Digital storytelling
Encyclopedia
Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital film-making that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story.
"Digital storytelling" is a relatively new term which describes the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their 'story'. Digital stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, they are usually less than 8 minutes long and can be interactive.
The term "digital storytelling" can also cover a range of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games); It is sometimes used to refer to film-making in general, and as of late, it has been used to describe advertising and promotion efforts by commercial and non-profit enterprises.
One can define digital storytelling as the process by which diverse peoples share their life story and creative imaginings with others. This newer form of storytelling emerged with the advent of accessible media production techniques, hardware and software, including but not limited to digital cameras, digital voice recorders, iMovie
, Movie Maker and Final Cut Express
. These new technologies allow individuals to share their stories over the Internet on YouTube
, Vimeo
, compact discs, podcasts
, and other electronic distribution systems.
One can think of digital storytelling as the modern extension of the ancient art of storytelling, now interwoven with digitized still and moving images and sound. Thanks to new media and digital technologies, individuals can approach storytelling from unique perspectives. Many people use elaborate non-traditional story forms, such as non-linear and interactive narratives.
Simply put, digital stories are short 2 to 3 minute multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice. Digital stories may be used as an expressive medium within the classroom to integrate subject matter with extant knowledge and skills from across the curriculum. Students can work individually or collaboratively to produce their own digital stories. Once completed, these stories are easily be uploaded to the internet and can be made available to an international audience, depending on the topic and purpose of the project.
, in the documentary The Civil War, cited as one of the first models of this genre. In his documentary, Burns used first-person accounts that served to reveal the heart and emotions of this tragic event in American history, as well as narration, archival images, modern cinematography, and music (Sylvester & Greenidge, 2009). Some of the other artists who have described themselves as digital storytellers are the late Dana Atchley, his collaborator Joe Lambert, Abbe Don, Brenda Laurel
, and Pedro Meyer
.
The "short narrated films" definition of digital storytelling comes from a production workshop by Dana Atchley at the American Film Institute
in 1993 that was adapted and refined by Joe Lambert in the mid-1990s into a method of training promoted by the San Francisco Bay Area-based Center for Digital Storytelling.
Typically, digital stories are produced in intensive workshops. The product is a short film that combines a narrated piece of personal writing, photographic and other still images, and a musical soundtrack. Technology enables those without a technical background to produce works that tell a story using "moving" images and sound. The lower processing and memory requirements for using stills as compared with video, and the ease with which the so-called "Ken Burns" pan effect can be produced with video editing software, have made it easy to create good-looking short films.
Digital storytelling was integrated into public broadcasting
by the BBC's Capture Wales project. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England titled Telling Lives. Sveriges Utbildningsradio
created Rum för Berättande (Room for Storytelling). Netherlands Educational TV Tealac-NOT created a program with young people in Amsterdam. KQED, Rocky Mountain PBS, WETA and other public television stations in the US have developed projects.Digital storytelling is evolving from the simple narrated video to forms that are interactive and look better. These include websites and online videos created to promote causes, entertain, educate, and inform audiences.
With the arrival of new media devices like computers, digital cameras, recorders, and software, individuals may share their digital stories via the Internet, on discs, podcasts, or other electronic media. Digital storytelling combines the art of storytelling with multimedia features such as photography, animation, text, audio, voiceover, hypertext
and video. Digital tools and software make it easy and convenient to create a digital story. Common software includes iMovie and MovieMaker for user-friendly options. There are other online options and free applications as well.
Educators often identify the benefit of digital storytelling as the array of technical tools from which students may select for their creative expression. Learners set out to use these tools in new ways to make meaningful content. Students learn new software, choose images, edit video, make voiceover narration, add music, create title screens, and control flow and transitions. Additionally, there is opportunity to insert interactive features for “reader” participation. It is possible to click on imagery or text in order to choose what will happen next, cause an event to occur, or navigate to online content.
Additionally, distinctions may be drawn between Web 2.0
storytelling and that of digital storytelling. Web 2.0 storytelling is said to produce a network of connections via social networking, blogging, and YouTube
that transcends beyond the traditional, singular flow of digital storytelling. It tends to “aggregate large amounts of microcontent and creatively select patterns out of an almost unfathomable volume of information,” therefore the bounds of Web 2.0 storytelling are not necessarily clear.
