Digital storytelling cookbook pdf

Social media has four main organizing principles:iv 1. Web 2. A simple interface generally belies complex functionality. Content is organized horizontally or nonhierarchically. This is data that can be shuffled and reorganized easily—often through tagging, a communal organizational structure. It is generated or built or improved upon by its users.

As media became first social and then mobile, it intertwined with the activities of everyday life. Media started to become less a way to tell stories and more a way to communicate—and so dominant a form that some fear it threatens to supplant face-to-face communication. As Nancy M. Photography is central to the social and cultural theories of memory and to how memory is constructed.

Whole narratives of families were told in photo albums, changing how we understood families. Memory is contextual as well, being hardwired both in the neurons of our brains and in mnemonic technologies like writing and photographs. Memory is a social matrix that enacts a complex dialogic between subjective and collective motives. Our memories are located within the mental and material spaces of the group…x like in those stories your family tells about you as a child that you only remember from these tellings or in a family photo album.

An individual memory is impossible, Connerton argues, for it always exists within the discourse network that is our culture, and even social groupings themselves are closed systems being discourse networks—or at least they were until the advent of social media.

Photography is an archival art—driven by the impulse to record or to inscribe—that is visual, collective, gendered, temporal and cultural. Cultural commodities like literature were inscribed on the soft clay tablets too, but they were designated only for short-term use, not for preservation.

When the invading Babylonians torched the Library of Ninevah, they did humanity a favor. They inadvertently baked the great Sumerian epics, like The Story of Gilgamesh, into a durable form to be preserved down the centuries.

It is unlikely that the snap you just took with your cell phone of your companion will have the same fate. Just as digital technologies are changing our brains, so our digital technologies are changing all of our memory systems. Not eroding our intelligence as some critics of the digital maintain , so much as shifting our priorities for what needs to be remembered.

Andrew Hoskins argues in Media and Memory for a dichotomy between archival and lived memory—between our old analog culture of storage and a digital-lived cultural presence of interactivity. Metadata, the infamous tags of the Web 2. Conversely, the tagging that we see in social media is not embedded in the story of a specific image.

Instead, it resituates or decontextualizes the image in a tag-based framework determined by search engines or machines, selectively remembering some attributes and forgetting others. These shifts in the ordering of photos allow us to forget how family albums were once a narrative device that produced memories, genealogies, sentimental stories, and identities.

Now we ourselves are products of information overload, constructed in a thousand different ways in datastreams like on Facebook for different communities and as fading moments in time. Identity is now as malleable and ephemeral as the digital image itself. In the 20th century, photography emerged as an art form. Is the power of photos not about their ability to tell stories?

Stories are visual in nature like the photograph. Exploring the complexities of photographs, Shawcross discusses how sometimes photographs do not narrate and will not give up their stories. Photography is not as transparent as it seems and the photographer, like a writer or film director, can shape or direct events. That message without a code can be the sin of omission as in photographic representations of historical times or power structures that leave women or minorities out of the picture altogether or images that tell different truths.

Shawcross draws upon the books of several writers for whom the photograph is central to their work. Kingston thereby foregrounds the authority of the word by challenging the gap in the visual narrative with her own imagined story.

Is the whole of this fiction a lie? Whose stories do the images tell? By contrast, look at how Virginia Woolf seamlessly wove images into her fanciful novel Orlando. Each of the family portraits bears a distinct family resemblance to each other and to Vita, and supplements the story of a never- aging youth who wakes one morning to find himself a she.

Figure 2: Where autobiography meet fantasy: "Orlando on her return to England. The cigar store owner Auggie Harvey Keitel reveals his secret passion, his album and art, to his customer and friend Paul William Hurt. Make sure that you watch the clip. All of the photos are black and white and they are arranged chronologically in a photo album. Paul is baffled and does not understand why Auggie would keep taking the same picture every day.

They are organized and bound and await their readership. They offer, however, an uncommon form of narrative: one that complicates customary expectations and limits the use of text to captions consisting of dates. As Paul learns to look and really sees the photos, he discovers something that brings him closer to his own past life too. I do not want to spoil the surprise. You will find out what he sees when you watch the clip. The setting may be the same, but the content of the image the weather, the light, the people in the frame, etc.

By limiting his narrative framework to such a small window, he in fact becomes a kind of modern day Scheherazadexxiii , the legendary Persian storyteller. He reinserts the human back into the urban landscape, onward into the text of his life, and the lives of those around him.

