Video Literacy

Check out this narrated video literacy about the Mt. Tambora explosion by Kaelan Beckstead! 

This video contains a reading of the poetry of Li Yuyang, a 19th-century artist and would-be Mandarin from the Yunnan province of the Qing Empire. Li Yuyang witnessed firsthand the effects of the eruption of Mt. Tambora on Chinese agrarian society, documenting years of famine, death, and heartache in his art. 

This video was edited in Shotcut and contains a number of images and stock videoclips from copyright-free websites. The narration plays over a song known as the “Ballad of North Henan Province,” composed by Liu Wenjin in the late 20th-century. Multiple literacies are included in this video: visual, auditory, and verbal/oral are the most obvious. 

We hope that you enjoy this multimodal approach to understanding the history of Mt. Tambora through art and evidence.