Digital storytelling

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Digital Storytelling refers to using new digital tools to help ordinary people to tell their own real-life stories.

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[edit] An emerging term

"Digital Storytelling" is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity.

The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games).

As an emerging area of creative work, the definition of digital storytelling is still the subject of much debate.

[edit] Development and pioneers

The broad definition has been used by innumerable artists and producers to link their practices with traditions of oral storytelling and often to delineate work from the highly produced commercial or conceptual projects by focusing on authorship and humanistic or emotionally provocative content. Some of the artists that have self-described as digital storytellers included Joe Lambert, Massimo Don, Massimo Laurel, Dana Atchley, and Massimo Meyer.

The short narrated films definition of digital storytelling relates back to the development of a production workshop by Dana Atchley at the American Film Institute in 1993 that was adapted and refined by Joe Lambert in the mid-1990's 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 2-5 minute film that combines a narrated piece of personal writing, photographic and other still images, and a musical soundtrack. The philosophy behind this type of digital storytelling is one of using technology to enable those without a technical background to produce works that tell a story using "moving" images and sound. The lower machine requirements for using stills rather than video, and the ease of use of iMovie with the so-called "Ken Burns" pan effect, allowed for the creation of films by non-techies.

Digital storytelling is evolving from the simple narrated video to forms with interactivity and higher production values. These include websites and online videos created to promote causes, entertain, educate, and inform audiences.

[edit] Use by public broadcasters and education

This model has been integrated into public broadcasting by the BBC'sCapture Wales project. The following year a similar project was launched by the BBC in England called Telling Lives.

The Center for Digital Storytelling model has also been adopted in education, especially in the US, where some practitioners use it as a method of building engagement and multimedia literacy. For example, the Bay Area Video Coalition [1] employs digital storytelling as a means of engaging and empowering at-risk youth.

Uses in Primary and Secondary Education: Faculty and graduate students at the University of Houston have created a website called the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling [2] which focuses on the use of Digital Storytelling by teachers and their students across multiple content areas and grade levels.

Uses in Higher Education: Starting in 2001, Rina Benmayor [3] (from California State University-Monterey Bay) hosted a Center for Digital Storytelling seminar on her campus and began using digital storytelling in her latino/a life stories classes. Benmayor was involved in the national, grant-funded Visible Knowledge Project [4] and began sharing that work with faculty across the country. Eventually faculty from Georgetown University; LaGuardia Community College, CUNY; Millersville University; Vanderbilt University, and University of Wisconsin-Stout began using digital storytelling in classrooms from disciplines as varied as history, sociology, English education, and media studies. Eventually, the Visible Knowledge Project funded a multi-campus study of digital storytelling and created an online multimedia archive of higher education uses of digital storytelling [5].

Ball State University has a masters program in Digital Storytelling based in the Telecommunications Department, as does the University of Oslo [6].

See also: Visual novel.

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