DIGITAL STORYTELLING ONLINE EVENT: to take place here, 3/28 and 3/29

This asynchronous (not live) event will take place in TechSoup’s Digital Divide Forum March 28 and 29. Topics will be discussed via forums posts and will not include a vocal component.

If you are interested in participating in our Digital Storytelling event, please just jump in and join the discussion – no registration is required. Each event topic will be discussed in a separate message-board thread.
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JOIN US AT OUR UPCOMING ONLINE EVENT
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Digital Storytelling: Using Technology to Create and Share Powerful Stories

Have a story you want to tell? Digital stories are being used by nonprofits, schools, and political activists to share experiences, voice concerns, and rally support for causes. In this two-day online event, you'll learn how to create a story that you can share with others.

This free online event takes place on March 28-29 at TechSoup's web site, no advance registration needed.
Just visit TechSoup's Digital Divide forum at
http://www.techsoup.org/digitalstory

This event is hosted by Daniel Weinshenker and Andrea Spagat of the Center for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives.

Hello all,
Just wanted to welcome you all to the digital storytelling event here. Andrea and I, both from the Center for Digital Storytelling (www.storycenter.org) are excited to be here to answer as many questions as we can about digital storytelling, from facilitation to implementation to publication.

Just to remind you, we'll be covering the following topics over the next two days:

• An introduction to digital storytelling.
• The importance of storytelling: Individual narratives in marketing, communication, education, and advocacy.
• Literacy and technology: How digital storytelling helps foster digital literacy, media literacy, and the democratic nature of the Web.
• The role of video in digital storytelling.
• Technical specs for digital storytelling: What it takes to run a digital storytelling program, from hardware to software.
• Key components of a digital story.
• Tools you can use to tell your story on a budget, including high-tech versus low-tech storytelling.
• How to publish your digital stories: What to do with those stories once they’re made, from posting them on Web sites to hosting public screenings.

As far as the introduction goes,

The Center for Digital Storytelling is a California-based non-profit 501(c)3 arts organization rooted in the art of personal storytelling. We assist young people and adults in using the tools of digital media to craft, record, share, and value the stories of individuals and communities, in ways that improve all our lives.

Many individuals and communities have used the term "digital storytelling" to describe a wide variety of new media production practices. What best describes our approach is its emphasis on personal voice and facilitative teaching methods.

We all have stories about the events, people, and places in our lives. In a group process, the sharing of these stories connects people in special ways. People often come to our workshops feeling insecure about their writing, about the technology, about their design sensibility. Many of the stories we show as examples in our workshops are directly connected to the images that one collects in a life's journey. But our primary concern is encouraging thoughtful and emotionally direct writing. At the end of the workshops, when the stories are presented, there is a bit of magic as the fruits of their own work, and those around them, surprises and inspires the participants.

This was just taken from our website, but if any of you want to take a minute to view some digital stories, you can do so at:

www.storycenter.org/movies

That should give you a good idea as to the range of the work that can be created out of our curriculum and methodology.

Welcome to the fray!

Thanks for making this event possible. I am looking forward to learning more about this topic!!

Thanks for the examples of digital storytelling, and what they are good for. I have a more fundamental question:


“What makes a good story?”

In other words,what is the design or architecture of a good digital story.

For example, in public speaking, one way of structuring a talk is “Tell them what you are going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them”. We could get into discussions of which powerpoint theme we should use, how many colors, whether to have animation or not, pictures or not and those are certainly important, but of greater importance and interest would be how to structure an effective talk so that the message gets across to the audience.

Following the same analogy, I would like to understand what makes a good digital story and what makes it effective (effective means something easily remembered, or successful call to action, or evoking a given emotion), and successful and unsuccessful to approach this. I have some vague ideas of what these might be for non-digital stories (e.g. jokes, fables, etc), but it would help me make better and more effective use knowing what to look out for in creating the stories. What I understand so far is that digital storytelling is a new multimedia communication technique which does not require the presence of a presenter, and requires audio, video and pictures to get the message across, rather than through a single media.