Auggie makes the mundane blur of humanity going about its business into a personal and interesting story. It is important that they understand how much can be conveyed in very few words, and how that story can be enhanced in a digital environment when enriched with images.

The students are encouraged to think about stories and images as a fresh and exciting medium told from a right-brained perspective, rather than as something linear, logical and god forbid predictable. Are you ready?

You will also come to see how different stories can be told visually and what an important role perspective and point of view play in storytelling. Digital Storytelling with Image and Text Brazilian writer Paul Coelho says that there are only two kinds of stories: stories of adventure where a hero goes out into the world, and interior or domestic tales where a stranger comes to town.

In Writing for Story, Jon Franklin says that plots follow the formula of complication, development, and resolution: the complication marks problems or troubles encountered by a person or people; developments are the snaky turns and twists of plot that result from answering or addressing the initial complication; and the resolution marks personal growth or a negative change in personality. In keeping with the general focus on life writing in traditional digital storytelling, Franklin argues for the essential nature of these approaches specifically in nonfiction and autobiographical tales.

Christopher Brooker in his book Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories provides a bit more complexity to both models in his study of well-crafted works from the Greek classics to modern film by providing a larger framework for storytelling. This site gives you a collection of photos with several different captions for each and then invites you to add your own character or less version. Try your hand at a few.

Digital Storytelling 11 Your first assignment for this class is a bit more complex. You are going to write a six-word story that is interwined with between 10 and 20 images. The images should not be illustrations of your story, but should instead add to your text. For your own story, you can start with an image or begin with the six words themselves. Powers starts from the photo and develops a novel out of what might have become of those three young men.

Your words can be placed within images or they can occupy separate screens, but the whole of your work should be woven together in a slide show at the end. You can use Powerpoint for this or Wix. A program that gives you the option of a freestanding slideshow that you can burn to a disk or save on a memory stick is best. When you start writing your digital story, you might at first find yourself on unfamiliar ground. Start with an idea and work from there.

The Digital Storytelling Cookbook published by the Center for Digital Storytelling recommends that you approach digital storytelling as a seven step process. First, find your story. Every storyteller is about the storyteller in some way. Look for the pivotal moment in the story—what is usually called the climax; find the centre of the tale that everything revolves around and you will have found the suspenseful hook that will catch your reader or audience.

The most affecting stories share your experience while transforming your audience by allowing them to find parallels in their own experiences. Supplement that language with implicit imagery. Further to our discussion of how illustration or explicit imagery will not necessarily advance your story, implicit imagery on the other hand adds metaphor and other layers of meaning to your tale.

A character dies as another gives birth, driving home the cyclical nature of life to us. Juxtaposition does not have to be simply visual either; it can cross or unite disparate media forms. The sociopathic nature of the attackers is driven home by the music like blunt force trauma to the viewers. Advertising often uses visual juxtaposition—linking perhaps high art and fast food— to sell you a lifestyle that you do not want. The fifth step is learning to pay attention to how sound conveys meaning.

New storytellers tend to want to fill up a story with sound. Once you are more experienced, you will see that less is more. Voice on its own can be tremendously affecting. Ambient sound can add a lot too, especially on a metaphorical level. The sixth step is finding the right structure to glue all of the elements of the story together. Like finding the climax, story structure is critical to whether the story conveys its meaning well or not.

Structure enables suspense and other deep responses from an audience. Complex structure also adds new layers to a story, making it richer and more interesting. The final step, of course, is sending your story out into the world. Digital storytelling is a communal process and it needs to be shared.

Why should we? We already have it figured out. When something isn't as it seems, we're wired to notice it, lest it be something that could harm us or help us.

Stories are about making sense of, and navigating, the unexpected. What lures us in is the desire to find out what's really going on. The sense of urgency we feel when our curiosity is piqued is actually a delicious dopamine rush that makes us pay attention.

The book does just that. It takes a very simple tale and tears it apart, telling it and retelling it in 99 different ways. The stories work because he never fails to dazzle our expectations. In fact, Madden dazzles us so much because the story is so simple. The story starts from a template. A man is sitting at his desk working on his computer. He stands and walks through the doorway on the way downstairs. What other experiments with points of view are undertaken? Other approaches that he offers variations on are in framing the equivalent of camera angles in the world of comics and in spatialized narratives.

Being a writer involves not just being able to tell a good story, but to tell a good story in unexpected ways. Part of that, as Madden demonstrates, is an understanding of the machinery and mechanics of a narrative. It is the story of the reading of a novel. The novel is composed of ten story fragments or first chapters. We therefore, like the fictional reader, return to the bookstore, anxious to continue reading the book we thought we had started.

