Thanksgiving Day (USA) was also the day of the launch of StoryBank Cancer Genetics digital stories at the University of Glamorgan’s Atrium building in Cardiff, Wales. It was a fantastic event. First Minister Carwyn Jones AM, who formally launched StoryBank, told a moving story about a serviceman posted home who discovered from military records that he’d been sent home because his mother had cancer and wasn’t expected to live very long. Carwyn said: “That man was my father”. What a way to discover such bad news.The health professionals who spoke from the stage said stories are a much better way than pamphlets to: persuade people with a significant history of…
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Digital stories in the Kwak’wala language
Only 270 people can speak Kwak’wala (source) so it’s highly endangered. Digital storytelling has a vital role in keeping a record of languages as they’re spoken today. The Mayatlan’s Wila Culture and Language Group for their Kwak’wala Digital Language Project has won Canadian Government funding to create 20 digital stories in the Kwak’wala language that will reflect daily activities, such as family meal times and home routines, as well as traditional events like food gathering… Capturing a language in this way in itself is not enough; digital storytelling needs to be just one piece of the jigsaw pieces that make a language relevant and vibrant. I do wish the speakers…
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Digital stories containing home movies
Here are some links to digital stories shown on the BBC website which contain home movies, archive film and especially-shot video – i.e. not just stills To Know Someone by Canadian student Nicole Lavergne Smith mixes home movie footage of her grandmother as a young woman with Nicole’s story of her grandmother’s dementia today. Another effective, albeit brief, use of home movie in a digital story by Gill Jones from the Breaking Barriers project. This Rhondda Lives! story by Les Rees is remarkable for its use of 1926 carnival archive footage from the National Library of Wales. Les was actually at this carnival and remembers it well. Here’s a seldom-screened…
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Animating StoryCorps interview
“The things we all share are pretty much the things that bring us together”. That’s how Jamillah Knowles began her piece about StoryCorps. I was listening to the BBC Outriders technology podcast this week and really enjoyed the StoryCorps interview. The programme’s presenter Jamillah talked with Mike Rauch, who’s making animations of some of these audio stories. I don’t know whether or not this podcast is downloadable outside the UK, but here’s a link to the 12 MB mp3 file of this episode. The story by Danny and Annie at the start of the sequence was really moving, especially when I heard that Danny had passed away since recording his…
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See how trees could improve your local area with a new tool that helps get them planted.
The Woodland Trust has launched a new civic campaigning tool called MyView that will be of interest if you feel your neighborhood could benefit from having some trees planted there. Step 1 take a photo of an area near you which you feel would benefit from some trees Step 2 upload it to the site and drap-and-drop some virtual trees to the view to make it look nicer. Caption your work by maybe adding a story about why this is a place that’s special to you. Personal stories are a powerful tool in getting things implemented, as we learn from Patients’ Voices’ health-related stories. Step 3 send a link to…
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The Cardiff Story digital stories
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. The stories were broadly all on the theme of the views about Cardiff of people living in the Valleys of south Wales. They’re a collaboration between The Cardiff Story, University of Glamorgan’s George Ewart Evans Centre of Storytelling, Cardiff Council and the AHRC. 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…
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wearecardiff
Interesting new multi-format digital storytelling about ‘place’ project – and it’s here in Cardiff. I’m looking forward to finding out more: The background is in this WalesOnline news report. The organisers (including Helia Phoenix, Roath) have already staged an empty shop project in town: via Google news alerts
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The best digital storytelling opportunity ever?
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…
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Telling your story in a taxi cab
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…
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How storytelling is saving hundreds of lives in Welsh hospitals
“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…