I am guessing that many in the audience and trainers are so familiar with storytelling that what I am asking is obvious. If so, an expression of their knowledge and experience would be useful to me.

Hi Shahid,

This is something I have been thinking a lot about as well. I really enjoy reading/writing and also listening to online stories like at StoryCorps or This American Life

I think, "Well what about that story is so powerful or interesting?" What I keep coming back to is...What point are they trying to make ultimately through their story? What was the essential meaning of the story?

For instance, a policeman who was on duty in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, re-tells to his wife one of the awful images that he recalls from that event.

While this recalling had import, what was ultimately the powerful message of the story was his underlying message to his wife: how sorry he was that he hadn't been able to talk about any of this up until that point. There was a distance between them because it had been too difficult for him to share the experience with her. His telling the story, exposed the underlying issue of the distance in their relationship. The kicker question at the end was when they asked each other whether they wanted to move from New Orleans after that horrible experience and both were in agreement that they didn't want to move. It was their home (and life together that was important). So powerful - Imagine how the story could have changed if either had said, yes, at that point.

So it wasn't ultimately the re-telling of his Hurricane experience which took most of the time, but this subtle underlying (almost unspoken, but somehow communicated) message of why the telling of this particular story was important.

That example has stuck with me...

Shahid,
Good question.
Though usually we try and steer clear from qualifications such as good or bad. In digital storytelling, there's both process and product. Sometimes the product (finished digital story) isn't effective as a piece to be shown, but as a process of learning and of expression, it was more than impactful.

That said, we have a guide to creating what we believe are effective digital stories.

You can read that guide here:

Digital Storytelling Cookbook

Best,
Daniel

Hi Shahid,

Great to have you with us. You've asked THE key question. Daniel is busily writing a reply to your post as we speak. One resource I can point you to is the CDS online digital storytelling cookbook at http://www.storycenter.org/resources.html.

Andrea

Hi Suzshaff

Thanks for the response; not knowing the full outcome of the story or what the digital story was I can't gauge what other outcome there might have been.

The learning for me from your experience is that (1) the underlying subject area is necessary (2) there is an underlying message that needs to be communicated.

My question here is: should the storyteller be absolutely clear about his or her underlying message, or is it up to the reader to draw his own conclusions about the author's message, or both.

In public speaking, a talk or presentation has to be absolutely clear on the purpose on what the message is in order to be remembered and effective.
In telling jokes, the purpose could be to entertain, or to demean or put down another person.
In telling fables, the purpose is to illustrate an example of something that is right or wrong.

This question comes up because of discussions I have had in the past with people about literary works. There are those who feel that it is up to the reader to determine his own conclusion. I feel that the author should make it clear what his point of view is, so that readers can then be clear about whether or not we agree with the point of view or the message, rather than spend the time debating what the point of view is. Given the amount of time spent in interpreting the message of the author of literary works, I would say that those works do not serve as examples of clear communication.

Shahid

Shahid,
I think there are very few people who like to be told what the meaning of a story is. They like to be lead there, and then have the space to interpret. For a good example, watch Tanya on our movies page.

It's only 1 minute long.
But it tells a full story.

It's incredibly honest and really sets the audience up in the first sentence. And then pays off in the final scene.

She could've ended the story by saying what it all meant, or summing up the experience, but she didn't. And in my opinion, that's what makes it "work". Because there's space for the audience to make sense of the act, the story.

Theshenk,

Thanks for the response. Yes, there are some who like to get their own meaning from the story, and there are also those like me who want to know clearly what the message is so I can evaluate the story in that light. When I know clearly what the message is, then I can think about that rather than hoping I interpreted it correctly.

I could not watch the story of Tanya today, but I believe I did about a month ago, and it was moving, it was powerful, and it was a personal experience which the author told that showed the consequences of external events and circumstances, and the most surprising thing was it fitted within a minute.

Shahid

Theshenk

Thanks, I try to keep away from qualifications such as good or bad, and use those terms to mean effective or not effective.

