School (EWU) started up again last week, and this post heralds the start of Digital
Storytelling, a class that already looks to be both interesting and pertinent
to today’s media requirements. I say this because it’s the second week in and I’ve
been dragged kicking and screaming to the computer in order to set up a twitter
account, as well as to brush off this lovely blog and start typing again. This
first post is the opening to using multiple digital mediums in order to tell
personal and historical stories.
In The
Value of Digital Storytelling for the Small Museum the author expounds on the
pros and cons of using digital media in a museum, and how taking digital media
classes has changed the way she works. An
easy read that gives the point of view of someone who actually has firsthand
experience with the changeover from typical historical mediums.
Stony Brook
University’s page on Digital Storytelling does a really good job on explaining
the subject and gives the seven elements of this technique. Easy to navigate and understand, this site
provides information on useful tools, copyright issues, and steps to create
your own digital story.
There are
many projects that use the Curatescape platform to tell their stories, and this
site gives a list of 18 various public projects. The Indy Historical, Raleigh
Historical and Northwest Pennsylvania links take you to websites that aren’t
active yet and provide no real information, though they do give you
opportunities to donate.
The two ‘must-see’
Digital Storytelling Projects from Mashable are Bear 71 and Welcome to Pine
Point. Bear 71 is an interactive website/documentary that allows the user to
see the interactions between man and nature. Interesting concept, but there
wasn’t a lot of guidance for the user and the background music/sounds got
annoying. Welcome to Pine Point introduces visitors to the no-longer-in-existence
town of Pine Point, and the people who lived there and still reminisce about
it. The format was innovative in a
yearbook kind of way, though sometimes the images would cover up the text. There were lots of pictures, videos and sounds
clips, though they would protrude over each other, and were a lot to take in.
The
Mashable list of four examples of Digital Storytelling were Bear 71, Pandemic,
Welcome to Pine Point and Rome. Pandemic
was confusing because it was a real time interactive social experiment that is
no longer active and so the website was kind of dead. The link to Rome takes you nowhere, which is disappointing
because the description provided sounded very interesting: “a multiplatform
interactive narrative experience inspired by the music of Danger Mouse and
Daniele Luppi (featuring Jack White, Norah Jones and renowned composer Ennio
Morricone’s original 40-piece orchestra from Italy).”