Thursday, April 11, 2013

Digital Storytelling


            While reading “Knut Lundby’s book “Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories,” I was struck by a quote in the beginning of Chapter 2:

“Starting from paintings made on cave walls, humans represented ‘their world’ and in order to do that they had to ‘invent’ tools for painting and systems of meaning making for how things should be represented and the symbolic nature of such representation” (21)

The first time I looked at examples of digital storytelling, I kept on thinking how innovative and original this was.  I had never seen or heard (before this class) of the word digital storytelling and was captivated by the idea that people would create videos detailing their life events.  However, like the quote says, humans have been expressing themselves through art and storytelling for quite a while and as ‘new’ as digital storytelling was to me, what I had to understand is that it wasn’t people expressing themselves that made me stop and think, but what was new to me was the way technology was adapted to create and construct these projects. Today’s digital age provides us a variety of digital tools such as YouTube, social media platforms, and computers that give us the ability to see videos and pictures and through editing software and incorporating music and voiceovers, provide the ability to enable people to comfortably express their inner thoughts and emotions. Through digital technology, people’s personal stories were given a new breath of life that was fueled by intimacy.  Digital storytelling solely through the new ‘invented tool’ of technology made these projects different from other modes of public expression.

The digital storytelling example I decided to use from the book is Telling Lives from BBC.co.uk.  I decided to go with this example because when I clicked on the link provided in the book I was met with a notice stating:

"The Telling Lives website is no longer available. Telling Lives was part of the BBC's social media output from the early 2000's (along with Video Nation). These sites focused on "digital stories" where members of the public made short films about their personal stories and experiences. The Telling Lives project ended in 2005. The Telling Lives website was closed in 2011. It was no longer being updated and the quality of the online video no longer meets current technical standards. The filmed stories have been added to the BBC archives"

After seeing this message my first thought was to close my browser and find another digital storytelling project, however the bottom of the message caught my eyes. “It was no longer being updated and the quality of the online video no longer meets current technical standards”

How could someone’s personal stories and experiences that reflect the growing power of digital technology not meet current technical standards?  Lundby’s book asks us to question how digital tools are used to bring these stories to life. Although I understand that the reason the site was closed is because since the early 2000s advances in technology made it so the quality of these videos did not live up to what we are used to in 2013, I found it ironic that these videos were removed from the site because as Lundby explains digital storytelling is about engaging with the present technology that we create and use it to express oneself.

After searching the archives, I was able to find a few videos from the Telling Voices project.  The specific video that I ended up watching was “Learning to Drive” by Sheila Ogden.  In this video, Sheila narrates her history, revealing that she grew up listening to her father who said that women shouldn’t drive and in consequence of these words, she did not drive until her husband, when she was 53 years old, got fed up driving her around and forced her to learn. Her voiceover of her retelling her experience learning to drive is e highlighted by a montage of photos of cars, people, and things on the street. Yes the quality of the film was poor, the size was small, and lacked fancy editing, but this example of digital storytelling successfully uses images and narration to present a period of time in this woman’s life. Digital technology was “invented as a tool” here to show how anyone at any age with any amount of talent can participate in public expression and I do not think this lesson can be outdated.

Unlike the Telling Voices project, which was strictly about using one’s voice for public expression, when I searched for my own digital storytelling example to compare, I found that many sites were educational resources.  In using digital storytelling in this way, many platforms utilized digital storytelling to teach young kids to write stories, were developed from university funded projects and targeted students, or general tutorials on how to make digital storytelling projects. In this way, digital storytelling is a way to jazz up boring PowerPoint presentations as one can use interactive maps, music, videos and photos to bring a lecture to life. For example, the digital storytelling project The Reality of Television found on Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling (digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu) is a lecture about television. Like Learning to Drive, The Reality of Television uses a voice over while a montage of photos play.  However, the tone of the two projects was very different. While Learning to Drive was a personal reflection, The Reality of Television was an objective outlook on the historical evolution of television. While this shows that digital storytelling can be used in many ways, both examples show how technology has opened up the doors for people to engage directly with their projects and showcase certain aspects that might not have before been possible. 

4 comments:

  1. I really like that you point out that humans telling stories about themselves is not new, it's just the ways in which we do it that have changed. I think what's also changed is the audience. When we used to tell stories, it was face-to-face, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes to a group of familiar people. Stories were told where reactions could be seen.

    We can get immediate reactions through technology (e.g., comments on blog posts), but I wonder if there is the same release associated with sharing personal stories online as there is in person. I always feel like when I post something on my blog or Facebook that I've just thrown some information into the universe and will never get to see its effects or receive a satisfactory reaction.

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  2. I think the other component that is important in Lundy's compilation is that digital storytelling has the ability to provide a voice to those who might otherwise have their stories ignored. In the example of the Telling Lives piece, the woman had the opportunity to explain her frustrations in a way that others that did not have access to her point of view and observations on what was presumably a self-limiting lifestyle. As described, The Reality of Television sounds like it is a more traditional resource, possibly created by an institutional source, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but does not necessarily provide the same opportunity for individual contributions. However, I could be completely wrong; for example, the video could be generated by an individual who has observed certain limitations with television and is using digital storytelling to relay their point of view to an audience they might not previously have had access to.

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  3. I think you hit on an excellent point concerning the technical standards issue. There are several web sites that are sitting in limbo when the script language to code them changed from html to xhtml and so on. At the same time, new technical standards bring in new tools, new speeds, and methods by which to view something, but renders the old "obsolete". But when it comes to these digital stories, even though the technical standards are rendered obsolete, that shouldn't mean the story itself is. I'm happy to see they have it in archive, but the fact that there's little attention really given to it is a shame. That's history there and provides a framework by which we can look at the way in which people lived in certain spaces, in certain times, different from our own. I feel like more effort should be given in providing a more trusted online museum or archive to these videos. Loading to YouTube can be problematic too. I've hit several digital storytelling videos that are just gone whether by having timed out or being shut down because of potential copyright infringement for a song or clip used in a video - a major problem for me over YouTube being owned by a corporation especially.

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  4. I LOVE that your first choice was closed, and then residues of it remain. Your post about both digital storytelling projects shows how this project is facilitated by both technology and the institutions that give people access to it (or take it away) and pretty scripted structures and formats through which they can then “tell their stories.”

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