Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling has written with news of workshops he’s holding in Copenhagen this summer and of exciting plans to establish a European Center for Digital in conjunction with Copehagen Business School. Joe’s team will be joined for the workshops by guest trainers Lisa Heledd Jones (BBC Wales and George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling) and Barrie Stephenson of digistories.co.uk. There are details of the workshops here. Next: knife crime is a problem in some British cities. I think community leaders may take inspiration from Mervin Jarman’s story. He’s just been awarded the Stockholm Challenge Trophy. He’s set up a digilab where people can come…
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Storywalks
Hyperaction launches Storywalks tomorrow morning with a walk and picnic in Torfaen, south Wales. On their website you can download a printable PDF routemap (here’s an example) and free mp3 podcasts of the stories to listen to along your way. Loading up your portable device with stories and heading off to the countryside clutching a map is a great idea and Hyperaction’s experience in such community-led projects shines through and is sure to contribute to the success and hopefully the future expansion of the network of Storywalks around Wales.
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Making Space workshops using more accessible digital storytelling tools
I’ve always been puzzled by this paradox: people get so many new skills by making their first digital story …. yet most people only ever produce one digital story. It was Jenny Kidd, whose PhD subject was Digital Storytelling at the BBC, who drew my attention to this. The team at University of Glamorgan (called South Wales University since 2013) has been exploring lowering some of the barriers to continuation by devising forms that use widely-available online production tools and social media tools. Carwyn Evans, Lisa Heledd Jones and Susie Pratt of BBC Wales and University of Glamorgan held a workshop in Aberystwyth just before DS3 where they led a…
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DS3 Festival of Digital Storytelling – cribsheet
I’ve just returned from the DS3 Festival of Digital Storytelling at Aberystwyth Arts Centre. It was another successful festival, following on from and expanding on last year’s DS2. People had travelled from all over Wales and Britain. I met delegates from Belfast, USA and there was someone who’d come from New Zealand too. Day1 – Thursday 5 June 2008 A Public Voice – Digital storytelling, narrative and pedagogy. By Prof. Hamish Fyfe & Susie Pratt, University of Glamorgan; Karen Lewis, Lisa Heledd, BBC Cymru Wales Karen Lewis set the context of the research that’s being done with AHRC support. Hamish Fyfe gave a description of storytelling across the ages and…
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Geoff Charles, Welsh documentary photographer
I met Culturenet Cymru’s Sioned Rhys Jones and Hawys Tomos at Eisteddfod yr Urdd, Conwy, last week. As part of the National Library of Wales and funded by Heritage Lottery and Welsh Assembly Government, Culturenet Cymru is working on a project based in Aberystwyth called ‘From Warfare to Welfare’. There’re doing three things: 1. helping people to make digital stories. Young people work with older people to make a digital story of 1939-1959 recollections 2. staging multimedia conferences 3. digitising photos by Geoff Charles I nearly fell off my chair when they told me about the Geoff Charles element. Geoff was a prolific Welsh documentary photographer. He took a photo…
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Signals from society
I’ve been corresponding recently with Wim Kievits who’s had an interest in Digital Storytelling for some time. He recently contacted me regarding a presentation he’s making in the Netherlands later this week. He asked what triggered BBC Wales’s interest in starting Capture Wales and asked: “Can you tell me or point out to me how the whole initiative started? What were the initial challenges (or signals from society) you encountered that made you decide to start this initiative?” Well I can’t speak on behalf of BBC Wales but I can remember a time when it used to cost £30,000 to buy a machine to edit video. So it was expensive/exclusive…
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Festival of Digital Storytelling 2008
Registration is now open for Wales’s third annual Festival of Digital Storytelling at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on Thursday 5th and Friday 6 June 2008. And – wearing my DS Cymru member hat – I’d like to invite you to come 🙂 Yes, DS3 has expanded to two days this year and, as it says on the website: “Whether you work in education, the community or as an artist, it is your opportunity to share experiences, explore new creative ideas, see the latest technological developments, look at examples of best practise in the U.K. and worldwide and celebrate the growing significance of Digital Storytelling” I’m really looking forward to this year’s…
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Curtains open, lights on
The Capture Wales team has been holding a series of five Digital Storytelling Gatherings around Wales. We’ve held them in Caernarfon, Aberystwyth, Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff. The final one – in Cardiff – was held today and it was fantastic! More than 100 individuals who are actively involved in or interested in facilitating digital storytelling activities in Wales have attended these days. Each day has been a chance for people who are involved in this work to meet others in their area, to enjoy watching stories together, learn a little about the history of digital storytelling, hear about recruiting participants (by Carwyn Evans), thinking about issues around ownership of…
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Happy St David’s Day
Happy St David’s Day Here’s a short clip of a song sung by children at a school in south Wales to celebrate the national day of the patron saint of Wales, sung at Cardiff Castle on 1 March 2008. I’ve obscured the images of the children on purpose. Diolch i chi blant am godi calonnau pawb a gwneud i ni deimlo’n falch i fod yn Gymry. Click to play Recorded using the excellent hand-held Zoom H2 audio recorder, with thanks to Zoom for the loan of this.
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Archive meets storytelling
I’m hoping this is useful to people working in museums or with film archives…. I’ve written about Rhondda Lives! here before. This is a Valleys Kids Project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, BBC Wales and the National Sound and Screen Archive of Wales. I led a workshop held at Valleys Kids’ Soar Chapel at the end of November. This was a novel kind of digital storytelling experience because it fits edited, considered but unscripted personal reminiscence with existing archive footage shot in the Rhondda Valley between 1926-1986 or so. I’ll post a link to the stories from Aberth when they’re live. Step 1 – attend public screening at Valley’s…