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Definitions of digital storytelling

When we talk about digital storytelling two definitions comes to my mind. In general, I tend to describe it as a movement and practice, however I recently encountered a more detailed description of the fields of digital storytelling.

Professor John Hartley from Queensland University of Technology in Australia outlines the following elements as parts of ‘digital storytelling’:

As a form, it combines the direct, emotional charge of confessional disclosure, the authenticity of the documentary, and the simple elegance of the format – it is a digital sonnet, or haiku.

As a practice, digital storytelling combines tuition of the individual with new narrative devices for multiplatform digital publishing across hybrid sites.

As a movement, it represents one of the first genuine amalgamations of expert and consumer/user-led creativity.

And as an elaborated textual system created for the new media ecology, digital storytelling challenges the traditional distinction between professional and amateur production, reworking the producer/consumer relationship. It is a contribution to (and test of) contemporary thinking about media literacy and participation, storytelling formats, and content distribution. (Hartley, in press)

So I must admit, that my definition of digital storytelling was quite short. Digital storytelling represents more than a new media practice; it also includes an emergent form and an activist/community movement.

The beginning of digital storytelling

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”Cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson was asked in the 1950s if he believed that computer artificial intelligence was possible. He responded that he did not know, but that he believed when you would ask a computer a yes-or-no question and it responded with “that reminds me of a story” you would be close.” (Lambert, 2002:21)

As long as humans have existed on this earth we have used whatever medium we have had available to share our stories, from the gatherings around the bonfire to papyrus to the digital media of today. Without going into detail, I will state that storytelling is to be seen as the core of human activity and the creation of narratives always has been the most significant symbol of humans’ way of communicating, such as Bateson emphasized in the quote above (further readings; Aristotle’s Poetics, Roger Schank 1990). In other words, as humans we have a need to express ourselves, and we tend to do that through stories.

Nowadays the digital media facilitate a variety of modalities, through which anyone with the appropriate computer skills can tell his or her story. It is in this area that digital storytelling operates. Digital storytelling as a method and a movement gives people a voice through the use of computer tools (Lambert, 2002) or as one of the founders of the digital storytelling movement Daniel Meadows precisely express it:

“Digital Stories are short, personal, multimedia tales, told from the heart. Anyone can make them and publish them on screens anywhere.”(Meadows, 2001)

So Digital Storytelling is about sharing stores and build a better world… is that all, I keep wonder? My intuition tells me no. I have to found out, what it is good for?

/Anne Hvejsel

What is it good for? – Power of Multimodality (No.2)

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Why make digital storytelling? What are the benefits? We are trying to find theoretical and practical answers in this serie, where we ask the question: what is it good for?

“In our experience, digital stories have wide appeal among children, in part simply because they are multimodal and digital, and thereby allow individuals those compositional means and rights that used to be associated just with the world of mass media”

In the paper “Locating the Semiotic Power of Multimodality” the authors, Glynda Hull and Mark Evan Nelson, examine what makes digital storytelling so appealing and helpful for at-risk youth. With a theoretical focus on new literacies or multi-literacies they analyze the effects of learning through a different system of signification.

The authors notes that it’s problematic that the educational politics (In US. red) outline a focus on reading and writing as the only way to be literate. The new forms of reading and composing should be considered as supplement to the traditional perspective on literacy rather than a treath.

In thinking of multimodal texts, the student suddenly have a array of choices to make about semiotic features, and the process of design becomes more diverse. He/She has more choices to be made and there will be more possibilities that the student find that semiotic significant system which express his feelings.

”The point is that images, written text, music a so forth each respectively impart certain kinds of meanings more easily and naturally than others. ”

Reference:
Locating the Semiotic Power of Multimodality
By Glynda Hull and Mark Evan Nelson

What is it good for – Crafting an agentive self (No.1)

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Why make digital storytelling? What are the benefits? We are trying to find theoretical and practical answers in this serie, where we ask the question: what is it good for?

“To tell others who you are can play an important role in the contruction of an agentive self.”

The point is taken from the paper “Creating an Agentive Self”, a paper based on fieldstudies of a digital storytelling program for at-risk youth called DUSTY – Digital Underground StoryTelling for Youth.

Dealing with at-risk youth, the authors aim to ”illustrate how alternative spaces for learning can sometimes effectively support adolenscents´interests in literacy and foster their developing sense of agency.”

With a solid theoretical framework based on Miller (1994), Bruner (1994), Bakhtin (1981) and Baumann & Briggs (1990) they draw the conclusion that a digital storytelling program helped two students ”to articulate pivotal moments in their lives and to assume agentive stances toward their present identities, circumstances and futures.”

Reference:
Crafting an Agentive Self. Case studies on Digital Storytelling, by Glynda Hull and Mira-Lisa Katz