Evaluating Documentaries & Video Sources
Multimedia resources have to be evaluated to determine whether or not the information is complete, reliable, and relevant to your topic. The same strategies you use for print sources can be used with other types of resources.
Make sure to consider a resource's
Currency: What is the publication date? Has our understanding of the topic changed since then? Has the resource been updated? How long after the event was the resource produced?
Reliability: Can the information be confirmed by other sources? Has it been reviewed by other experts? Does the creator have known biases? Is information left out or misconstrued?
Authority: Who was involved with producing this resource? Are they experts in this field? What else have they created? Are subject experts interviewed or included in some way?
Purpose or Point of View: Why was this resource produced? Is it fact or opinion? Was it sponsored by a certain organization or intended for a specific audience? Do the producers make the sponsorship or other affiliations clear? Does it portray a particular point of view?
The answers to these questions can help you determine whether a resource is CRAP or not.
Cómo evaluar una película, un video, o un segmento de película
Episode 2 of World War II: Up Close and Personal
The origins of World War II lie in Asia in 1931, when the Japanese army sabotaged a railroad line in northeastern China. From here, trace the invasion of 1937 and the brutal Rape of Nanjing. Witness the events through the eyes of a Chinese soldier and a Japanese journalist, young men who bore witness to the flesh and blood of battle.
City of Life and Death from Kanopy.com
The first big-budget fiction film by the Chinese to deal with this seminal event in their modern history, CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH is a visceral, heartbreaking portrait of life during wartime, and an unforgettable masterpiece of contemporary world cinema.
In the Name of the Emperor is a monument to the suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese during World War II. It weaves together rare footage of the Japanese occupation, diary entries from Americans who were there, and the eyewitness accounts of surviving Japanese soldiers. Especially unique is the newly discovered film footage of the massacre shot by John McGee, an American missionary who was living in Nanjing. These war crimes continues to disrupt diplomatic relations between Japan, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan to this day. The horrors captured in this ground-breaking documentary reminds us of the exploitation and suffering of women, and indeed all civilians during war time.
This documentary recounts the historical events leading up to the terrifying occupation: the growth of China’s capital city, Nanjing; the expansionist ambitions of Japan; and the large Japanese army, intent on revenge after meeting fierce resistance by the Chinese army in the defense of Shanghai. Archival film footage depicts the full horror of the genocide in Nanjing, in which some 300,000 people were killed and 80,000 women were raped, in a one month period. These distant wartime events take on a deeper meaning when the film focuses on the effect the occupation had on one Nanjing family, the Wangs.
Over the course of six weeks in 1937-38, Imperial Japanese forces massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war as the Empire of the Rising Sun turned China’s capital, Nanking, into a veritable Hell on Earth. This program seeks both to expose and to understand that shocking outrage against humanity through the testimonies of the last surviving Japanese veterans and the recollections of Chinese eyewitnesses.
This 52-minute documentary is broken into segments based on topic including Westerners Leave Nanking, Japanese Atrocities in Nanking, Military Rule in Japan, Photographic Evidence of Japanese Atrocities in China, Military Leaders Recalled to Tokyo, and 1945: War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo among others.
