1. how will you address consents?
Privacy laws in the UK are more relaxed than in other countries like France. Setting laws to one side, ask yourself: if that was me/my child in that story, would I be happy?
2. who will own the copyright of the finished stories and will exhibition licences be explicitly attached?
Seems such a simple question; explore Creative Commons.
3. which media form are you asking people to make?
Here’s one of the ways we modelled the BBC Capture Wales form of the digital story, mainly aimed at trainers: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/about/pages/howto.shtml
This is the Center for Digital Storytelling’s Cookbook: http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.html
Whichever form you encourage participants to make, publish and share the documentation.
4. is sustainability important to you?
http://www.aberth.com/blog/five-ways-to-make-your-digital-storytelling-project-more-sustainable.html
Disclaimer: seek legal advice if in doubt about any of the above because I’m not a lawyer
Credit: distilled from working as a member of the Capture Wales team.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could pop in to get some expert help and make your own digital story while shopping in town? Well, during August 2010, if you’re lucky enough to live in Newcastle in the north-east of England, you can. Culture Shop is Culture Shock’s empty shop arts project which not only screens digital stories but also offers expert facilitation for people who’d like to make their own digital story. Some take their own photos to tell their story; others choose from a range of artifacts from museums and galleries of the North East England.
I visited Culture Shop while we were visiting my wife’s friend Grainee in Newcastle this weekend. Grainee told us about the project and offered to take me to see the shop. I was bowled over - every high street should have a place like this to screen and produce digital stories. Culture Shock never ceases to impress me and their Culture Shop is fab. What better way of increasing digital inclusion than a drop-in like this?
Glamorgan GATES is looking for a digital storytelling tutor for its www.merthyrstories.org project. Thanks to Karen Lewis of StoryWorks for passing this on to me. Here’s the text of the message:
Glamorgan GATES is looking for a digital storytelling tutor for our merthyrstories.org project. Our current tutor is moving on. We have a core group of four/five older storytellers who are well skilled in digital storytelling but we are looking for someone who is knowledgeable and vibrant and will bring something new to the class and generate some new students. A recent graduate or postgraduate student would be ideal. We have approximately 5 hrs per week on offer.
Please refer any interested people to me either via email or at the address below.Dr Lesley Hodgson, Curriculum Leader, GATIAU Morgannwg/Glamorgan GATESm 121 High St, Merthyr TydfilCF47 8BL01685 729941/0CeLLPrifysgol Morgannwg/University of Glamorgan7 Forest GroveTrefforest/Treforest
Some great news: the Breaking Barriers Community Arts digital storytelling project, based in south-east Wales, has just had confirmation of funding from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust. This is of major importance to digital storytelling in Wales.
So now Breaking Barriers is recruiting three people to take the project on to its next strides between now and March 2012. As far as the duration of funding goes, Breaking Barriers’ Ruth Garnault says: “Part of the role of these posts, however, is to ensure the long-term viability of the organisation which will lead to the posts being extended.” Here are the recruitment details Ruth sent me:
JOB ADVERTISEMENT
Breaking Barriers Community Arts (BBCA) is recruiting 3 new posts to take this digital storytelling organisation to a new level. Funding for these posts has just been granted from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust and ends in March 2012. Part of the role of these posts, however, is to ensure the long-term viability of the organisation which will lead to the posts being extended.
Project Manager who will drive the development of BBCA into a self-sustaining social enterprise.
Up to £24,000 pro rata. Initially 3 days per week, rising to 4 days a week from April 2011
Technical Administrator - a person who ensures the excellence of BBCA projects through their excellent knowledge of Mac-based IT.
Up to £19,000 pro rata. 1 day per week.
Administrative and Finance Officer to run an efficient and effective organisation
I went to the screening last night at the Atrium in Cardiff of 13 new digital stories, made to be exhibited at The Cardiff Story - a museum about the city which opens in autumn 2010.
Only 13 of the stories were screened last night but they’ll all be exhibited at the Cardiff Story later in 2010, and on their website. What’s remarkable about this is that the stories were all facilitated by one hardworking superwoman: Mari Lowe.
Mari drew groups of people from common communities of interest or area together to share stories. Then she worked by responding according to individual needs and within resources - often one-to-one to help everyone complete their story. She says she learned a lot about this way of working from Katrina Kirkwood who works with Breaking Barriers and has worked with Rhondda Lives. The storytellers were invited to the screening of their stories and a bus was organised from the top of the Rhondda Valley down to Cardiff, stopping along the way to pick up storytellers.
