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Digital Storytelling - Wikipedia
Digital Storytelling - Wikipedia
Digital Storytelling - Wikipedia
Digital storytelling is a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their
story. The media used may include the digital equivalent of film techniques (full-motion video with sound), stills,
audio only, or any of the other forms of non-physical media (material that exists only as electronic files as opposed
to actual paintings or photographs on paper, sounds stored on tape or disc, movies stored on film) which individuals
can use to tell a story or present an idea.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Development and pioneers
3 Components
4 Uses in education
4.1 Uses in primary and secondary education
4.2 Use by teachers in curriculum
4.3 Uses in higher education
4.4 Uses in public health, healthcare, social services, and international development
4.5 Uses in museums
4.6 Uses for religious training
5 Uses in libraries
6 Uses in business
7 Place-based digital storytelling
8 See also
9 Notes and references
10 External links
Introduction
"Digital storytelling" is a relatively new term which describes the new practice of everyday people who use digital
tools to tell their 'story'. Digital stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, 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,
Windows 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.[1]
Simply put, digital stories are multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, 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 can easily be uploaded to the
internet and can be made available to an international audience, depending on the topic and purpose of the project.[2]
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.[5]
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 working with
organisations such as Breaking Barriers. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England
titled Telling Lives. Sveriges Utbildningsradio created Rum fr Berttande (Room for Storytelling).[6] Netherlands
Educational TV Teleac/NOT created a program with young people in different parts of the country. 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, 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 Movie Maker 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,"[7] therefore the
bounds of Web 2.0 storytelling are not necessarily clear.[8]
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."[9]
Telling a digital story combines a narrative, whether it be fiction or non fiction, personal or general, and digital
media. Digital media includes imaging, video, sound and all other forms of media then can be portrayed visually,
the most simple of digital stories can even be a power point. The point is to convey a message through imagery,
which a lot of times can be more effective then if just conveyed through sound. In my opinion a digital story can
even be told by some social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram, where you are constantly posting images
accompanied by captions in order to portray the story of your life. "A story can be as short as explaining how you
misplaced your keys this morning or as long as a multivolume autobiography", the wonderful thing about telling a
digital story is that there really are no rules. Like any story you want to capture your audience so it is important
when telling a digital story to "sell your story, as a write, filmmaker, dramatist, you as often as not ask yourself
what stories compel me and where might I find a profoundly dramatic story".
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[10] and
Youthworx Media Melbourne[11] employ digital storytelling to engage and empower young people at risk.
"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?"[12] 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."[12]
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. iMovie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie."[13]
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. Teachers can create digital stories to help facilitate class discussions,
as an anticipatory set for a new topic, or to help students gain a better understanding of more abstract concepts.
These stories can become an integral part of any lesson in many subject areas. Students can also create their own
digital stories and the benefits that they can receive from it can be quite plentiful. Through the creation of these
stories students are required to take ownership of the material they are presenting. They have to analyze and
synthesize information as well. All of this supports higher level thinking. Students are able to give themselves a
voice through expressing their own thoughts and ideas.
When students are able participate in the multiple steps of designing, creating and presenting their own digital
stories, they can build several literacy skills. These include the following: Research skills by finding and analyzing
information when documenting the story, writing skills when developing a script, and organization skills by
managing the scope of the project within a time constraint. Technology skills can be gained through learning to use
a variety of tools, such as digital cameras and multimedia authoring software and presentation skills through the
presentation of the story to an audience. Students also gain interview, interpersonal, problem-solving and
assessment skills through completing their digital story and learning to receive and give constructive criticism.[14]
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,[15] 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, the
values, attitudes, beliefs and feelings, associated with their digital storytelling work with students.[16]
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.[12]
The educational goals for teachers using digital storytelling are to generate interest, attention and motivation for
students of the "digital generation" in classrooms. The use of digital storytelling as a presentation tool also appeals
to the diverse learning styles of students. Digital storytelling also capitalizes on students' creative talents and allows
their work to be published on the Internet for others to view and critique.[14]
A handful of teachers around the world have embraced digital storytelling from a mobile platform. The use of small
handheld devices allows teachers and students to create short digital stories without the need for expensive editing
software. iOS devices are the norm nowadays and mobile digital storytelling applications like The Fold Game[17]
have introduced an entirely new set of tools for the classroom.
