Digital storytelling for public engagement at #digifest14
A selection of tweets, reflections and resources from the Netskills/BCE workshop on digital storytelling for public engagement at the Jisc Digital Festival, Birmingham 12th March 2014
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Caroline Ingram and I presented this short workshop to a packed room of about 30 people who had made it to the upper reaches of the ICC in Birmingham. We were delighted at the turn out and the group was brilliantly engaged with the topic, asking some astute questions and actually inspiring me to explore some new areas!An hour wasn't a lot of time, but as luck would have it, there is a funded 1 day workshop on the topic that we're running in Manchester on April the 29th! Here's the link…
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Netskills: Digital storytelling for public engagement‘Digital Storytelling’ refers to a combination of approaches and technologies that help people with little or no professional experience of digital media to produce short, narrative-based videos. Despite the simplicity of the approach, these stories can be highly engaging and often emotionally powerful. Stories are a great way of making complicated ideas meaningful to a wide audience.
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Anyway, this is what went down!
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Digital storytelling for public engagement session is about to start at #digifest14
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Digital storytelling for public engagement
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The Terrible Twosome!
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Paul McKean was valiantly live-tweeting on behalf of the conference. Thanks, Paul.
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@cbthomson digital storytelling: digital media in various formats put together to convey a story #digifest14
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That's the short version. We talked about how there are many different flavours of DS out there. The one I was talking about is based on the method developed by JOe Lambert and the Centre for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley.
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Digital storytelling for public engagement: easy and low cost way of telling stories about your research. #digifest14
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OK, perhaps I should have explained that better; it's not easy! It's just easier than trying to do full video production. Also, there is cost when you factor in how much planning and production time you need to do a really powerful digital story. It can be days of work, rather than hours.
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At the JISC Digital Storytelling workshop #digifest14 giving me some great ideas e.g. the ‘Dear John’ one on here http://curiositycreative.org.uk/curiosity-creative-digital-stories/jisc-netskills-and-infonet/ …
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Dear John
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Steve's story wasn't created as a piece of public engagement, but I used it as an example as I think it's really good at showing how research can be opened up to audiences beyond academic walls in a powerful way. It adds a human voice to science. Thanks Steve for letting me use it
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Powerful example of a digital story shown by @cbthomson #digifest14
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Digital story: Delegate – A different calmer way of engaging me against the noise of video I’m suffering from video fatigue #digifest14
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Dave was commissioned to write this story by the Jisc BCE team. He's obviously extremely skilled at media production so it's good to see how a story can be told and still be visually sophisticated. When I showed it to the workshop I asked them to separate out in their minds the media production and the fundamental story.
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“You had to be there” – digital story by David White
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If you want to know more about the writing process behind Dave's story, I blogged about it on Netskills Voices…
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Fine-tuning your storytellingWriting stories is difficult. That’s especially true if you’re used to writing in other formats, particularly in the academic world. I recently went through a process of script development with friend of Netskills Dave White from Oxford Uni and thought the process was worth passing on for people who might be trying to do something similar.
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Frank Norman (sat in the front row) tweeted an example of his own.
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This is a nice piece of digital storytelling from @MRCcomms http://www.insight.mrc.ac.uk/2013/08/01/writing-women-a-wikipedia-edit-a-thon/ … #digifest14
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I like Mark's Tweets about authenticity.
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Use of digital storytelling allows the narrative to be personal, authentic and controlled by the storyteller #digifest14
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Digital storytelling can raise questions of authenticity. How do we know the story is true or real? Should we care? #digifest14
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Good question, Mark! 🙂
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Chris Thomson on digital storytelling: “All great stories should have a dragon in them somewhere” #digifest14 #dragons
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The point of the dragon is that the most powerful stories are the ones that clearly articulate what hurdles have been encountered and how the protagonists attempt to overcome them. Remember, not all stories have to be about defeating the dragon. Sometimes the dragon wins!
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Use of still images & audio engages is authentic & creates emotion & interest #digifest14
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Really interested in issues of emotional ambiguity, trust & manipulation in digital storytelling #digifest14
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Lorna Campbell made a really good point about the dangers of including emotion in storytelling. What makes something engaging emotionally and what makes something else manipulative? Storytellers need to be aware of where this line appears for them and to behave ethically. Stories are not a benign force.
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Good advice from Chris Thomson for all writers and storytellers: nail your first and last sentences #digifest14
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@cbthomson include somebody in your story personalise it even if it’s about an institution or business #digifest14
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@georgeroberts questioned early on about just how "digital" these stories really are. Yes, they include digital media, but the digital landscape is now much more multi-faceted than it was when "digital storytelling" in the sense that I was describing was forming in the early 2000's. We had a good conversation about the affordances of the web for storytelling and how these digital stories can actually be part of a much more diverse form of storytelling that encompasses other forms of media and social interaction.Reminded me of this "Storyhack" event I'd come across last year…
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…and I mentioned some other flavours of digital storytelling – you can find these links in the slide deck above towards the end. Check out the Nagasaki Archive, which is my favourite. There's a great Youtube Screencast of it below.
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Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Archive
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It all seemed to go down well with the audience…
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Great digital storytelling workshop at #digifest14 I can see it being really effective for evaluative assessment for learners too
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Really impressive digital storytelling workshop with @caro11ne and Chris Thomson of @netskills #digifest14
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“@LornaMCampbell: impressive digital storytelling workshop with @caro11ne & Chris Thomson of @netskills #digifest14” – agreed, v.good
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#digital #storytelling is fab, best workshop yet – I do have a question though, can your digital story be #accessible ? #digifest14
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OK, let me answer that question because it's important. The answer is yes, although it requires work to do it well. It's important to include at least a transcript but that's not user-friendly. Youtube does captioning really well without having to do much input of text or editing although it does need a clear audio track for voice recognition. Amara will do something similar but can be more fiddly and outputs the video separately from the non-subtitled version. amara.org/en/In terms of production, writing stories requires a certain level of literacy/language skills but THere are loads of good exmaples of digital stories built around recorded conversations. Video editing needs fine motor skills but this can of course be facilitated by someone.It's not necessarily about Accessibility (capital A) but communicating through stories does enable communication with wide audiences, whereas more formal approaches me be less accessible (small A).
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Last word goes to @dkernohan (Although he wasn't necessarily talking about my session).
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#digifest14 somehow getting the idea that poets and storytellers will shape the future, not technologists.
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