Further screenings are being organised in towns and villages in the Valleys.
Two of the stories struck me as being really different in their approach:
- there was a story about a museum exhibit made by the donor of two family heirlooms: delicate tumblers bought and engraved at the Great Exhibition in Cardiff in 1896. This form of story is one that other museums may find useful, especially if the donor’s story is exhibited alongside the artifact.
- there was a family story made by two teenage sisters and their young mother. Listening to this reminded me of an audio story like StoryCorps’s. At times it was difficult to tell who was speaking, but I’m interested in seeing how Mari and her co-workers develop this of digital story form in future.
Last night was a celebration of stories, attended by many of the storytellers and their proud family members and friends. To give you a taste of the night, here’s one of Mari’s Cardiff Story digital storytellers Melanie, with her story ‘Happy Days’.
As you can see as you follow the links, I’m doing a little recycling here because the individual articles are reprised. But this is the first time I’ve laid these out as a Top 7 of digital storytelling tips.
If you find this Top 7 useful, tell other people by linking to it, re-tweeting or pasting the address into your Facebook update. And happy digital storytelling. Thanks.
Digital stories about bush fires in Australia are now being used as learning materials in that country’s schools. There are ten stories about natural disasters like fire and flood - all based on actual experiences. There’s also a freely-downloadable pack for teachers. The digital stories were facilitated by ACMI, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and it’s great to see digital storytelling being used in this way. To see the stories and read more about this: http://www.ema.gov.au/…
Do you know of examples of media forms that mix home movies with digital storytelling to add a personal-viewpoint narration to a home movie? If you do, please can you add a link to the comments below? (Don’t worry about the error message when you send the comment; I seem to be picking up all the coments OK, This is one of the joys of my WordPress comments plugin).
I’m asking the question because an Umbrian researcher called Simona Bonini Baldini is spending the summer based here at BBC Wales investigating the BBC Capture Wales model and seeing if this kind of digital storytelling method might be mixed with the rich archive of home movies digitised and stored in her Umbria Region in Italy. There’s a link to a charming home movie about Africa belonging to Simona’s own family from this page in Italian.
Simona would also like to speak with others in Wales and nearby who have ideas on this subject. If you prefer to send a direct message, please email me at melynmelyn (at) gmail dot com and I’ll put you in touch with Simona.
This is my look back at DS5. It’s something I did after previous conferences DS4 (2009), DS3 (2008) and DS2 (2007) too. Unfortunately, the record of DS1 is no longer online.
At this year’s DS5, Diego Vidart - Historias Digitales del Uruguay (HDUY) - gave the opening speech of the day. Diego had worked with Breaking Barriers in Wales a few years ago and now he’s now working at the Catholic University of Uruguay in Montevideo on a USB-based video capture and editing application that enables children to capture and edit a digital story. The One Laptop per Child (OX) initiative is up and running in Uruguay. Because the OX’s processor is slow, the child will upload the assets and edit decision list (EDL) to a central server to be rendered. The morning after, a compressed version of the video is ready to be viewed on the laptop. Diego showed a tantalising montage of stories made by HDUY participants. You can watch some at www.hduy.edu.uy. In the break after Diego’s presentation, I pondered with Chris, a digital storyteller from the Aneurin Bevan Health Board, what sort of country Wales would be if every child had a broadband-connected laptop and was taught to make digital stories.
Culture Shock is a museums-based digital storytelling project in the north east of England. Five of its members came by car from Newcastle to Aberystwyth. It was refreshing to meet them and hear their experiences of digital storytelling at Alan Hewson’s welcome meal the night before DS5. Alex Henry spoke on behalf of Culture Shock and she showed some powerful digital stories made by people about the difference between collecting and hoarding and the lasting impact of being bullied at school. The project’s moving from its production phase into curating the stories at museums - often alongside artefacts there - and screening the stories around the area. Culture Shock is a glowing example of how digital storytelling can be used to increase understanding between diverse communities of people. There are some memorable stories to watch on their website:
David Gunn showed two of the Echo Archive’s projects in a breakout session I attended next. The first was a map of five cities in Portugal which enabled you to click on the map and create an audio mix of the sounds of the locality: an ancient wine cellar door creaking and slamming shut; a fado singer in a bar; someone talking about buying their first car. The second was a community-sourced soundscape of an area of Leeds called Little London. The audio mixing software he used was outstanding. David made a statement during his presentation that took me back somewhat. He said the only stories we want to hear people in deprived neighborhoods tell are their authentic ones. Yet, if you’re a Guardian-reading, middle class Londoner, you can tell any story you like. I’m still thinking about this because it’s such a bold statement.