I skimmed through the Digital Storytelling Cookbook about a month ago, and I believe after our discussion today, it will be more meaningful when I read it again today.

So it appears that there are two parts to a digital story: (a) the finished product viewed by the reader (b) learning and expression by the author. If that is true, I would conclude that the more (b) can be woven into (a), the more effective and compelling it would be to the author.

In that sense, the storytelling serves a similar role as writing, to think, to organize, and to clarify thoughts, ideas and emotions but using pictures, sounds and video rather than primarily on the written word.

Thanks for the clarification.

Shahid

I want to give a bit of an overview of how we approach telling a "poweful" story - one that effectively conveys layers of meaning by making an emotional connection with the audience.

A couple of broad considerations - all digital stories should be short and very focused. They shouldn't be used to tell more than one story. The brevity of the form doesn't allow for it.

Three important pieces to this equation are point of view, dramatic question and emotional content. Briefly, determining the point of view means asking the questions what is the message we are trying to convey and to whom. In addition, with digital storytelling asking the question "why are we telling the story right now" often helps to clarify the essential topic of the story.

Creating a dramatic questions simply means making sure that the story establishes some type of tension. This is normally done by making a statement at the beginning of the story that creates a question in the audiences mind. That question is resolved by the end of the story and gives the audience closure.

Finally, emotional clarity allows the producer of the digital story write a script that is spoken from the heart. Often, we tell people in workshops to write from their own heart directly to the heart of their audience.

The Digital Storytelling Cookbook we keep referencing really is the more complete answer to Shahid's initial question. Hope this very, very brief overview helps somewhat.

Andrea

I was also thinking that it comes down to the purpose of your story... Are you in a teaching situation, or is the story for personal reflection and meaning-making within your own life - like a memoir....

This purpose then can play a major role in how you let the story unfold. If I'm trying to illustrate a point within a lecture, then sometimes I want the underlying message to be unambiguous (unless I want students to wrestle with a complex topic). Otherwise, I like being able to have the story provide multiple meanings for different people - because perhaps they read the story from their own perspectives and bring to it their own spin which may or may not provide insight to them, but hopefully interest and some pondering connected to their own lives.

Suz,
That's a good observation, but still, my thought would be that a story is a story is a story.

If you're using it in a teaching situation, fine.
That just means that it comes pre-packaged in a context, or that you can provide more "unambiguous" context around the telling/showing of the story before or afterwards.

And that means that the story itself can remain the same as it ever was.

I guess what I'm saying is that we get a LOT of teachers in our workshops. I'd say close to 60% of students in our public monthly workshops are teachers. And many of them feel like they need to come and tell pretty expository essays instead of narratives that approach story. And they feel they have to do this, my guess, for a few reasons.

1. They don't want to bring the personal into their teaching.

2. They want their students to do it but they don't want to do it themselves.

3. The education world has rarely put value on personal narratives or creative non-fiction and is still mostly stuck in the language of 5-paragraph essays.

But if I look back to the times when teachers really made a difference in my life it certainly wasn't when they were giving lectures. It was in their offices afterwards when they were telling stories.

So, the point of this is that maybe stories themselves don't need to be changed if you're in a teaching situation. That the changing of story to essay or lecture is precisely what makes so much of teaching unbearable and ineffective.

But I do agree with you on one of your points that sometimes the way in which you tell a story can and should be malleable for specific audiences. The story I'd write to my daughter might be different in delivery than the story I'd write to a large group of people.

Maybe.

Often times people come to our workshops and think that because they're telling a story that maybe they'll show to tons of people that the more general they can make it, the more it'll apply to everyone.

And of course the opposite is often true.

The more detailed and unique we can make our stories, the more involved and engaged our audience becomes.

Ok, will give my fingers a rest now.

Would love to hear all the comments on this,
so people, please join in!

-daniel

Hi Daniel,
Thanks for getting me thinking some more..

I guess I was thinking about the differences between examples used in illustrating a point and personal narratives for reflection and deeper thought...

I'll hobble off and ponder some more. Thanks for your thoughts!