J.D. Lasica has posted the video of an interview he did with Daniel Meadows at the Digital Storytelling Festival at KQED in San Francisco. In the interview, Daniel – who started it all here at QUT with a “train the trainers” workshop back in April 2004 – talks with characteristic passion about the social power of digital storytelling – where “empowerment” and aesthetic elegance meet the public sphere – as well as his own practice as a digital storyteller and trainer (see Daniel’s website http://www.photobus.co.uk and BBC’s Capture Wales for examples).

The BBC digital storytelling program has been exploring themed workshops (or at least thematic collections of digital stories) for a while – mostly pretty “big” stuff like family history, and there are some truly epiphanic experiences shared in those stories: revelations that recover lost histories, therapeutic moments of catharsis, and so on. It seems that these are the stories that people who come to digital storytelling workshops for the first time are often burning to tell – stories of recovery, of loss, of joy, of finding or losing one’s place in the world.

But I am really much more excited by the idea of Shoebox Stories: “A collection of digital stories about favourite objects made by visitors to the BBC Wales Community Studios”. I love the idea of stories extracted from personal objects, because they allow for a more subtle and multilayered style of storytelling, one which can come sideways at the themes of memory, loss, nostalgia, longing, and belonging. I think there is a special elegance that comes from unravelling the threads of meaning, the powerful whispers of memory that come packed into very small things, but it’s important for me that this elegance can emerge organically from everyday experience, without being overdetermined by an explicitly artworld aesthetic.

I’ve been ranting on and on about mobile phones as media production tools for ages – luckily, I never have to actually develop products to back up my rants, because time after time someone else has been doing it in the background all along…witness HP StoryCast: Simple, digital storytelling with photos and narration

StoryCast is an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller’s voice.

As usual, the idea is interpersonal communication (‘friends and family’) but if this gets taken up with any momentum, we’ll probably see public online platforms for sharing too…

While working as a trainer in digital storytelling workshops has been rewarding, I’ve been anxious to see if any of the participants will continue using the techniques they learned in the workshops, and how far the stories they have already made travel among their peers. I’ll see what happens to the stories made in the Youth Internet Radio Network workshops when ‘sticky’, the web manifestation of the network, launches soon, which will be interesting.

One of the participants in the KGUV Sharing Stories workshop, Leila Wu, who is also a master’s student here, has taken digital storytelling and run with it, making 3 more stories – two for and about the church she is a member of here in Brisbane, and one in collaboration with a photojournalist friend of hers, about the continuing threat of landmines to everyday life in Cambodia. Download or watch it here (mp4, 6MB).

To my mind, this particular story is a very strong proof of concept – it’s powerful, simple, and elegant, and emerges naturally from a combination of learned skills, accessible technologies, and an existing friendship. Most interestingly, this story came into being as a result of these two friends sharing the belief that they have something to say (rather than having to say something), and that the digital story format was the best way to say it. And based on a chat I had with her last week, Leila is very passionate about the potential of digital storytelling for new media in China – she’s going back there on quite a mission it seems! I’m very proud of her and looking forward to hearing about what happens next.