Honors Projects

Around the Dinner Table: Familial Discovery Through Multimedia Storytelling

Abstract

My Honors Project is a multimedia storybook of my family’s history that attempts to explain our culture and explore different ways to tell stories. It takes place between the pages of my family photo albums, through the streets of San Marco, Sicily, and around the dinner table.

Through hours upon hours of interviews and interactions with my family members — both in Cleveland and in Sicily — over the course of several years, I was able to collect portions of the oral history of my family and record them. From my grandmothers’ sisters to my mother’s sister, my relatives echoed each other’s stories. This consistent timeline of events and themes relating to my family’s history and culture allowed me to create video, audio and written stories to preserve our oral histories.

As much as this project is a sentimental one, it is also educational. The work I have done over the past two and a half years as a journalist and the interest I have developed over the past 20 years as a daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter in my family have come together to teach me about storytelling. By designating myself as my own family’s historian through this project, I have gained a deeper knowledge about how to effectively tell stories — more than I ever could have learned in a traditional classroom.

Department

Journalism and Public Relations

Major

Journalism

First Advisor

Dr. Heath Diehl

First Advisor Department

Honors Program

Second Advisor

Dr. Jim Foust

Second Advisor Department

Journalism and Public Relations

Publication Date

Fall 2019

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