Author: Chris Thomson

The last post looked at what I perceive to be “traditional” digital storytelling; a short, personal narrative, usually in the form of a slideshow-style movie. It’s a very effective method of telling stories digitally, but not the only one. 

If we make an assumption that a digital story should fulfil a number of criteria:

• Contains a “narrative” of some description (I’ll examine what “narrative” can mean in a future post)
• Is enhanced by digital media (but need not be exclusively in the digital realm)
• Is intended to elicit some form of emotional response from the viewer

…then that gives us large scope for including many different approaches.

Without going into too much depth at this stage, to help explain DS in workshops I’ve run, I’ve described a sort of simple narrative continuum that runs from “Strong” to “Loose”.

• Strong narrative – has a very clear structure and aim. Could be characterised as a “once upon a time” story. Most movies, novels etc would come into this category. A single author’s voice is guiding the audience step by step through this narrative.
• Loose narrative – There is little or no guidance from an author how to move through these naratives. The audience is presented with fragments of the story and they play a more active role in constructing their own narrative from them. Imagine wandering casually through an art exhibition.

Digital stories could appear at any point on this continuum and still meet the 3 basic criteria I mentioned above.

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Stories in text

Blogging itself come in many different forms but many, particularly those that involve some sort of personal or group reflection on experiences. Easy incorporation of digital media through uploading or embedding can add extra colour to these stories and hyperlinks to other sites (and stories) place the narrative in a much wider context.

Single blog posts can be seen as stories in their own right but over time the whole blog becomes an extended story, potentially showing personal transformation over time.

Here are a few examples

• The Name’s Bond, Miss Bond – a Year 1 teacher’s reflective blog
• The Wonderful World of @Loopygirl – a personal blog “based on actual events, experiences, dreams, creative moments, flashbacks and memories of childhood from my life”.

Hopefully, when complete, this blog will also tell a the story of my progress through this dissertation project!

These can also be dialogic stories as the audience add their own comments, “amplify” the story using social media or link to them through their own blogs.

We can extend this out to include social media sites themselves. Currently Facebook is rolling out a feature called “Timeline” to its users. This is a way of presenting all or a selection of a user’s interactions on Facebook in one place and in chronological order. The stories already exist, as they do on services like Twitter, of LinkedIn, but “Timelines” is a much more conscious attempt to present these as a whole narrative. The video on the site linked to above strongly shows this.

There are tools starting to emerge like Storify that allow users to take elements of social media spread out over disparate services and produced by multiple users and to create coherent narratives from them. This is being embraced the growing number of “citizen journalists” and event organisers as a way of capturing the flows of communication, adding a layer of meaning or commentary to them and sharing them with a wider audience.

Stories in sound

Like blogging, podcasting is quite an established use of web2.0 technology where the method of telling stories involves recording the voice instaed of text. It’s more complicated to incorporate other media in these such as movies or images but, like blogs these stories can still exist in a wider social media universe.

• Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory – This American Life podcast including a story about a journalist’s visit to Foxconn’s manufacturing plants in China.
• Audioboo – Deputy Mitchell’s channel for recording the work of his class and personal reflections.

Stories with maps

This is the UK Sound Map, produced over 2010 and 2011 by the British Library.

Members of the public were encouraged to record sounds they came across using their smartphones and publish them using a service called Audioboo. As well as sharing these sound recordings out over social networks, Audioboo also “geotags” the recordings, adding metadata that includes the latitude and longitude of where the recording was made.

These “Boos” were collated by staff at the library and, thanks to the geotagging, it was possible to place these recordings on a map. 

These sounds then offer a loose narrative of life in the UK at a particular time.

A more sophisticated example would be the Nagasaki Archive, a Japanese project to capture the experience of the atomic bomb dropped there in 1945 and how it affected the lives of the residents. It uses Google Earth as a basis for an immersive, multi-layered experience, using maps, overlayed images, social media and written testimony from survivors. 

If you have the Google Earth plugin installed for your browser you can view the interactive map here.

Below is a short video demo, hosted on YouTube.

Mapped stories acknowledge the fact that stories take place in space as well as time and can exploit the growing number of easy-to-use technologies around digital mapping to present those narratives in spatial context.

Stories with data

This is an emerging field, although it could be argued it’s been emerging since the Crimean War! Data can be presented visually to convey a message that remains hidden in its raw form. 

