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Digital storytelling

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Digital Storytelling refers to using digital tools so that ordinary people can tell their own real-life stories.

An emerging term

"Digital Storytelling" is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity.

The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games).

As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.

Development and pioneers

The broad definition has been used by innumerable artists and producers to link their practices with traditions of oral storytelling and often to delineate work from the highly produced commercial or conceptual projects by focusing on authorship and humanistic or emotionally provocative content. Some of the artists that have self-described as digital storytellers included Joe Lambert, Abbe Don, Brenda Laurel, Dana Atchley, and Pedro Meyer.

The short narrated films definition of digital storytelling relates back to the development of a production workshop by Dana Atchley at the American Film Institute in 1993 that was adapted and refined by Joe Lambert in the mid-1990s into a method of training promoted by the San Francisco Bay Area-based Center for Digital Storytelling.

Typically, digital stories are produced in intensive workshops. The product is a 2-5 minute film that combines a narrated piece of personal writing, photographic and other still images, and a musical soundtrack. The philosophy behind this type of digital storytelling is using technology to enable those without a technical background to produce works that tell a story using "moving" images and sound. The lower machine requirements for using stills rather than video, and the ease of use of iMovie with the so-called "Ken Burns" pan effect, allowed for the creation of short films by non-techies.

Digital storytelling is evolving from the simple narrated video to forms with interactivity and higher production values. These include websites and online videos created to promote causes, entertain, educate, and inform audiences.

Use by public broadcasters and education

This model has been integrated into public broadcasting by the BBC'sCapture Wales project. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England called Telling Lives. Swedish Educational Media company UR created Room for Storytelling [1], Netherlands Educational TV Tealac-NOT created a program with youth in Amsterdam. KQED, Rocky Mountain PBS, WETA and other public television stations in the US have developed projects.

The Center for Digital Storytelling model has also been adopted in education, especially in the US, where some practitioners use it as a method of building engagement and multimedia literacy. For example, the Bay Area Video Coalition [2] employs digital storytelling as a means of engaging and empowering at-risk youth.

Uses in Primary and Secondary Education: 

"The idea off merging traditional storytelling with today's digitial tools is spreading worldwide."  Anybody today with a computer can create a digital story simply by answering such questions as "What do you think? What do you feel?  What is important?  How do we find meaning in our lives?"[1] Most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. "These topics can range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe and every story in between."[2]

For primary grades you want your focus to be content related to what is being taught in your grade level, a story that will relate to your class and your students. Also for primary grades it is highly important that you keep your digital story to a maximum of five minutes to capture younger minds attention span. You want to include vibrant pictures, age appropriate music and narration. Narration accompanied by visible text narration can also help build vocabulary. These three attributes will keep the students engaged and learn from the information given in the story. For upper elementary and middle school students, content related digital stories can help students to understand abstract or layered concepts. For example, in one 5th grade class a teacher used digital storytelling to depict the anatomy of the eye and describe its relationship to a camera. Another fifth grader said, "This year I have learned that places are not just physical matter but emotional places in peoples' hearts. I-Movie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie."[3] 

The above mentioned aspects of digital storytelling, pictures, music, and narration, reinforce ideas and appeal to different learning modalities.  Secondary educators can use this tool to introduce projects, themes, or any content area.  Secondary educators can also allow their students to make their own digital stories, and then share them with others in their classes, school and on the internet.

The technology that is available to educators is free and accessible. If an educator is using a Macintosh, iMovie is the program to utilize. There are many features in iMovie that allow for images to be imported, organized, and set to a digital story. There are multiple views in iMovie and can be difficult to use without first taking an online tutorial. For those using a PC, Photo Story 3 is the program that will be best to use. However, if your computer has Windows XP you will have to use Movie Maker (Photo Story 3 is not compatible with XP). Both programs, Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker, are easy to use with a single click you can touch-up, crop, or rotate pictures, remove red-eye, add stunning special effects, soundtracks, and your own voice narration to your photo stories.

Faculty and graduate students at the University of Houston have created a website called the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling [3] which focuses on the use of Digital Storytelling by teachers and their students across multiple content areas and grade levels.

