My Tweets

1. Civic spirit!

2. Favorite eating spot.

3. Spotlight on a local business owner

4. Student on the street.

5. Academic excellence.

6. Scenic spot.

7. Little-known fact.

8. Culture

9. Freestyle.

Top 3 Class Tweets

Top 5 from other schools

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Engage with 5 other posts

1. Comment on @julieeee post on evergreen content

2. Likes @lisamcfall2 post

3. Liked @kelloway737 video

4. Comment on @emilyfair9 post

5. Liked @sierramilan_ photos

Reflection

The Twitter scavenger hunt was a great way to put myself in a position where I had to talk to potential sources, research community events and create a multimodal story that conveyed the Trenton community’s culture.

The challenges on the list forced me to approach strangers around campus, explain what I was doing as ask questions that elicited interesting responses. I found this process reminiscent of approaching sources for a story, you need to put yourself out there and be mindful of how you phrase questions to get the best content for your story.

The challenge also forced me to approach narrative in a new way, not only using text to convey a story but enhancing narrative with visual elements such as photography and video. I also learnt to not only focus on individual challenges and their posts, but how each post would complement each other on my Twitter feed.

I found it challenging to get a broad representation of Trenton as my access to the city is limited to catching buses and Ubers, hence I focused on the Ewing township and TCNJ community. It was interesting to compare my approach to the challenges with other classmates and then other colleges internationally. I found several similarities between other student’s responses and my own. It was common to see favorite scenic spots on campus and references to college clubs.

Overall, I found the twitter hunt an interesting and challenging way to convey a story about a town through a modern, non-traditional platform.