Another form of digital storytelling is the micromovie, which is “a very short exposition lasting from a few seconds to no more than 5 minutes in length. It allows the teller to combine personal writing, photographic images or video footage, narrative, sound effects, and music. Many people, regardless of skill level, are able to tell their stories through image and sound and share those stories with others.”
For primary grades the focus is related to what is being taught, a story that will relate to the students. For primary grades the story is kept under five minutes to retain attention. Vibrant pictures, age-appropriate music and narration are needed. Narration accompanied by subtitles can also help build vocabulary. Content-related digital stories can help upper-elementary and middle-school students understand abstract or layered concepts. For example, in one 5th grade class a teacher used digital storytelling to depict the anatomy of the eye and describe its relationship to a camera. A fifth grader said, "This year I have learned that places are not just physical matter but emotional places in peoples' hearts. I-Movie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie."
These aspects of digital storytelling, pictures, music, and narration reinforce ideas and appeal to different learning types. Teachers can use it to introduce projects, themes, or any content area, and can also let their students make their own digital stories and then share them.
Software such as iMovie
, Photo Story
3 or Movie Maker
do all that is required.
Faculty and graduate students at the University of Houston
have created a website, The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, which focuses on the use of digital storytelling by teachers and their students across multiple content areas and grade levels.
The National Writing Project
has a collaboration with the Pearson Foundation examining the literacy practices involved in their digital storytelling work with students.
With an emphasis on collaborative learning and hands on teaching, this website offer an in depth look at how to integrate 21st Century Skills with the objectives of a rigorous academic program:
http://nafcollaborationnetwork.org/curriculum-instruction/ci-pbl-ds.html
. CDS programs with the New Media Consortium
led to links to many campuses where programs in digital storytelling have grown; these include University of Maryland Baltimore, Cal State Monterey, Ohio State University, Williams College, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The University of Colorado, Denver, Kean University, Virginia Tech, Simmons College, Swarthmore College, the University of Calgary, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), the Maricopa County Community Colleges (AZ), and others have developed programs.
The distribution of digital storytelling among humanities faculty connected with the American Studies Crossroads Project was a further evolution through a combination of both personal and academic storytelling. Starting in 2001, Rina Benmayor (from California State University-Monterey Bay) hosted a Center for Digital Storytelling seminar and began using digital storytelling in her Latino/a life stories classes. Benmayor began sharing that work with faculty across the country involved in the Visible Knowledge Project including Georgetown University; LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; Millersville University; Vanderbilt University, and University of Wisconsin–Stout. Out of this work emerged publications in several key academic journals as well as the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.
Ball State University
has a masters program in digital storytelling based in the Telecommunications Department, as does the University of Oslo.
Digital storytelling is also used as an instructional strategy to not only build relationships and establish people's social presence online but also as an alternative format to present content.
project in 1999 under the direction of Amy Hill (who joined the Center for Digital Storytelling in 2005) led to the expansion of digital storytelling in public health. Projects developed with the Center for Disease Control, the Open Society Foundation, work in gender-based violence prevention with groups in California, Texas, New York, Minnesota, and with the organization Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa, the broad use of digital storytelling with Foster Youth, and finally the connection to digital storytelling to public campaigns in substance abuse prevention and community mental health programs.
The largest project is currently taking place in the North East of England - Culture Shock! This project is using museum and gallery collections to inspire people to create their own digital stories, which are also being added to the relevant museum collections.
Another large-scale project is the work of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
.
The National Gallery of Art
in Washington D.C. also held a series of classes to integrate arts education curriculum with digital storytelling from 2003-2005.
Some museums help interpret and make community history accessible. In 2007, the Colorado Historical Society collaborated with the Center for Digital Storytelling to create a program, The Italians, about Italian American History. In 2008, a group of eleven museums in Yorkshire launched My Yorkshire, a digital storytelling project. The museums work with communities to use contemporary collected oral histories alongside those from archives to interpret local history from a personal point of view. Some interesting issues have arisen with the use of historical oral recordings and archival photos. The group have also produced help guides to creating digital stories in a museum setting.
