The launch of Community Voices projects is drawing nearer. Organisations will be invited to submit their projects for funding by The Media Trust early in the new year. I was interviewed by one the researchers from Corporate Citizenship who compiled the report that informs the approach to be taken by Media Trust towards the Community Voices project. It’s good to see that Digital Storytelling features in the report.
It is my intention be as fully involved in Community Voices as is practical, hoping to bring to the project my conviction that storytelling can be an important factor in digital inclusion. I am therefore pleased to able to offer support in any way I can, including displaying the project’s logo and links on my sites. If you want to know more just click on the logo or the links.
Digital storytelling, the technique of combing narrative with digital media, into short movies emerged as a practice in the 1990s. The technique exploited the increasing accessibility of technologies for capturing audio and images and was exploited particularly for community and social projects. It can be seen as an adaptation of the storytelling tradition which has existed for more than 6,000 years (Abrahamson, 1998). Digital stories have been described by The Digital Storytelling Association (http://www.dsaweb.org/) as “the modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling”;. Meadows (2003) identifies it as a social practice, telling stories with easily accessible low-cost technology.
I have started to re evaluate iMovie 8 (part of iLife 09) as a tool for digital storytelling. I was beginning to warm to it until I began some tests to nail down it’s behaviour with still images.
Now it’s driving me to distraction – it’s so inconsistent. So my write up will take a bit longer than I’d hoped. On the whole, at this stage, I’m disappointed with iMovie 8. Transitions make a mess of timings, fine editing is tedious and too many numbers have to be typed into boxes when dragging a clip edge should do the job. More later – hopefully with fewer grumbles …… or perhaps I just need to lock myself away in a darkened room to calm down and wish for a bug fix in Snow Leopard for iMovie HD.
Culture Shock records ordinary lives in North East
By Culture24 staff | 28 October 2009
(Above) Culture Shock participants editing their digital story. Photograph courtesy Culture Shock
A project in the North East is allowing local people to contribute records of their own lives to the permanent collections of the region’s museums and galleries.
Culture Shock aims to help visitors create 1,000 ‘mini-movies’ in the course of some 100 digital storytelling workshops.
We’re already starting the process of preparing for DS5 next year, and as I suggested at DS4, we would like to use the power of the digital storytelling community to develop the best festival yet! This will be an experiment in crowdsourcing content ideas from the community while the fabulous team at Aberystwyth Arts Centre will manage the nuts and bolts of turning our ideas into a reality.
It’s on June 16th 2010 – book the date in your diary.
Last year I trained several teams of digital storytellers who have since been running workshops for a project called Culture Shock. The first stories (over 200 of them) are now online. The site is smart and functional and well worth a visit.
The stories are, of course, a fascinating insight into life in the North East as inspired by the museums collections in the region. All ages are represented from school children to some who are even older than me!
My congratulations to everyone involved in this project. They all worked hard in the Training Trainers workshop and they have clearly continued with dedication to pass their skills on to other storytellers.
I’m working with East Dorset Arts again this week training trainers in Verwood. Excellent facilities at The Verwood Hub make working working there a pleasure. Great people too. So if you live in the East Dorset area look out for opportunities to join a digital storytelling workshop there soon.
This event is this weekend May 16th. There are many storytelling events scattered across the globe – although not many in the UK. I am gathering stories at a digital storytelling workshop in Birmingham for engineers, but it’s not open to the public so it doesn’t qualify as an event for the International Day.
If you want to take part in a passive way why not treat youself to watching a few digital stories on the digistoriesuk YouTube Channel?
(Above) Culture Shock participants editing their digital story. Photograph courtesy Culture Shock
