Throughout my four years in high school and my first two years at Duke University, I competed at the national level in both Varsity Cross-Country and Track. Running has, and always will be, my passion, my love, and my obsession in life. It affords me time to clear my head, a means to stay in shape, and an outlet to release any frustrations, aggression, or competitive sentiments. Some of my fondest memories were made both on and off the track within the sports context, but unfortunately, so too were some of my worst. It was also during this time period that I suffered from an eating disorder, and to make matters worse, I simultaneously had to watch as countless members of my team struggled to battle similar conditions. Through our collective experiences, I have seen life at its lowest points; I have seen the depression, the anxiety, the exasperation, the exhaustion, the perfectionism, the obsessive compulsive tendencies, the self-loating, the diminished self-esteem, the injuries, and the countless other physical, psychological, and emotional deleterious health consequences that come as a result of these eating disorders.

While I did not include this particular diagram in my prezi, I thought I would include it here as it nicely outlines the thought process which led me to develop the flow of my digital essay.

As you can see, while eating disorders are a problem within the general population as a whole, female athletes reportedly live at increased risk for the development of these disorders (both clinical and subclinical conditions). What’s more, recovery rates remain dismal, and far too few individuals receive the adequate intensity of treatment that they need to ultimately achieve successful recovery. Thus, better prevention, intervention, and treatment is necessary if we are to truly help these women.

Obviously, there are multiple dimensions to prevention, intervention, and treatment, many of which can only take place within an inpatient or hospital setting. However, recounts from recovered individuals, myself included, emphasize that the factors that helped them most was the help and support that they received outside of these strictly defined medical settings. For example, coaches, teammates, friends, family, and other related sports personnel are all perfectly placed to identify symptoms of disordered eating in female athletes early on and to help these individuals to approach and deal with these disorders in numerous ways. There are also multiple measures that female athletes struggling with eating disorders can take to help themselves to cope and recover. Everyone just needs a little guidance and insight into how these things can be done. This is the purpose of my digital essay, “Realization Space.” Realization Space is meant to be a collective site of information for coaches, teammates, friends, family, and struggling female athletes themselves to gain knowledge, to become inspired, and to ultimately work towards more successful change and recovery. Realization Space is also, partly, my story.

My Prezi all about FEMMES: Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering and Science, an organization here on campus. We are an educational outreach group that works with 4^th-6^th grade girls attending Durham Public Schools. The project seeks to be an informative piece, a call to action for future volunteers, a bit of a narrative, and a way to show off how adorable our participants are, all at once. FEMMES has been a big part of my Duke experience and I saw this project as the perfect opportunity to reflect on it and showcase it. My project walks through why we need FEMMES, talks about our three main programs (summer camp, capstone, and after school/Saturday program), offers some testimonials from participants and DPS faculty, as well as describes my personal experience with the organization.

This project came about because our organization frankly needs a new site, and I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. I started collecting interviews with a bunch of girls, and started sifting through the tons of pictures we have from our events. I ended up with a ton of media to work with! I thought that I would really be able to leverage all of this access to media I had to enhance my project; I hoped to really take it “off the page” and turn it into a digital essay.

I decided to work with Prezi because I felt as though my project doesn’t necessarily have a linear flow to it and Prezi is really receptive to that. If a viewer were to look at my home screen, she could easily navigate her way to testimonials, contact information, our programs, and more with a simple click, in any order that you please. I also thought the playfulness of a Prezi was nice, as our organization works with 4^th-6^th grade girls. I added the sort of random pictures that are interspersed throughout the presentation at the end, and I believe they actually make the site more inviting. How can you say no to these faces?

Don't you just get up and go learn science? (And/or hang out with 4th-6th graders?)

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening is a digital essay that uses the affordances of the web to bring this Robert Frost poem to life in a very personal way. This digital essay aims to capture not only how I believe poetry should read but also how I actually read this specific poem both literally and figuratively.

I’ve always been astonished at how Frost is able to write deep meaning into simple images of the New England outdoors. My literal reading of the poem is shown on the left side of screen. I think this poem is so beautiful in the literal sense, but has deep figurative meaning as well. I always think of this poem when I’m sleeping and don’t want to get out of bed.. a la “my bed/blankets are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…” etc. In my video, this personal, figurative reading is shown on the right side of the screen.

Last semester, I took a poetry course with Joseph Donahue that I absolutely loved. I’ve always loved poetry, but this class did a great job of fostering an intense appreciation for images, and the actual art of reading poetry as well as writing it. We learned that poetry is the only art form that can isolate and elucidate single images within the mind using a functionally artful combination of words. I tried to illustrate this process with my digital essay.

Many “readers” commented that they might like to hear Frost’s voice reading the poem itself throughout the essay, but this would defeat the purpose of reading it for yourself. I feel as though my digital essay offers the reader an opportunity to read the poem properly on their own, and then get a glimpse into my personal reading as well.

Click here to view the final version of my site!

So essentially, my project is meant to serve as a simple but new approach to the problem of the low self-esteem of female Duke undergraduates. I know this is an issue that has been mentioned in the Women’s Initiative, countless Chronicle articles, Duke’s most recent Who Needs Feminism? campaign, and many other sources, but I wanted to explore and combat it in my own way. On my website, I have a History page, where I look back at two studies on the self-esteem of Duke students, as well as the Who Needs Feminism? campaign. I have a Project page, where I give a brief description of my project’s purpose – both to educate people about the reality of the self-esteem of Duke women (specifically, what the studies say) and to explain my choice to use portraits to do so. Finally, I have a gallery page featuring Duke undergraduate women holding up signs that say I <3 My ______”, where they fill in the blank with a personality or physical trait that they love about themselves.

I originally got the idea from a combination of similar campaigns (like Who Needs Feminism?) and a section in Marie Claire magazine, where they take photographs of women in a particular city and include captions where the women talk about one attribute they love about themselves. I was especially attracted to the visual aspect – visuals are definitely important for multimedia projects, and I feel like attempting a strictly text-based version of this project would be impossible. It’s one thing to talk about women at Duke, like they do in the study, but it’s another thing entirely to show them. There’s something about visuals that drive the point home, especially because viewers can find similarities with the subjects of the portraits.

I had hoped to use Wix.com, because I liked the gallery format and the way that you could create a very clean, minimal site that relied broke up the topics (History, Project, and Gallery) clearly and easily. However, Wix.com proved almost impossible to use, and there were many times that I almost threw my computer at the wall. Instead, I used WordPress, but rather than structure my site like a blog, I used the same gallery format as I originally intended with Wix.

I loved putting an order to the project, so people could read the History and have interactive links and figures from the studies, but then they could click another link and go to the Project page and the Gallery page in a particular order. I relied greatly on the affordances of the web – the clickability, the way I could create an order for viewers, and the way that I could deter people from viewing the Gallery until they read and understood the project fully. I couldn’t have done the project in print, like I said. Sure, the history is important, but the most important component is the Gallery itself. Viewers have the power to click on individual images that perhaps they relate to or find significance in, and they can spend as much time as they like actually looking at particular photographs.

As for constraints, my biggest constraint was simple: some girls didn’t want to participate. Sometimes it was about them not having the time, but more frequently, they were uncomfortable with putting their image on the web for the project. It’s a constraint of using the internet rather than text – your project can serve its purpose, but it can also blow up, and you don’t have complete control over who views it and interprets it for themselves. Overall though, I was pleased with the response (even if I had to force my roommates into it).