The finished digital stories can have many uses: advertising an upcoming exhibition, preserving a short-term project, building relations with communities. They provide skills to volunteers and can be permanently displayed in galleries.
Bilingual library staff work with participants to create a recording using the digital station, which can be integrated with a variety of media, including audio, video, pictures, and images. The digital storytelling station project called California of the Past is funded by a grant from the California State Library, U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and Technology Act, and administered in California by librarians. The Media Arts Center in San Diego facilitates this project.
Since 2006, San Diego has housed a story station in its downtown library. The Media Arts Center of San Diego partnered with the downtown public library to set up a story station where the public can create a three-minute video. The topics of the archived videos range from personal to historical documentaries.
's New Media Lab (formerly MediaLinx Habitat) launched a project, Murmur, out of the 2002-2003 studio. The project integrates audio interviews into cellphone-based tours. The Center for Digital Storytelling created Storymapping.org in 2006 with projects in Mendocino
(California), Houston, New Orleans, and Tuscaloosa
(Alabama) to promote the connection between storytelling and issues of local memory and civic planning.
"Digital storytelling" is a relatively new term which describes the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their 'story'. Digital stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, they are usually less than 8 minutes long and can be interactive.
The term "digital storytelling" can also cover a range of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games); It is sometimes used to refer to film-making in general, and as of late, it has been used to describe advertising and promotion efforts by commercial and non-profit enterprises.
One can define digital storytelling as the process by which diverse peoples share their life story and creative imaginings with others. This newer form of storytelling emerged with the advent of accessible media production techniques, hardware and software, including but not limited to digital cameras, digital voice recorders, iMovie
IMovie
iMovie is a proprietary video editing software application which allows Mac, iPod Touch 4th generation, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2 users to edit their own home movies. It was originally released by Apple in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-enabled consumer Apple...
, Movie Maker and Final Cut Express
Final Cut Express
Final Cut Express is a discontinued video editing software created by Apple Inc. It is the consumer version of Final Cut Pro and is designed for advanced editing of digital video as well as high-definition video, which is used by many amateur and professional videographers...
. These new technologies allow individuals to share their stories over the Internet on YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Vimeo
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004...
, compact discs, podcasts
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
, and other electronic distribution systems.
One can think of digital storytelling as the modern extension of the ancient art of storytelling, now interwoven with digitized still and moving images and sound. Thanks to new media and digital technologies, individuals can approach storytelling from unique perspectives. Many people use elaborate non-traditional story forms, such as non-linear and interactive narratives.
Simply put, digital stories are short 2 to 3 minute multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation, sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice. Digital stories may be used as an expressive medium within the classroom to integrate subject matter with extant knowledge and skills from across the curriculum. Students can work individually or collaboratively to produce their own digital stories. Once completed, these stories are easily be uploaded to the internet and can be made available to an international audience, depending on the topic and purpose of the project.
Development and pioneers
The broad definition has been used by many artists and producers to link what they do with traditions of oral storytelling and often to distinguish their work from slick or commercial projects by focusing on authorship and humanistic or emotionally provocative content. Digital Storytelling has been used by Ken BurnsKen Burns
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs...
, in the documentary The Civil War, cited as one of the first models of this genre. In his documentary, Burns used first-person accounts that served to reveal the heart and emotions of this tragic event in American history, as well as narration, archival images, modern cinematography, and music (Sylvester & Greenidge, 2009). Some of the other artists who have described themselves as digital storytellers are the late Dana Atchley, his collaborator Joe Lambert, Abbe Don, Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel is a pioneering writer, researcher, designer and entrepreneur in the fields of human-computer interaction, interactive narrative and cultural aspects of technology ....
, and Pedro Meyer
Pedro Meyer
Pedro Meyer is a well-known photographer based in Mexico. He is one of the pioneers of the digital revolution in contemporary photography...
.
