What do I mean by “digital storytelling”? Part 2
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.
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.
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