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
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 Berkeley. 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,[18] Cal State Monterey, Ohio State University, Williams College, MIT, and the
University of Wisconsin, Madison. The University of Colorado, Denver,[19] Kean University, Virginia Tech,
Simmons College, Swarthmore College, the University of Calgary, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), the
Maricopa County Community Colleges (AZ),[20] and others have developed programs.. The University of Utah
offered its first class on digital storytelling (Writing 3040) in the Fall of 2010. The program has grown from 10
students the first semester to over 30 in 2011, including 5 graduate students. Chicago journalist Mark Tatge started a
Digital Storytelling program at DePauw University in 2011. Students learned journalistic-style storytelling
techniques and published the resulting stories on a class website.[21]
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[22] (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[23] including Georgetown University;
LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; Millersville University; Vanderbilt University, and University of
WisconsinStout. Out of this work emerged publications in several key academic journals as well as the Digital
Storytelling Multimedia Archive.[24]
Ball State University has a masters program in digital storytelling based in the Telecommunications Department, as
does the University of Oslo.[25]
In 2011, the University of Mary Washington launched an open online course in digital storytelling titled DS106.[26]
The course includes credit-seeking students at the University as well as many open, online participants from around
the world.
Digital storytelling is also used as an instructional strategy[27][28] to not only build relationships and establish
people's social presence online but also as an alternative format to present content.[29]
Uses in museums
The largest project, Culture Shock!, is currently taking place in the North East of England.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35]
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, through the use of historical oral recordings and archival
photos. The group has also produced help guides to creating digital stories in a museum setting.
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.
In 2005, the Church of Norway initiated a project wherein young people raised questions of faith and life in short
biographical mini-films called 'Digital Faith Stories'.[36] A study of this project in a congregation near Oslo found
that the method of 'Digital Storytelling' could contribute to a more systematic educational method for including the
lifeworld of the young in religious training.[37]
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.[38]
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.[39]
Uses in business
With the development of marketing in the digital world is digital storytelling implemented in business. Digital
storytelling is used as a tool of user-generated content,[40] when consumers contribute their opinion based on their
own experiences about a product to promote a firm's product in the digital world.
Digital storytelling is being used by innovative startups to pitch their ideas to the potential investors and to
communicate with potential customers to get feedback about the market potential of their product or service.
The Enterprise Center with Salem State University organized a Big Idea Video Pitch Contest[41] competition for
students to submit a 60-second video pitch of a unique idea for a business, non-profit or social cause. People could
vote once per day using the "vote now" button that is displayed in the voting section. The Digital Story that receives
the most votes was awarded. Videos were judged on originality, creativity, and the clarity of message.
Project SomePitching[42] is a crowdsourced online competition for new business ideas and early stage startups to
provide feedback on their product and business ideas. The freeform explanation could be a website, a short pitching
video or an animation (max. 90 seconds), a slideset (max. 5 pages with font size 20+), or any other material (or
combination of materials) that was short and clear for anyone to evaluate.
SomePitching used the Innopinion platform[43] to manage the idea rating process and the selection of winners based
on the ratings from both the public and professional jury.
The intent of this competition wasn't to present the best Big Idea of the product, service, or solution only, but also to
find the way, how to interpret it by Digital Story the best way from visual and narrative point of view. Because in
the public jury phase, the evaluations was based on the following categories (with percent of the final score):
The Voice Library (TVL)[45] launched two, ongoing, social-giving projects in 2014. The Military Families Story
Project,[46] based out of Portsmouth, NH, maintains and strengthens families' ties, builds morale through a
brother-/sisterhood network, enables service men and women and their families to record history as they make it,
and memorializes veterans' experiences. TVL's national Let Me Be Your Memory[47] project, in collaboration with
Cognitive Dynamics,[48] offers a unique, six-week audio-based archiving Language Arts curriculum for students
and educational institutions that builds multiple, Common Core-adaptable competencies by raising awareness of
those living with memory disorders and their caregivers. It stimulates students to learn, investigate, and connect
with family and community. The Voice Library changes the digital storytelling paradigm by providing users
passcode-protected access through any telephone technology. It also provides online access. Both combine audio
and still-image capability. For 24/7, global access, unlike social media, subscribers' private accounts are secured on
the company's server.
See also
Film/video-based therapy
Interactive web stories
Visual novel
External links
Digital Stories at UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (http://www.umbc.edu/stories)
Digital Stories at UMBC, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (http://stories.umbc.edu/)
Storytelling Can Do Wonders in Blogging (http://www.kumailhemani.com/storytelling-blogging/)
Bristol Stories - Bristol-based storytelling project, linked to the Museum of Bristol
(http://www.bristolstories.org)
Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling (http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/)
Capture Wales: Digital Storytelling (http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/)
BBC Telling Lives: Digital Storytelling in England (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tellinglives/)
Queensland Stories - Digital Storytelling from the State Library of Queensland
(http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/resources/queensland-stories)
Mediatized Stories - an international academic network studying the phenomenon
(http://www.intermedia.uio.no/mediatized/)
Collaborative Digital Storytelling Hub in the United States (http://www.digitalstoryhub.net/)
Categories: Educational technology Performing arts Storytelling Documentary film genres Filmmaking