Story Circle

STORY CIRCLE

“Where once cultures valued storytellers for lauding, lamenting, and laughing at those in power, this thoughtful book illuminates the hopes, practices and achievements of the myriad amateur storytellers who populate today’s globalized and digitalized cultures.” Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science

“I warmly welcome the publication of Story Circle. It provides a fascinating account of what’s happened in digital storytelling so far and will be a crucial reference point for digital storytelling in the future.” Menna Richards, Controller, BBC Wales

List of Figures vii

List of Tables ix

Acknowledgments x

Notes on Contributors xii

Part I What Is Digital Storytelling? 1

1 Computational Power Meets Human Contact 3
John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam

2 TV Stories: From Representation to Productivity 16
John Hartley

3 The Global Diffusion of a Community Media Practice: Digital Storytelling Online 37
Kelly McWilliam

Part II Foundational Practices 77

4 Where It All Started: The Center for Digital Storytelling in California 79
Joe Lambert

5 “Capture Wales”: The BBC Digital Storytelling Project 91
Daniel Meadows and Jenny Kidd

6 Digital Storytelling at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image 118
Helen Simondson

7 Radio Storytelling and Beyond 124
Marie Crook

Part III Digital Storytelling Around the World 129

8 Narrating Euro-African Life in Digital Space 131
Sissy Helff and Julie Woletz

9 Developing Digital Storytelling in Brazil 144
Margaret Anne Clarke

10 Digital Storytelling as Participatory Public History in Australia 155
Jean Burgess and Helen Klaebe

11 Finding a Voice: Participatory Development in Southeast Asia 167
Jo Tacchi

12 The Matrices of Digital Storytelling: Examples from Scandinavia 176
Knut Lundby

13 Digital Storytelling in Belgium: Power and Participation 188
Nico Carpentier

14 Exploring Self-representations in Wales and London: Tension in the Text 205
Nancy Thumim

Part IV Emergent Practices 219

15 Digital Storytelling as Play: The Tale of Tales 221
Maria Chatzichristodoulou

16 Commercialization and Digital Storytelling in China 230
Wu Qiongli

17 Digital Storytelling with Youth: Whose Agenda Is It? 245
Lora Taub-Pervizpour

18 Digital Storytelling in Education: An Emerging Institutional Technology? 252
Patrick Lowenthal

19 Digital Storytelling in Organizations: Syntax and Skills 260
Lisa Dush

20 Beyond Individual Expression: Working with Cultural Institutions 269
Jerry Watkins and Angelina Russo

References 279

Index 300

"There can be no doubt that this book is important in fostering understanding of DST's potential and it deserves many readers among students, researchers and practitioners." (Seminar.net, July 2010)

John Hartley is Distinguished Professor and ARC Federation Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, and Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative industries and Innovation. He is the author of Television Truths (Wiley-Blackwell 2008) and A Short History of Cultural Studies (2003), and editor of Creative Industries (Wiley-Blackwell 2005). He is Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Kelly McWilliam is an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Industry) in the Creative Industries Faculty of Queensland University of Technology. She is the co-author, with Jane Stadler, of Screen Media: Analysing Film and Television (2009) and the author of When Carrie Met Sally: Lesbian Romantic Comedies (2008).

Everyone loves a story. Not everyone loves a computer. ‘Digital storytelling’ is a workshop-based practice in which people are taught to use digital media to create short audio-video stories, usually about their own lives, placing the universal human delight in narrative and self expression into the hands of everyone, bringing a timeless form into the digital age, and giving a voice to the myriad tales of everyday life as experienced by ordinary people.

Story Circle is the first collection ever devoted to a comprehensive international study of the digital storytelling movement. Exploring subjects of central importance on the emergent and ever-shifting digital landscape-- consumer-generated content, memory grids, the digital storytelling youth movement, and micro-documentary--Story Circle pinpoints who is telling what stories where, on what terms, and what they look and sound like. From China and Brazil to Western Europe and Australia, Story Circle charts how tales are being told and retold in the digital age.