The "short narrated films" definition of digital storytelling comes from a production workshop by Dana Atchley at the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
in 1993 that was adapted and refined by Joe Lambert in the mid-1990s into a method of training promoted by the San Francisco Bay Area-based Center for Digital Storytelling.
Typically, digital stories are produced in intensive workshops. The product is a short film that combines a narrated piece of personal writing, photographic and other still images, and a musical soundtrack. Technology enables those without a technical background to produce works that tell a story using "moving" images and sound. The lower processing and memory requirements for using stills as compared with video, and the ease with which the so-called "Ken Burns" pan effect can be produced with video editing software, have made it easy to create good-looking short films.
Digital storytelling was integrated into public broadcasting
Public broadcasting
Public broadcasting includes radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing and commercial financing.Public broadcasting may be...
by the BBC's Capture Wales project. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England titled Telling Lives. Sveriges Utbildningsradio
Sveriges Utbildningsradio
Sveriges Utbildningsradio — the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company — is a public-service corporation dedicated to serving the needs of the Swedish general public by providing educational programming on radio and television.-External links:**...
created Rum för Berättande (Room for Storytelling). Netherlands Educational TV Tealac-NOT created a program with young people in Amsterdam. KQED, Rocky Mountain PBS, WETA and other public television stations in the US have developed projects.Digital storytelling is evolving from the simple narrated video to forms that are interactive and look better. These include websites and online videos created to promote causes, entertain, educate, and inform audiences.
Components
The most important characteristics of a digital story are that it no longer conforms to the traditional conventions of storytelling because it is capable of combining still imagery, moving imagery, sound, and text, as well as being nonlinear and contain interactive features. The expressive capabilities of technology offers a broad base from which to integrate. It enhances the experience for both the author and audience and allows for greater interactivity.With the arrival of new media devices like computers, digital cameras, recorders, and software, individuals may share their digital stories via the Internet, on discs, podcasts, or other electronic media. Digital storytelling combines the art of storytelling with multimedia features such as photography, animation, text, audio, voiceover, hypertext
Hypertext
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
and video. Digital tools and software make it easy and convenient to create a digital story. Common software includes iMovie and MovieMaker for user-friendly options. There are other online options and free applications as well.
Educators often identify the benefit of digital storytelling as the array of technical tools from which students may select for their creative expression. Learners set out to use these tools in new ways to make meaningful content. Students learn new software, choose images, edit video, make voiceover narration, add music, create title screens, and control flow and transitions. Additionally, there is opportunity to insert interactive features for “reader” participation. It is possible to click on imagery or text in order to choose what will happen next, cause an event to occur, or navigate to online content.
Additionally, distinctions may be drawn between Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
storytelling and that of digital storytelling. Web 2.0 storytelling is said to produce a network of connections via social networking, blogging, and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
that transcends beyond the traditional, singular flow of digital storytelling. It tends to “aggregate large amounts of microcontent and creatively select patterns out of an almost unfathomable volume of information,” therefore the bounds of Web 2.0 storytelling are not necessarily clear.
Another form of digital storytelling is the micromovie, which is “a very short exposition lasting from a few seconds to no more than 5 minutes in length. It allows the teller to combine personal writing, photographic images or video footage, narrative, sound effects, and music. Many people, regardless of skill level, are able to tell their stories through image and sound and share those stories with others.”
Uses in education
The Center for Digital Storytelling model has also been adopted in education, especially in the US, sometimes as a method of building engagement and multimedia literacy. For example, the Bay Area Video Coalition and Youthworx Media Melbourne employ digital storytelling to engage and empower young people at risk.Uses in primary and secondary education
"The idea of merging traditional storytelling with today's digital tools is spreading worldwide." Anybody today with a computer can create a digital story simply by answering such questions as "What do you think? What do you feel? What is important? How do we find meaning in our lives?" Most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. "These topics can range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe and every story in between."For primary grades the focus is related to what is being taught, a story that will relate to the students. For primary grades the story is kept under five minutes to retain attention. Vibrant pictures, age-appropriate music and narration are needed. Narration accompanied by subtitles can also help build vocabulary. Content-related digital stories can help upper-elementary and middle-school students understand abstract or layered concepts. For example, in one 5th grade class a teacher used digital storytelling to depict the anatomy of the eye and describe its relationship to a camera. A fifth grader said, "This year I have learned that places are not just physical matter but emotional places in peoples' hearts. I-Movie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie."