The second break-out I attended was by Steve Bellis and Geraint Jenkins, speaking about Rural Stories. The power of inter-generational working came across loud and clear here.
Lunchtime was a good time to mingle and visit the stalls in the market hall, including DigiTales, StoryWorks, Culture Shock, Communities 2.0 and The Rural Media Company.
Joe Lambert of the Centre for Digital Storytelling had led the training the trainers workshop for the BBC at which I began to learn about digital storytelling back in 2001 in the Elan Valley. Funnily enough there were three others who had been on that course at the DS5 conference too: Karen Lewis, Mandy Rose and Kate Strudwick. After that, Joe returned to BBC Wales in Cardiff to speak at the conference which I guess you could call DS1. Meanwhile, in 2010’s DS5, Joe remembered the times when the late Dana Atchley was touring and performing his Next Exit show, seen by many as the first ever digital stories as we know them now. Joe showed Dana’s much-loved Home Movies (Turn) film. This is a story that every digital storyteller must see. Joe showed a further two powerful stories facilitated at CDS and partners’ workshops: the first about a father who bitterly taunted his young daughter that she’d never amount to anything, just like her late mother, who’d worked as a waitress; the second by a man puzzled at his own mother’s expression of anger and of her final days in hospital. These were both very moving, well-told stories. Joe said he was impressed by the way digital storytelling has taken off in Wales and he paid tribute to Daniel Meadows for the essential part he’s played in this. As one who’s worked a lot with and learned a lot from Daniel in the past, that tribute made me feel very happy.
So that leaves the question we ask every year: will there be another one next year; will there be a DS6? DS Cymru’s Esko Reinikainen, who hosted the day succinctly and with great insight, said that depends on the practitioners. He appealed for volunteers to help with the DS Cymru Ning network and @dscymruTwitter feed. He also expressed concern at the disappearance of potential future sources of conference funding.
The enduring feeling I have at the end of DS5 is that now, nine years after the beginning of digital storytelling in Wales, 80% of those attending DS5 this year had not only made a digital story, they were now also helping others to do the same. That’s a thing that makes me feel optimistic about the sustainability of the form in Wales.
I also believe digital storytelling has an important part to play in the Assembly’s plans for delivering digital inclusion. But it does take more than enthusiasm and increased access to broadband to sustain an activity. Now that the talk here in the UK is about public spending cuts, I hope there’ll still be enough money available to keep the activity of digital storytelling alive and financially supported here in Wales.
I’ve written about BBC Cymru Wales’s PS site before. PS now has a brand new sister site for teachers. As producer Nia M Davies says PS for Teachers is all about using personal stories to “engage young people aged 14-19 in Personal and Social Education.” It’s a bilingual site, in English and Welsh. Topics tackled include:
Active citizenship
Health and emotional well-being
Moral and spiritual development
Preparing for lifelong learning
Sustainable development and global citizenship
There are personal videos to watch and show, lesson plans and an invitation for students to upload their own digital stories, video diaries and other experience-based videos. Class discussion topics are suggested and there are freely downloadable PDF factsheets.
This looks like a really useful new set of resources for teachers of PSE. And it’s great to see personal stories captured on video being used to encourage young people to become more active citizens and to make changes to their lives.
Spanning the UK and Cape Town, University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre is advertising a Research Fellowship in Digital Storytelling. This could be the best digital storytelling opportunities I’ve ever heard of because:
- you’ll get to model and produce digital story forms that are most suitable for the intended local audiences/producers/participants by working with ethnographers and technologists
- you’ll work in the UK and Cape Town, along South Africa’s Wild Coast
- you’ll benefit from work already done by the university’s StoryBank project in India
- you’ll get to work with Prof David Frohlich, pioneer of Audiophotography and a former HP Labs Europe innovator
- it’s a well-funded post
- you’ll be making a valuable contribution to the global digital storytelling community
In the email from Prof Frohlich, he said the person appointed would work on a project:
“designed to scale up the StoryBank system in South Africa, with a view to bringing out a mobile digital storytelling toolkit for NGOs.”
Closing date for applications: 24th June 2010
Interview board: 9th July 2010
Salary is up to £32,620 p.a.
Because of the way the University of Surrey’s Jobs website is configured, I can’t give you a direct link to this role, instead, I’d ask you to look about halfway down this page: https://jobs.surrey.ac.uk and click on the Research Fellow in Digital Storytelling link.
