Category: digital storytelling

The Work of Stories

In a sudden twist of good fortune, I’m presenting in place of my supervisor John Hartley at MIT4: The Work of Stories in May – this is the fourth of MIT’s Media in Transition conferences, which I’ve wanted to go to all along. The line-up looks great, should be an enriching few days for me, and a good chance to hook up with researchers and practitioners working in digital storytelling as well. John and I are working up the ideas together – here’s the abstract:

Digital Storytelling: New Literacy, New Audiences

Digital storytelling fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and (professional) popular media that was never adequately bridged during the broadcast era. Digital stories are simple but disciplined, like a sonnet or haiku, and anyone can learn how to make them. They reconfigure the producer/consumer relationship and show how creative work by non-professional users adds value to contemporary culture. The paper examines what is needed to bring out their potential, discusses some of the emerging initiatives that aim to increase their reach, and includes examples.

Kelvin Grove Urban Village – Sharing Stories

The Kelvin Grove Urban Village – Sharing Stories website launched today – the digital stories produced at a workshop I facilitated last December now have a potential public, which is fantastic!

“The Kelvin Grove Urban Village site has a rich and varied history, including its indigenous, military, educational, residential and natural history. The Sharing Stories project has been developed to inform the community on the Village’s history.

Stories, photographs, artwork, archival information and digital stories are shared from the past and the present by students and community participants who chose to share their memories, inspirations and research about the Kelvin Grove Urban Village site.”

Creativity, play and communication

Thinking aloud here about some stuff that occurred to me while continuing to read Speaking into the Air this morning. You probably won’t want to read this unless you live inside my PhD with me (messy in there, isn’t it?). These thoughts also go some way to explaining what I was getting at with my heretical talk of ‘authenticity’ and ‘presence’ in my first post since getting hold of the book.

There is an axiom floating around at the moment that creativity is meaningful only in that it is communicative – Negus and Pickering built a whole book out of this apparently straightforward concept (it’s quite a good book too, despite others’ lamentations to the commentary). However, the axiom only looks straightforward if both the key terms are taken at face value – creativity meaning the cognitive process of innovative (usually cultural) production; communication meaning at least the transmission of information, at most the exchange of ideas. Negus and Pickering do a lot to unpack the genealogy and usage of the first of these keywords, but do much less with the second.

In my PhD research, my two detailed case studies are Apple’s iLife suite and digital storytelling. In trying to explain how these two case studies relate to each other, I’ve started to think about them in relation to two very different constructions of creativity – creativity as productive play, with no necessary relation to the social (the dominant one); and creativity as communication, which is less dominant, but far more central to my own arguments. [Before I go on, let me say quite clearly that there is no reason these two constructions of creativity should be exclusive: in fact, I might go far as to say that the kind of creativity I mean when I talk about "vernacular creativity" is precisely an articulation of play and sociality.]

But anyway, this is how I’m thinking of how my two case studies sit in relation to all this:

The iLife suite and the discourses around it structure creativity as productive play (play meaning childlike fun – I would need a whole paragraph to unpack ‘play’ as well). The dominant metaphor apple uses is, as I see it, the toybox: the interfaces all look like etch-a-sketches made of candy, and garageband is a bright tasty box of sonic lego blocks (and I wish it were play dough). To be creative in this universe is simply to make media, and to have fun making it. (there’s more to it, but you don’t want the whole chapter here)

Digital storytelling, fun as it is, productive as it is, goes much further towards the kind of communicative creativity that I think constitutes meaningful agency in the ‘network of networks’ of contemporary culture. The kind of communicative creativity I am talking about is not to be understood in the sense of communication as the exchange of information or ‘ideas’, but as social action – the test of effective communication in this sense is a kind of being there, a kind of becoming real as a participant in the network. I think this understanding of creativity avoids the emptiness of the rah-rah celebration of it as the driving force behind the ‘new economy’, which is one good thing, and it opens up the concept so that it is no longer about the expression of the creator’s interiority, but actually privileges collaborative creativity – another good thing.

digital storytelling out of the box and in the classroom

So, I’ve scored myself an iBook through a project I’m involved with at QUT (you gotta love the place sometimes), and have started research for the chapter of my thesis on the technological shaping of amateurism, using Apple’s iLife suite of “creative” software as a detailed case study.

Always in my peripheral vision is the nascent collaborative project (i.e. something a few cronies and I talk about over coffee but have done nothing about yet) exploring zero-budget digital storytelling. That is, looking at the range of free, open-source or OS-bundled software to see whether you could effectively substitute some combination of them for the very expensive proprietary tools usually used – Photoshop and Premiere. The reason we think this is important is that, by relying on photoshop and premiere, and teaching digital storytelling using them, we’re only increasing digital storytelling’s dependence on the institutional resources that I had previously thought were necessary to get it going, but might one day subside in favour of collective/networked autonomy. It seems clear that from a purely economic point of view, the reliance on Adobe products is disquietingly counter to the spirit of DIY that, in other ways, the digital storytelling movement is all about.

Of course, the iLife suite is positioned in precisely this way, not least because of Apple’s integration into (US) schools and the co-promotion of iMovie and iPhoto as trojan horse literacy tools (whereby students with challenges in written literacies who are confident in their visual and oral literacies become storytellers through the process of creating multimedia stories). A nicely written reflection on one such initiative here.

