In Web and social-media time, it feels like Jennifer Warwick and I have been friends for ages and ages. It’s really been only since 2004, but she’s one of my “oldest” virtual friends, meaning that I have all sorts of warm feelings and admiration for her even though we’ve never … Continue reading
Category Archives: Digital/Multimedia Storytelling
From Poverty Porn to Humanitarian Storytelling
Last fall, my Facebook friend Liz Massey of the blog Write Livelihood interviewed Roger Burks, a pioneer of what he calls “humanitarian storytelling.” The interview, Roger Burks, his company Pictographers, and Burks’ pioneering work in humanitarian storytelling all impressed me. I had especially not consider the negative and exploitative effect … Continue reading
How to Guarantee You’ll Tell Stories in Your Presentation
Came across an idea that’s not new to me but is worth sharing. Karl Kapp suggested in a blog entry that to force presenters to tell stories instead of reading dry facts, stats, and bullet points from slides, use slides with no words — just images. I did that with … Continue reading
21st-Century Storytelling Alive and Well? The Sundance View vs. the MIT Media Lab View
Today is the last day of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the theme of which is “Storytime.” Although Storytime seems to be more about “the stories — from the screen and from the street — that make Sundance what it is” than about storytelling in films per se, Michelle Meyers, … Continue reading
One Example of What a Lifestream Might Look Like … and a Bunch of Resources
Not long ago, I blogged about lifestreaming, the concept of aggregating various forms of one’s social-media participation into some sort of cohesive format, and thus into some semblance of a story about yourself. Apparently WordPress has a Lifestream plug-in (ahem, got anything like that, Movable Type?), which Mark Krynsky uses … Continue reading
Happy Anniversary to SMITH and Good News about the Alligator
A couple of followups on publications I’ve blogged about in the past: A couple of days late, but happy anniversary to SMITH magazine, which celebrated its third anniversary on “National Smith Day,” a day to celebrate Smiths, famous and not, on Jan. 6. SMITH is celebrating with a new book … Continue reading
Add Lifestreaming to Personal Narrative Trends
This entry is a bit of an addendum to my New Year’s Eve posting about 2008 as the year of personal narrative in which I agreed that 2008 was a starting point but predicted that personal narrative will just get bigger and bigger. I talked about social media as part … Continue reading
Two New Discoveries for the New Year
Regular readers must tire of my constantly expressing my astonishment at making new storytelling discoveries. After searching for story material on the Web for four years — partly for this blog and partly for my PhD program — I would have thought I would have found it all. Yes, of … Continue reading
‘Storytelling Is Hard Work, But the Result Is Worthwhile’ — Ron Howard
I’ve always felt a strong affinity for Ron Howard. I literally grew up with him; he was born the same year I was — in fact the same month. I’ve always felt that if I passed him on the street, we could strike up a conversation like old buddies. I … Continue reading
Digital Storytelling Exploded in 2008
Karen Smith apparently conducts a poll through her blog, DIGITAL STORYTELLING — The home of e-folklore (the blog’s purpose is to “link together useful digital storytelling resources”), in which she discovered a 120 percent gain in the number of digital storytellers from last year to this year. Smith also reports … Continue reading