DH2006: Social Media Story Group Project

The objective of this assignment was to create a social media story with a minimum of 20-30 entries. The story had to be based of of an archive we had to create as part of a separate project. Our archive was about the life and work of Nano Nagle.

“Honora “Nano” Nagle (1718 – 26 April 1784) was a pioneer of Catholic education in Ireland despite legal prohibitions. She founded the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (PBVM), commonly known as the Presentation Sisters, now a worldwide teaching order.” – Wikipedia

To learn more about Nano Nagle and her work visit Nano Nagle Place in Cork or take their virtual tour online on their website.

We chose to use the platform Instagram as we felt that it had the most to offer as a social media platform. Instagram has the capabilities to house images, videos, text, links and sound all in one place. For this reason we chose to utilize it for our social media story to get the most we could out of our information and really bring it to life.

The first thing to do was to explore a variety of sources available to us, including Nano Nagle Place, in order to roughly map out Nano Nagle‘s life in chronological order. That way we could then go on and categorize our posts and information in an easy to read fashion.

Following this it was time to make a simple logo for the account, in order to help people to identify what the account was for when they look at the home page. I did this by taking the portrait of Nano Nagle into Photoshop and doing a simple block-colour trace.

Once the basic Instagram account had been set up with a bio, a profile photo and a grid idea. I began to refine the details of each individual post as well as come up with a rough idea and template for the overall look of the feed.

Once all the graphics had been drawn up it was time to refine our information and section it off post by post. The plan was to record voice over elements with photos reeling in the video and the graphics to appear as covers.

Lastly it was time to fight with Instagram’s way of posting and figure out what order the videos went in for the timeline to line up. This was much easier said than done but over a few attempts we uploaded them successfully in the right order.

With all of that completed, we had achieved a cohesive and chronological digital story, telling the life of Nano Nagle. It was an incredibly challenging assignment but a thoroughly enjoyable one!

Visit the Instagram Page here: https://www.instagram.com/thenanostory/