After learning that the book we thought we were reading was interlaced with another book, the Reader seeks the other book, only to start the cycle all over again when that book proves to be a different story. Entwined with the reading of the book is the experience of reading the book itself. Each new first chapter is punctuated with reflections on reading, writing and the Other Reader—a woman named Ludmilla that the narrator meets in the bookstore. She has experienced the same capsizing of her reading experience.

Each chapter requires that we think about where we are situated in relation to the fictional tale and what our point of view is. The novel keeps starting over and interrupting itself. We could also read the book as an exploration of the nature of the social network that develops around a text and between readers.

It is a network composed out of the stands that the writer reads and the Reader chooses whether or not to pick them up. Calvino creates what we can now read as a virtual world or game space for the novel and characters to play out. Critic Nella C. How will these elements play out in your own stories? Study Questions 1. Identify which of the comics in 99 Ways to Tell A Story use different frames to tell their story.

How do they alter the original image? In 99 Ways to Tell A Story, identify which comics are told in the style of particular cartoonists or period genres. How does Madden apply these styles to tell his story? What is a metafiction? Finally, you should think about your audience! Moving from individual to collective storytelling: Digital stories can be used as a springboard for a participatory video process, and as a way of moving from very personal, individual work, towards a group storytelling project.

Central to this shift is a process of reflection and analysis of digital stories by the storytellers themselves. Collective storytelling through participatory video: Together, participants discuss and agree on a narrative for the film s they want to make, and go on to produce these films.

It is an empowering process, enabling people to take action for solving their own problems and communicating this to decision-makers, their communities and the wider public. The multimodal dimension where the participants produce their own digital video by the use of text, images, voice, music, animation etc. The challenge in this project is to gain this and also maintain the framed TPD theme in question — the science teacher profession.

In the workshop, we investigated when and in which ways sketching can be included in the DS process. In these sketching processes, the participants were asked to experiment with grouping some elements, deleting others, clarifying patterns and bringing certain similar issues closer together.

Research design and context As presented, this research stems from a small segment of a larger research project on online teacher professional development oTPD for science teachers in Danish elementary schools. The Kata Foundation is a non-profit project fund which works for the purpose of promoting knowledge about learning.

As a part of the qualitative data, a two- day DS-inspired workshop was conducted in December with two science teachers from an elementary school in Denmark; participation was not mandatory, but voluntary. The data collection linked to the workshop included a qualitative mail questionnaire completed by the teachers before the workshop, as well as reflection notes during and after the workshop produced by the facilitator and the co-facilitator, including an evaluation at the end of the workshop in the form of a talk with the participating teachers.

Furthermore, an interview was held with the co-facilitator shortly after the workshop, and a mail questionnaire was processed with the teachers a few months after the workshop and repeated one year after the workshop.

The workshop was arranged as a two-day workshop away from the school over three days, with one day back at school in the middle to relate the workshop to everyday activities. Prior to the workshop, reflection on current practice was initiated with a couple of questions and use of the online resource KpN.

The workshop began with questions like: what do I do as a science teacher; why do I do what I do; where am I now; and where do I want to go and how do I get there? This was followed by DS activities, such as manuscript writing, all framed within the science teacher practice.

The facilitator and co-facilitator both participated in these exercises and sharing, aiming to support a non-hierarchical setting and trust. The participants implemented these perspectives into their manuscripts after a sharing session, and then they individually recorded their voice-over and produced their digital video stories, which they shared in a feedback session.

They identified that one of their pivotal challenges was mutual, and they both chose to make these challenges the focal point in the following reflection exercises and story productions. These challenges were centred on difficulties with their science-teacher team. They both felt there existed a lack of knowledge-sharing and lack of collaboration in general on their team. Our approach to the data collection was partly ethnographical and narrative research and partly participatory action research Creswell, , e.

The planning and pre-phase were conducted with three researchers. We focused on identifying signs of reflection and agency. As such, the research rested on a methodological assumption that research of this kind may be well-investigated in small pilot-like sizes, but that these still have to take place in real contextual settings, in an intervention or real-life cases Creswell, , e.

They expressed an experience of personal benefit in relation to their practice. For example, they experienced that the explorations from different angles resulted in understandings they did not have beforehand, and both teachers pinpointed that, above all, the most important outcome of the workshop for them was new awareness and insights into what was missing for them personally.

During the workshop, the relation between the two teachers changed. Both teachers described how they were motivated to collaborate with each other in the future. This was a new motivation, given that the two teachers described their relationship as distanced beforehand, and that they did not have any specific interest in each other.

