Bryan Alexander's Blog: The New Digital Storytelling, page 2

Storytelling by Flickr

We can tell stories through other types of social media beyond blogs and Twitter. Social image platforms, like Picasa or Flickr, are fine sites for narratives.

Consider the Tell a Story in Five Frames Flickr group.  This requires stories to have, well, five images, as you might expect.  No text is allowed beyond a title.  For example, "Gender Miscommunication" takes us through a short story with only that much material... and how well it succeeds.  Social media: note the discussion thread which follows.

Periodic Table of Storytelling

A fun storytelling visualization appears in this Periodic Table of Storytelling.

The digital aspect is twofold.  First, it uses several digital tools to work, including references to one excellent, vast wiki resource, TVTropes.  Second, it addresses numerous digital stories.

Here's one corner - the whole thing's too big to cram into a single post:



It's an engaging way of thinking about narratives, and could easily join the story creation tools I mention in chapter 13.

(thanks to Peter Naegele!)

Halfway through a month of digital stories

Time for some station identification: we're halfway through the month of digital stories, here and elsewhere.

"Elsewhere?" you ask. Indeed so:

Item: The WordPress blog.

Item: My Amazon author page, which pulls in that WordPress content.

Item: The book's Facebook page.

Meanwhile, as an example of my making stories while talking about 'em, the blog-based Dracula project hums along.  

Elsewhere you can find the book via its publisher page, not to mention Amazon's.

StoryCorps

One prominent player in the digital storytelling scene is StoryCorps.  Well known to NPR listeners, this project helps people (couples, groups of three) tell stories from their lives, then produces finished audio tracks.

Recently StoryCorps has added animations to accompany these sound pieces, like this one, "Danny and Annie".

Two more examples: "No more questions" and "Q+A".

(thanks to Megan J. Wier for selection help)

Storytelling by Twitter

Another platform for social media storytelling is Twitter. Consider, for example, the novelsin3lines project.  These are versions of Félix Fénéon's 1906 work, which found microstories in compressed newspaper stories.

No one hanged the young Russian Lise Joukovsky; she hanged herself, and the Rambouillet magistrates have allowed her to be buried.

In a tent near Aïn-Fakroun, a six-year-old Arab girl was incinerated by lightning, by the side of her mother, who was driven mad by it.

To thwart those boycotting the Draguignan banquet, the Socialist city council of Toulon invited M. Clemenceau.

Two Malakoff blacksmiths were rivals in love. Dupuis threw his hammer at Pierrot, who in turn tore up his face with a red-hot iron.

There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of Saint-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead.

Storytelling by blog: Project 1968

Project 1968 is another story told by blogs, with several features worth noting.

1. Two distinct voices build the narrative, each character with her own blog (Amy and Janine).  The pair are linked by the main blog site

2. The texts are grounded in historical documents, making the story a kind of remix.

3. The whole thing is explained by an introduction, a reader's guide, and pointers to resources.  Like the Pepys Diary blog, unlike an alternate reality game, a hoax, or a story whose truth is radically uncertain (for example).

Improv digital storytelling

Digital storytelling often requires preparation. Assembling media, brewing up a narrative: these take time. Is a prep-less improvised digital storytelling possible?

Netprov = networked improv literature.

Netprov uses everyday social technology plus the ol’ tricks of literature, graphic design, and theater to create stories that unfold in realtime within public mediascapes.

Some of this group's previous projects sound like classic web 2.0 storytelling, using many key platforms:

Rob’s Projects
Chicago Soul Exchange, online marketplace for past lives (blog, collaborative, performed live over 1 week)

Mark’s Projects
The Ballad of WorkstudySeth, Twitter fiction provoked by workstudy students (Twitter & Facebook, during 3 months of 2009)
The LA Flood Project, a locative narrative and flood simulation (Google Map, YouTube on-going, and simulation tweeted during LA Times Festival of Books April 30-May 1, 2011)
The Loss Wikiless Timespedia, Wikinewspaper open to wikizen journalists everywhere (Mediawiki installation launched April 1, 2009).

Be sure to explore their "common characteristics" list.

(thanks to Steve Burnett)

More from Doug Reilly

Doug went on to revise his story, like so.

More classic digital storytelling

Here's another example from a Center for Digital Storytelling-style workshop, Doug Reilly's  "Strange Geographies".

My goal was to make a film using essentially one image, from the overleaf of one my journals. It's a mashup of dreams I had about New York City, trying to explain the strange geography of the city as I dream it.

We had a lot of fun figuring how to scan the image in to a huge size, then handle it between multiple memory-challenged devices.

Previously on The New Digital Storytelling: the CDS' classic digital story.

Storytelling by blog: the Pepys Diary

Another example of blog-based storytelling is the Pepys Diary.  Each day this blog republishes a diary entry from Samuel Pepys' diary, on the corresponding date.

For example, for May 10 2011, we see May 10 1668:



Beyond the basic content, the Pepys Diary adds annotations and background material.

Importantly for storytelling purposes, each blog post can contain comments.  Those comments play a role in how we perceive those entries.  Readerly reactions, extra information from specialists: these add more content of all sorts to the seventeenth-century core.