The catch for me (and this is the catch with *all* digital storytelling setups I’ve found so far) is not only that the enthusiastic takeup of digital storytelling by schools, universities, government departments, community activist groups and corporations necessarily serves institutional ends, but also that it is cutting off DST’s potential to proliferate virally, stabilising an emergent genre before its time, creating too many rules and conventions before it has had a chance to develop possibilities, becoming polished and relentlessly interesting and losing its ordinariness, becoming just another tool for computer-assisted learning, another vehicle for Illich’s counterfeit vernacular.

To bastardise an already misunderstood quote from the fabulously cranky utopian Stuart Hall, digital storytelling might be one of the sites at which vernacular creativity gains a foothold and viral publics for ordinary creative communication are consituted – otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.

Then again, I can’t afford to be cranky, complicit as I am in the instutional support of digital storytelling.

A most convivial week

Last week we completed a digital storytelling workshop for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project – a QUT/Qld Dept of Housing project mainly involving oral histories of the area. The KGUV, including the spot where the QUT Creative Industries Precinct now stands, and where I work every day, used to be an army barracks but has a rich and still emerging unofficial cultural history that I have loved hearing about all week. When the official website is launched I’ll make sure I link to it, but in the meantime…

Digital storytelling workshop

Tanya and Matt working in Photoshop with two of our older participants, both of whom were an absolute hoot and knew exactly what they wanted – they just didn’t really want to drive the computer.

Digital storytelling workshop

Two more participants working together to get their images scanned in – what with the constant banter back and forth it was hard to know how they’d get anything done, but they did.

Convivial Tools

Although there are problems with referring to technologies as “tools” (which implies that they are relatively neutral conduits for solely human-derived action), I love this Ivan Illich quote that Digital Storytelling maestro Daniel Meadows brought to my attention:

“Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.”

So, which tools for creative content production and distribution are most “convivial”? Those that are relatively open and complex and invite social connection (e.g. open source software with its collaborative configurability and non-didactic, but often difficult GUIs?); or sole-user black boxes (closed but designed to “guide” the inexperienced user along familiar pathways to enable easier content production – like iMovie)?

OurMedia

Look at this: an idea whose time has come, to my mind. There’s a graphic depiction of how it will work here.

It’s been a long time since I stumbled across some cool new web project that spoke to a niggling question raised by my research – and there are always a lot of niggling questions. In this case: why don’t digital storytellers, as well as amateur music producers, photographers, film-makers, animators, etc. have a networked space of their own? Why is the production and consumption of digital stories, for example, so static and limited? (eg someone attends a workshop, makes a story, the story gets uploaded to the “community media” project or the BBC’s website, attributed to a name without any kind of cultural presence on the web, and then that’s it – people can view it and sometimes comment, but there is little that the individual producer can leverage beyond saying “look. I made this story”).

So with this new project, it is not only the idea of a “repository” of multiple genres of independent and amateur broadband content, where users and upload and download, and remake content at will, subject to Creative Commons licensing that sparks my interest. This is obviously a damn good experiment.

But much more interesting to me are the hints of an intention to build communities of practice in and around the content – this has been the splinter in my brain keeping me up at night lately.

There are a lot of things I’m curious about, eg. how “repurposed” proprietary content (fan films, mashups, etc) will be handled, etc. But at least in theory, the idea of open media is a nice little birthday present for creativity/machine, which is one year old tomorrow.

Digital Storytelling Workshop: Reflections

VizInk_Workshop_01.jpg Here’s a couple of the participants in the YIRN Digital Storytelling Workshops at Visible Ink putting the final touches to their films in Adobe Premiere. The trainer in the shot is Jo Tacchi

They all finished in the three and a half days total workshop time and the results were great. Once they’re up on the YIRN website I’ll be able to link to the Quicktime versions.

I’ve been writing up fieldnotes about this workshop, reflecting mainly on how we (trainers and participants included) negotiated some of the tensions I’m exploring in my thesis.

It’s early here, and it’s a Sunday, and I’ve been thinking a lot. Regular readers know that means patience is required to read on….

I felt we were all negotiating around the tensions between a universally legible aesthetic vs. whatever flavour of experimentalism we might otherwise try; “programming” subject matter and visual aesthetic vs. hands-off facilitation of “organic” creativity; etc. It was interesting for me to note that two of the participants who were very media-savvy were comfortable with ?rough? edges and apparent ?mistakes? (and confident in their own aesthetic decisions, weighing our suggestions on their own merits but just as often rejecting them and deliberately including rough, home-made design elements).

On the other hand, other participants with more mainstream cultural competences and cultural tastes were committed to a smooth finish ? reflecting mainstream television/cinema production values ? and asking for ?editorial? input from the trainers, hesitant to made ad hoc judgements (e.g. about whether to use cuts or dissolves, zooms or pans in Premiere).

Which brings me back to some core worries about enabling a broader base of cultural participation through cultural production: how am I going to deal with the [apparent] fact that any postive cultural value that is ascribed to amateur production is tied up with youth, hipness, funky lofi, DIY aesthetics etc., whereas the people I feel have the least access to our *attention* through something like digital storytelling employ a media vernacular that is less tied up with punk rock and activist media, and more closely aligned with commercial television and Hollywood cinema?

That is, it isn’t just “media access” that is the issue here, it’s access to cultural value and audience engagement: access to our attention and to the privilege of authorship.

I’m thinking the answer is to reorient our aspirations toward a “vernacular” cultural sphere from the ground up: the answer is *networks*: networks of producers who are also critics and consumers and teachers and learners, without having to be self-aware, camp or parodic media fans, avid gamers or obsessive bloggers…