As I listen to the Center for History and New Media’s Digital Campus podcasts, I follow their links and try out the recommended applications. I responded to their call for professors to “start your blogs” by creating Tellhistory on WordPress. I set up a page in Facebook in order to view Jeremy Boggs’ Facebook/WordPress course page, and signed on for de.licio.us, GoogleReader, Zotero, Flickr, and StumbledUpon—apparently a substitute for solitaire. Zotero is, hands down, the most useful application that I have adopted.
When I set up my de.licio.us account, I planned to review it after I accumulated a critical mass of links. Once I began “tagging”, the “cloud” of tags grew with large bold fonts highlighting the richest fields. De.liciou.us is more like gardening than solitaire—I found myself recursively weeding and dividing my little plots. When I followed the roots of sites that I had tagged, I found other de.licio.us users along with their tag clouds, and tagged resources. This was fascinating–far more addictive than StumbledUpon. With over 1,000 sites tagged in my de.licio.us account, the time to assess the results had arrived. So let me unpack the sites linked under the tag “digitalstorytelling.”
I guess truth in advertising is appropriate here. My sister Hilary McLellan is a scholar and teacher of digital storytelling. She is the author of one of my tagged sites, Tech-Head Stories, a rich and very early resource for grassroots new media production. Hilary introduced me to the Center for Digital Storytelling with its motto, “Listen Deeply. Tell Stories.”
The Center holds that “Every community has a memory of itself. Not a history, nor an archive, nor an authoritative record… A living memory, an awareness of a collective identity woven of a thousand stories.“
Digital storytelling seems to be an increasingly blurred category–much of what I describe on tellhistory could be considered digital storytelling. The definition offered on the production/consulting/training oriented MediaJazz site reflects more of a game producer take on digital storytelling: “Digital storytelling and scenarios are advanced forms of entertaining communication. They take the sensory allure of multimedia and turn it into a persuasive and educational form of communication with maximum emotional impact. Digital storytelling and scenarios have a variety of applications including enhancing computer-based training, supplementing decision support tools, and creating powerful presentations.” This does not do justice to the grassroots, democratic, storytelling movement.
The tools and resources for digital storytelling reflect the popularity of a new approach to self-documentation and home-mode documentary production. These include familiar applications like IMovie, PowerPoint, and ILife along with more specialized tools like VoiceThread, described earlier on this blog. 669 people have tagged Alan Levine’s CogDogRoo Storytools page. Nora Paul and Christina Fiebich offer a guide, The Elements of Digital Storymaking/building/telling, A project of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Institute for New Media Studies.
Broadcasters have latched onto digital storytelling as a strategy to actively engage their listeners. KQED offers workshops and a contest (the new round begins in April) as part of the Digital Storytelling Initiative The BBC’s project, Telling Lives, offers this definition: “Everyone has a story to tell. Technology now allows anyone to tell it in their own way. Digital stories are short films made by people like you using computers and personal photographs.“
Numerous projects reflect the zeitgeist of Digital Storytelling even when they do not use the term including StoryCorps. An early and enduring personal favorite is a 2001 collaborative project at OnRampArts. Intereactive: Space portrays Los Angeles through 5 cross-cultural, interactive narratives that explore a shifting, layered experience of urban space. Explore a kitchen while preparing a delicious tamale or walk to church through an ever shifting and sometimes downright uncomfortable but familiar neighborhood. The QY Crashpad is a “Virtual Safehouse for GLBTQ Youth.” Roll over the opening image of an urban building and the windows light up, “Wander through each of the rooms to find young video makers who have important stories to tell. Stories the world needs to hear to understand what it’s like to be YOUNG, LGBT and of COLOR.”
Digital Storytelling often relates to fostering a sense of place and community building. This is evident in projects aimed at StoryMapping, recounting tales of New Orleans as well as in the map based stories of New York City in CityLore’s City of Memory site.
Returning to de.licio.us, I’ve found that it offers me a way to corral topics, ideas, and examples and then to use these at a later date. I enjoy the democratic connections, almost sympathies, that de.licio.us permits by linking to others with similar interests or “tags”. I confess that it is often only as I review categories, that I add the comments which make this a more effective Web2.0 resource. On the whole, this is a tool that I plan to continue using.
[...] have written in the past about Digital Storytelling projects and resources. The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown [...]