Current proponents in this field include David McCandless, a data journalist who explained his craft and what it can achieve at a TED talk in July 2010.

Although this uses modern technologies to get across its story, as this article from the Guardian in 2010 shows, the techniques owe alot to pioneers such as Florence Nightingale.

Interactive stories

Making perhaps full use of digital technology, some storytellers are making interactive experiences to convey their message.

Inanimate Alice describes itself as a “digital novel” by author Kate Pullinger and digital artist Chris Joseph. It uses a mixture of text, images, animation, sound and music within an interactive framework to tell a story that is emerging over a number of chapters. It’s different from the examples above as it’s fiction but also that it is entirely professionally produced. The technologies involved are not immediately accessible to non-experts, at least at the moment.

A more recent example would be One Millionth Tower, a browser-based documentary put together as a result of a collaborative project between a local community, architects and digital artists and exploits recently developed web standards like HTML5 and WebGL to create an immersive series of stories about life in a tower block in Toronto. Incidentally, it also uses data to enhance it’s story; the virtual environment that the story plays in reflects weather and light conditions in Toronto at the time.

NOTE: You need to view this website with a browser that can support HTML5 and WebGL such as the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox. You can watch a non-interactive version below.

In summary, this is not an exhaustive list of different types of digital story and almost all these approaches can be used for non-narrative reasons but they are all methods that storytellers can appropriate. Some of these techniques, especially stories using data and interactive stories require a lot of expertise but are still useful to demonstrate the variety of ways of digital storytelling.

Header image – If you’re not confused by B Tal – By-NC

See Bibliography for the references in this post

It’s crucial that I define what “digital storytelling” actually is right at the outset. There is another question higher up the chain , namely “what is storytelling”, which also needs to be answered but involves a much more complex answer so, purely for convenience I’m going to push it to one side for now.

If you want a short answer, try these. Digital Storytelling (DS) is:

“A short, first person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images, and music or other sounds.” (Centre for Digital Storytelling – http://www.storycenter.org

Gravestock and Jenkins put it equally briefly:

“Digital storytelling combines a narrative with images that support and enhance the narrative” (2009: 250)

Both these definitions derive from the origins of digital storytelling as a methodology. McLellan (2006) documents how DS partly emerged therough the efforts of Joe Lambert and Dana Atchley in California in the early 90s. They and others were keen to explore “how personal narrative and storytelling could inform the emergence of a new set of digital media tools” (CDS – http://www.storycenter.org/history.html). 

The reason they were so interested was “the power of the personal voice for creating change.” (CDS). The focus of the San Francisco-based Centre for Digital Storytelling, that emerged from their work, was very much on empowering communities and individuals to participate in society.

“The premise for digital storytelling is very simple. It is designed to help people tell stories from their own lives that are meaningful to them and their audience, using media to add power and resonance, and create a permanent record.” (McLellan 2006, p70)

McLellan’s quote above highlights another important aspect of DS. It is about story first and digital second. This is further emphasised by Gravestock and Jenkins (2009, p252). The digital means are just that: means. The end is the telling of a story. This is helpful for widening the definition of what makes a digital story as I’ll explain later in part 2.

There are 2 examples from the UK that demonstrate this community voice approach to DS:

• Capture Wales
• Patient Voices

Capture Wales is a BBC Cymru Wales project for documenting “real-life stories made by people from across Wales” and as such is creating a braoder meta-narrative on life in Wales over the last few generations (Meadows 2003). I often use one particular example from this archive to introduce people to the concept of DS and although it uses archival footage rather than still images as most digital stories do, it gives a clear picture of how different digital media can be combined to tell a personal and meaningful story. 

The Miner’s Wife

Patient Voices, started by Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner in 2003 is storytelling for a very particular social purpose. The stories are created by people undergoing medical treatment…

“…so that those who devise and implement strategy in health and social care, as well as the professionals and clinicians directly involved in care, may carry out their duties in a more informed and compassionate manner. ” (Patient Voices)

The examples of storytelling that can be found on CDS, Capture Wales and Patient Voices adhere to a particular format of DS which comes from the methodology of the projects that created them. The stories are created in workshops that take place place over several days where the story tellers are encouraged to form their stories, locate images and other media and combine them using software like iMovie or Moviemaker. This has led to a very recognisable form.

In part 2 I want to expand this idea of digital storytelling and show how it can encompass many different forms of narrative and technology.

In part 3 I’ll begin looking at the pedagogy of DS.