I’m working at the Urdd National Eisteddfod - a major European youth festival - in Aberaeron, Wales, this week. Colleagues from the BBC Welsh-language children’s news programme Ffeil have been recording viewers’ stories using an adapted London black taxi cab as an experiment here. It’s not something they’ve built themselves; it’s been hired in.
The cab contains a video camera which starts recording onto a flashcard as soon as someone opens the door and sits in the cab. Question prompts can be given either on-screen or, in the case of Ffeil, by a presenter off-camera.This taxi strikes me as a fleet-footed story capture device. The best way to use this would be by guiding the individual through the process so they gain some element of media literacy from the process. Giving a copy of/link to their video to the storyteller or interviewee would also be nice. If you were planning to formally broadcast or publish what’s captured, you’d be wise to ask participants to sign a consent form and let them know how the clip may be used.
With these thoughts in mind, this kind of mobile, automatic capture device is a way of giving voice to people whose voices might not otherwise have been heard. It could be used by a museum, storytelling festival, media literacy conference, TV reality show. I think it’s a booth using technology like this that’s used for the public’s reaction to Big Brother - etc
“I was back in the hospital having my dressing changed after an operation. I’d had a lot of stitches. The nurse arrived with a pen in her mouth. She took off my old dressing and ran the pen which had been in her mouth along my chest to check all the stitches. After changing my dressing she walked on to the next patient tapping the pen against her teeth.”
This is the kind of patient story that’s been used in re-training staff to be aware of ways in which hospital bugs are spread. Hearing a short account like this has proved effective in changing hospital staff’s ways of working.
The story was recounted by Dr Jonathon Gray who heads a campaign called 1000+ Lives aimed at reducing unexpected deaths in hospitals by over a thousand. The main targets are hospital bugs (mrsa, c-diff, etc.) pressure ulcers and unnoticed worsening or developing complications.
Another digital story Jonathon showed was by the daughter of a man who’d had his larynx removed. He couldn’t swallow and he’d had a catheter put in his throat to drain saliva build-up. He was at home recovering. The man had begun choking, struggled, and taken out his own catheter in panic. The woman called the ambulance and, as her father was really struggling, she’d tried to re-insert the catheter herself. When the ambulance arrived, the woman asked the paramedic to re-insert the catheter properly as her father’s throat was filling up with saliva. The ambulanceman had said “I’m sorry but I can’t touch him; we’re not allowed to do that; we’ve not been trained in this.” The woman’s story inspired the Ambulance Service to give its paramedics training in inserting this kind of catheter to prevent a repeat incident.
In the past, at hospital board meetings, when the finance officer was asked to invest in measures to combat pressure ulcers, he’d say: “Doesn’t sound too bad”. Now, all board meetings begin with patient stories and these first-hand personal stories are helping to change policy for the better.
Just goes to show the power of storytelling. I think the work Jonathon and his team is doing is fabulous and I hope the work the National Health Service does in Wales in the field of patient stories gains recognition internationally.
This is a report from the Storytelling & Health Symposium, at University of Glamorgan’s Atrium in Cardiff, 13 May 2010. I’m quoting what the storyteller said from memory, and I’m not a medic, so apologies if it’s not exactly verbatim and for any medical bloopers in my account.
Joe Lambert of CDS just emailed some news that will be of interest to digital storytellers in the UK, Europe and beyond:
1. Joe’s giving the keynote at DS5 - the fifth Digital Storytelling Conference - in Aberystwyth, Wales, on Wednesday 16 June 2010. The cost is GBP15. http://www.dscymru.org.uk/
3. Lillehmammer Digital Storytelling Conference takes place in Norway from February 5th – 7th 201. It’s the conference’s fourth year and this year’s title is “Create – Share – Listen”. Apart from Joe Lambert and colleagues from CDS, speakers include Glynda Hull, UC Berkeley; Bjarke Myrthu; Storyplanet, Knut Lundby; Mediatized stories, Simon Strömberg; “Rum för berättande” and John Hartley; editor of the book ‘Story Circle’. Conference website: http://lillehammer2011.no has the program outline, themes and call for contributions. Registration details will be announced nearer the time.
I was asked a question on Twitter yesterday by @katycom1972:
@digitalst Would like to explore digital storytelling with my 2nd graders. Any tips on getting started? We use a MAC/Imovie 9. Thx!