These aspects of digital storytelling, pictures, music, and narration reinforce ideas and appeal to different learning types. Teachers can use it to introduce projects, themes, or any content area, and can also let their students make their own digital stories and then share them.
Software such as iMovie
IMovie
iMovie is a proprietary video editing software application which allows Mac, iPod Touch 4th generation, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2 users to edit their own home movies. It was originally released by Apple in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-enabled consumer Apple...
, Photo Story
Photo Story
Microsoft Photo Story is a free application that allows users to create a visual story from their digital photos. The software uses the Ken Burns Effect on digital photos and allows adding narration, effects, transitions and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with pan and...
3 or Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is a video creating/editing software application, included in Microsoft Windows Me, XP, and Vista. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie. New effects and transitions can be made and existing ones can be...
do all that is required.
Faculty and graduate students at the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
have created a website, The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, which focuses on the use of digital storytelling by teachers and their students across multiple content areas and grade levels.
The National Writing Project
National Writing Project
The National Writing Project is a United States professional development network that serves teachers of writing at all grade levels, primary through university, and in all subjects...
has a collaboration with the Pearson Foundation examining the literacy practices involved in their digital storytelling work with students.
Use by teachers in curriculum
Teachers can incorporate digital storytelling into their instruction for several reasons. Two reasons include 1) to incorporate multimedia into their curriculum and 2) Teachers can also introduce storytelling in combination with social networking in order to increase global participation, collaboration, and communication skills. Moreover, digital storytelling is a way to incorporate and teach the twenty-first century student the twenty-first century technology skills such as information literacy, visual literacy, global awareness, communication and technology literacy.
With an emphasis on collaborative learning and hands on teaching, this website offer an in depth look at how to integrate 21st Century Skills with the objectives of a rigorous academic program:
http://nafcollaborationnetwork.org/curriculum-instruction/ci-pbl-ds.html
Uses in higher education
Digital storytelling spread in higher education in the late nineties with the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) collaborating with a number of Universities while based at UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. CDS programs with the New Media Consortium
New Media Consortium
The New Media Consortium is an international 5013 not-for-profit consortium of more than 250 colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies.NMC member institutions are found in almost...
led to links to many campuses where programs in digital storytelling have grown; these include University of Maryland Baltimore, Cal State Monterey, Ohio State University, Williams College, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The University of Colorado, Denver, Kean University, Virginia Tech, Simmons College, Swarthmore College, the University of Calgary, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), the Maricopa County Community Colleges (AZ), and others have developed programs.
The distribution of digital storytelling among humanities faculty connected with the American Studies Crossroads Project was a further evolution through a combination of both personal and academic storytelling. Starting in 2001, Rina Benmayor (from California State University-Monterey Bay) hosted a Center for Digital Storytelling seminar and began using digital storytelling in her Latino/a life stories classes. Benmayor began sharing that work with faculty across the country involved in the Visible Knowledge Project including Georgetown University; LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; Millersville University; Vanderbilt University, and University of Wisconsin–Stout. Out of this work emerged publications in several key academic journals as well as the Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive.
Ball State University
Ball State University
Ball State University is a state-run research university located in Muncie, Indiana. It is also known as Ball State or simply BSU.Located on the northwest side of the city, Ball State's campus spans and includes 106 buildings...
has a masters program in digital storytelling based in the Telecommunications Department, as does the University of Oslo.
Digital storytelling is also used as an instructional strategy to not only build relationships and establish people's social presence online but also as an alternative format to present content.