The National Writing Project (NWP[4]) has a collaboration with the Pearson Foundation examining the literacy practices involved in their digital storytelling [5] work with students.

Use by Teachers in Curriculum

"Teachers can incorporate digital storytelling into their instruction for several reasons. Two reasons include 1) to incorporate multimedia into their curriculum and 2) Teachers can also introduce storytelling in combination with social networking in order to increase global participation, collaboration, and communication skills. Moreover, digital storytelling is a way to incorporate and teach the twenty-first century student the twenty-first century technology skills such as information literacy, visual literacy, global awareness, communication and technology literacy."[4]

Uses in Higher Education: The distribution of Digital Storytelling in Higher Education emerged in the late nineties with the Center for Digital Storytelling collaborating with a number of Universities while based at UC Berkeley. CDS programs with the New Media Consortium [6] led to links to many campuses, where ongoing programs in Digital Storytelling have grown including Cal State Monterey, Ohio State University, Williams College, MIT, University of Maryland Baltimore, County [7], and the University of Wisconsin, Madison and dozens of others. In addition, Kean University, Virginia Tech, Simmons College, Swarthmore College, University of Colorado, Denver, the University of Calgary, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), and others have developed ongoing programs.

The distribution of digital storytelling among humanities faculty connected with the American Studies Crossroads Project represented a further evolution through a combination of both personal and academic storytelling. Starting in 2001, Rina Benmayor [8] (from California State University-Monterey Bay) hosted a Center for Digital Storytelling seminar on her campus and began using digital storytelling in her Latino/a life stories classes. Benmayor began sharing that work with faculty across the country involved in the Visible Knowledge Project [9] including Georgetown University; LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; Millersville University; Vanderbilt University, and University of Wisconsin–Stout. Out of this work emerged publications in several key academic journals as well as the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive [10].

Ball State University has a masters program in Digital Storytelling based in the Telecommunications Department, as does the University of Oslo [11].

Uses in Public Health, Social Services, and International Development: The development of the Silence Speaks project [12] in 1999 under the direction Amy Hill (who joined the Center for Digital Storytelling in 2005) led to the expansion of Digital Storytelling in countless contexts of public health. Projects developed with the Center for Disease Control, the Open Society Foundation, work in Gender-based violence prevention with groups in California, Texas, New York, Minnesota, and with the organization Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa, the broad use of Digital Storytelling with Foster Youth, and finally the connection to Digital Storytelling to public campaigns in substance abuse prevention and community mental health programs.

Uses in Museums: Digital storytelling is being used by many different museums, the largest project is currently taking place in the North East of England - Culture Shock! This project is using museum and gallery collections to inspire people to create their own digital story. These stories are also being added to the relevant museum collections. Another largest scale project being the work of the Australian Center for the Moving Image. The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. also held a series of trainings to integrate arts education curriculum with Digital Storytelling from 2003-2005. Some museums to help interpret and make community history accessible. In 2007, the Colorado Historical Society collaborated with the Center for Digital Storytelling to create a program, the Italians about Italian American History. In 2008, a group of eleven museums in Yorkshire launched My Yorkshire [13]; a digital storytelling project. The museums work with communities to use contemporary collected oral histories alongside those from archives to interpret local history from a personal point of view. Some interesting issues have arisen with the use of historical oral recordings and archival photos. The group have also produced help guides to creating digital stories in a museum setting. The finished digital stories can have many uses from advertising an upcoming exhibition or being a lasting legacy of a short term project to building relations with communiities, 'up-skilling' volunteers and being displayed as permanent features in galleries.

Place-based Digital Storytelling

The Canadian Film Centre's New Media Lab (formerly MediaLinx Habitat)launched a project Murmur (http://www.murmurtoronto.ca) out of the 2002-2003 studio. The project integrates audio interviews into cell phone based tours. The Center for Digital Storytelling created Storymapping.org in 2006 with projects in Mendocino, Ca, Houston, Texas, New Orleans, Tuscaloosa, Alabama to promote the connection between storytelling and issues of local memory and civic planning.

See also: Visual novel.

References

  1. ^ (Kompar, 2007)
  2. ^ (Kompar, 2007)
  3. ^ (Banaszewski, 2002)
  4. ^ (Kompar,F, 2007)

External links

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