The fuel to establish this closer collaboration seemed to come from the identification of a mutual challenge and jointly striving to change aspects at their school; merely spending time discussing these issues provided each with a deeper knowledge of the other.

The interview with the co-facilitator showed that she pinpointed this improved relationship between the two teachers as a remarkable change during the workshop. The co-facilitator also noted that as the two teachers were the only two participants at the workshop, they were forced to relate to each other, where they might had avoided each other in larger settings.

The teachers stated in the evaluation that the actual implementation of the changes at the school was difficult, but they found that they were encouraged by having a fellow colleague with the same agenda.

They also described how their colleagues reacted with curiosity and interest to their experiences from the workshop. This evoked dialogues at the school, where colleagues expressed similar needs for knowledge-sharing on their teams, and they agreed to prioritise and improve this in the future. In the data collection two months after the workshop, one teacher responded that the workshop had been referred to several times at their school in the intervening time, and both teachers felt that something had shifted, even though some of these aspects still had not changed at the school.

The teachers described how they continued to try to create changes. For example, a meeting was organised focusing on collaboration, which uncovered how the school management could facilitate a better collaboration.

This issue had afterwards become something the school management had chosen to prioritise. The challenging part had been recording oneself voice. The teacher elaborated on the after-effects of the workshop and described how it had initiated ongoing reflection dialogues between the two participating teachers focusing on collaboration at their school. Though the overall experience has been positively evaluated by the teachers also over time , there was a large barrier in the first step — that is, to get teachers to take an active part in the initiative.

In the interview with the co-facilitator, she reflected on the sketching processes: she experienced them as challenging for the participants, but also beneficial. The challenge was an initial restraint among the participants to grasp, translate and deduce complex, lived issues into a visual image. The beneficial aspects included a somewhat playful approach to personal reflections and support as the participants were asked to put something at stake and bring challenging issues into the reflections.

In relation to TPD, the DS process is seen as useful, as it provides structure through phases and activities that aid in the formulation of issues that are important to the participants, which they themselves were not able to explicate to the same degree without the DS process. As DS did not originate in the field of learning, and certainly not as a professional practice TPD tool, but as a way of giving personal voice to participants, it also has some limitations.

Also, as shown in the theoretical section, several researchers and practitioners have included more participatory approaches. Our research is related to TPD and with teachers from the same school, who shared with colleagues on matters that were personal to their teaching.

It was therefore interesting to see that they shared willingly about difficult subjects, even though the participants had a strained relationship as they entered the workshop. This setting could have pushed the participants to maintain a distance and resist sharing of personal issues. Nevertheless, the participants expressed an improvement in their relationship and are motivated to collaborate more closely on joint matters.

In our analysis, we also investigated which ways sketching can be included in and support the DS process. The research review showed that, as DS often results in participants finding many and varied themes of interest, sketching was investigated to see if it could be used as a way of retaining the oTPD theme in the workshops and in the personal video stories produced.

It appears that DS and the sketching process supported both the first and second objective. The first was that the workshop provided a means for collecting data in relation to the larger research project focusing on TPD. Secondly, DS seemed to support professional reflection and TPD in particular insofar as that the teacher team became aware of issues they had not been explicitly aware of prior to the workshop.

Also, sketching supported a more contingent focus on the theme at hand, oTPD and KpN, meaning that a personal but common theme was clear for all present — i. However, the participants reported challenges in implementing fundamental changes back at their school, both on their teacher team and at the organisational level. In future research, it would be relevant to investigate possible development of DS and sketching approaches in TPD in terms of scalability, culturally diverse groups, a prolonged process, and using DS and related tools in online environments, e.

Even though the choice of only two participants was a matter of piloting the method, and the initial idea was to scale the number of participants at the workshop, there may be a particular strength in the size and that the participants was from the same team, turning the DS workshop into an almost team-building and mentoring setting.

It will be interesting to see if and how this can be scaled in the number of workshops and participants. References Akkerman, S. Alterio, M. Barak, M. Crawford, et al. Boje, D. Buxton, B. Creswell, J. Edition, Pearson, Boston. Estola, E. Craig , Lily Orland- Barak ed. Fletcher, C. Goldschmidt, G. Gythfeldt, M.

Refleksiv dannelse i et nyt perspektiv [translation: Is Beethoven a dog? In Pleasants, H. Cappelen Damm AS. Jamissen, G. Digital Storytelling in Higher Education. International Perspectives. Lambert, J. Lundby, K.