters with the highest number of views on YouTube, with the exception of this presenter's video about "hackschooling." (I didn't have the full criteria hammered out when choosing the TED male teenage videos.) I chose the booktubers in a similar fashion that is fully explained in my paper.

Absorbing and analyzing the videos taught me a few things about making a good presentation and helped me become somewhat familiar with the booktubing visual dialect. Because of these things, I feel more confident about putting myself out there; I actually made my own book review video last week! I implemented several things I learned; I edited out 'um's and dead space (choppily at times, but hey, it was practically my first time video editing!), picked a medium distance away from the camera, and made notes about topics I wanted to cover, and used the book as a visual aid. I also incorporated a simple visual aid into a class group presentation a couple of weeks ago, to help people keep track of what our group was discussing, and it was a little tricky to restrain myself from walking around the 'stage' too much.