Uses in public health, social services, and international development
The development of the Silence SpeaksSilence Speaks
Silence Speaks is the second studio album of RyanDan released in 2010 after the great success of the self-titled debut album released in 2007. It was released on Universal Records...
project in 1999 under the direction of Amy Hill (who joined the Center for Digital Storytelling in 2005) led to the expansion of digital storytelling in public health. Projects developed with the Center for Disease Control, the Open Society Foundation, work in gender-based violence prevention with groups in California, Texas, New York, Minnesota, and with the organization Sonke Gender Justice in South Africa, the broad use of digital storytelling with Foster Youth, and finally the connection to digital storytelling to public campaigns in substance abuse prevention and community mental health programs.
Uses in museums
Digital storytelling is being used by many different museums.The largest project is currently taking place in the North East of England - Culture Shock! This project is using museum and gallery collections to inspire people to create their own digital stories, which are also being added to the relevant museum collections.
Another large-scale project is the work of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, or ACMI, is dedicated to the moving image in all its forms. It is located in Federation Square, in Melbourne, Australia, across four levels of the Alfred Deakin Building...
.
The National Gallery of Art
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in Washington D.C. also held a series of classes to integrate arts education curriculum with digital storytelling from 2003-2005.
Some museums help interpret and make community history accessible. In 2007, the Colorado Historical Society collaborated with the Center for Digital Storytelling to create a program, The Italians, about Italian American History. In 2008, a group of eleven museums in Yorkshire launched My Yorkshire, a digital storytelling project. The museums work with communities to use contemporary collected oral histories alongside those from archives to interpret local history from a personal point of view. Some interesting issues have arisen with the use of historical oral recordings and archival photos. The group have also produced help guides to creating digital stories in a museum setting.
The finished digital stories can have many uses: advertising an upcoming exhibition, preserving a short-term project, building relations with communities. They provide skills to volunteers and can be permanently displayed in galleries.
Uses in Libraries
A digital story station is a public space for people to create a digital story that serves to archive oral histories from the public perspective. These oral stories may focus on a personal experience, incident, describing a place or witnessing an event. Based on the Center for Digital Storytelling model, over 30 public libraries ranging from Northern down the coast to Southern California have a place for people to tell their own story.Bilingual library staff work with participants to create a recording using the digital station, which can be integrated with a variety of media, including audio, video, pictures, and images. The digital storytelling station project called California of the Past is funded by a grant from the California State Library, U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services and Technology Act, and administered in California by librarians. The Media Arts Center in San Diego facilitates this project.
Since 2006, San Diego has housed a story station in its downtown library. The Media Arts Center of San Diego partnered with the downtown public library to set up a story station where the public can create a three-minute video. The topics of the archived videos range from personal to historical documentaries.
Place-based digital storytelling
The Canadian Film CentreCanadian Film Centre
The Canadian Film Centre is an advanced training institution for film, television and new media. Based in Toronto, Canada, CFC offers residents education, industry partnerships and production experience...
's New Media Lab (formerly MediaLinx Habitat) launched a project, Murmur, out of the 2002-2003 studio. The project integrates audio interviews into cellphone-based tours. The Center for Digital Storytelling created Storymapping.org in 2006 with projects in Mendocino
Mendocino, California
Mendocino is a census-designated place in Mendocino County, California, United States. Mendocino is located south of Fort Bragg, at an elevation of 154 feet...
(California), Houston, New Orleans, and Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Tuscaloosa is a city in and the seat of Tuscaloosa County in west central Alabama . Located on the Black Warrior River, it is the fifth-largest city in Alabama, with a population of 90,468 in 2010...
(Alabama) to promote the connection between storytelling and issues of local memory and civic planning.
External links
- Electric Shadows, An ITVS and Independent Lens production of web-original story projects by indy producers
- Bay Area Video Coalition's Next Generation storytelling programs
- BBC Digital Storytelling
- Center for Computer Graphics, Digital Storytelling Department
- Digital Stories at UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
- Ball State University Graduate Study in Digital Storytelling
- Bristol Stories - Bristol-based storytelling project, linked to the Museum of Bristol
- Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling
- Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling
- BBC Telling Lives: Digital Storytelling in England
- 7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling
- Queensland Stories - Digital Storytelling from the State Library of Queensland
- Mediatized Stories - an international academic network studying the phenomenon
- Digital Storytelling Asia
- FoldingStory | The Group Storytelling Game