It’s incredibly difficult to fit any sensible advice into 140 characters. What I really wanted to say was:
it’s the story that’s the most important bit of the process; if you get a good story, a great digital story is within reach
working in an expertly-facilitated group or groups is a good way for individuals to bring out the best from their stories
the facilitator needs to prescribe a form. This helps people know what they’re making. E.g. 250 words, personal, using your own stuff
steering people away from generic subject like race, equality, ‘this great country of ours’ type themes and onto personal subject is a good idea
etc, etc, and I still haven’t moved into technical advice…
Because I had only 140 characters and because I didn’t have time to write this blog post and send @katycom1972 a link to it, this is what I ended up Tweeting:
@katycom1972 my advice: focus on individuals’ own stories - not big ‘issues’- and let them use their own ’stuff’, not Googled images.
How would you advise Katy in 140 or fewer characters?
That’s the question Hanne Jones and Eli Lea from Flimmer Film asked as they went from door to door at old people’s homes in Norway. The answers they were given were as different as the people they met.
‘My Days’ is a collection of 37 memories told by people between the ages of 79 and 104. These digital stories are in Norwegian with English subtitles and they’re each around three minutes long. The music’s beautiful and the storytellers’ voices have such warmth and, at the same time, gravitas that they took me by suprise and brought a tear to my eye.
Watch, for example, Alf telling the story of his very first love.
And Margit being hugged by her brother Jon who tells her “You’re the best siter in the world.”
These are the stories we need to listen to and give people the opportunity to tell. ‘My Days’ is a model every society needs to consider. These are the stories that need to be recorded before it’s too late.
See the stories and meet the storytellers at http://www.minedager.no/mydays.html
Thanks to Lisa Heledd for letting me know about ‘My Days’ and congratulations to Flimmer Films for this important work.
Alan Thomas is a seasoned traveller. We first met at a BBC Capture Wales workshop in Haverfordwest, Wales, and we’ve met a few times since then too .. at DS4 and at BBC Wales and it’s always good to catch up. Alan has a condition called cerebellar ataxia which affects movement, balance and speech. Ever since making his first story, Alan’s been an advocate of digital storytelling when meeting people, speaking at conferences and in his blog. Alan is now Chairman of Ataxia South Wales and they’ve just launched their new bilingual website at http://ataxiasouthwales.org.uk
Alan went on to make another digital story - facilitated by the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of Glamorgan - to show at the European Ministerial e-Inclusion Conference in Vienna in December 2008. Stepping Stones:
The Ataxia South Wales website says that over 10,000 people in the UK have a form of ataxia. There is currently no cure but worldwide research is continuing to try to find an answer. The work Alan does as Chair of the organisation, using digital storytelling and speaking at international conferences is going to help in raising awareness and finding ways of tackling ataxia.
Delivered on April 28, Pontypridd, Wales, by Gilly Adams and Georgie Meadows, who say:
“To be effective practitioners and offer compassionate and good care, we need to be able to see each patient as a special and unique individual…Using pictures as our starting point, we will explore how we can be more aware of the stories of those who cannot tell their own.”
The cost of this half day workshop is only £30 and there are details here.
Led by Karen Lewis, it’s a fabulously talented, likeable and experienced team (declaration of interest: I’ve worked with many of them) and if you’re looking for people to guide you through the benefits of storytelling and stories in your organisation, it would be worth contacting StoryWorks.
I had a query recently from Liz Milner, Bristol, via Mandy Rose, asking about digital storytelling in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Here’s a list of the ones I could think of; please feel free to add others using Comments:
Hanne Jones, Christer Fasmer and Eli Lea of Digital Fortellinger . See also the end of this blog post for more in English about that project. Lisa Heledd, formerly of the BBC Capture Wales team has trained trainers in Norway.
The European Center for Digital Storytelling is part of the CDS and they have a Ning Group. You need to join (free) to read and post.
CDS has run other projects in the Nordic Countries, including Deltagarden. There’s an English synopsis halfway down this page.
The Swedish Disability Network has run digital storytelling activity called MediAbility. See also this page.
Knut Lundby of the University of Oslo contributed to ‘Story Circle: Digital Storytelling around the World’, Edited by John Hartley and Kelly McWilliam. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2009.
Simon Stromberg, Sweden The City of Stockholm, Culture House, Shahrazad
Project. This is more of a story exchange than a digital storytelling project, but it’s still worth investigating. Simon was one of the presenters at BBC Wales’s Digital Storytelling Conference back in 2002.
Aske Dam is a Norwegian professor who’s worked extensively in the East. His work on the use of keitai (mobile phones) in Japan is fantastic and, having met him twice here in Wales, when I visited University of Tokyo I was delighted to learn he’s held in high regard in Japan.
The story was recounted by Dr Jonathon Gray who heads a campaign called