Digital Storytellers from Italy and Jordan in Wales

I shared my journey to the DS6 festival of digital storytelling, with Simona Bonini Baldini and Rami Malkawi. I’ll never forget the excitement in the car as we rounded the corner of Aberystwyth’s side streets and caught our first full-on view of the sea crashing onto the West Wales shore. A magic moment. As I promised in my last post in which I reviewed DS6, here’s some more information about their respective work in the digital storytelling field.

Simona’s work in Umbria, Italy, links personal reminiscence of various locations with that Region’s extensive home movie archive. Simona was delighted to meet two other women from Italy who had made the trip to Wales at the invitation of experienced Welsh digital storyteller Steve Bellis of Yale College Wrexham. This all goes to show that we sometimes have to travel away from home to meet others who share our passions. Simona says she was delighted to meet people at DS6 whom she’d first met a year ago at DS5. She’s now looking forward to visiting the Cardiff Story museum – a concept that was being developed when she last came to Wales. She says she was really impressed by StoryWorks’s approach to developing bespoke approaches when working with diverse groups of people as this is something Simona is keen to do back home in Italy too.

Rami Malkawi is a PhD research student at University of Glamorgan. Since I last wrote about Rami, his work on a step-by-step digital storytelling wizzard has matured from concept to working prototype. It’s a DS Machine aimed at educators who want to use digital stories as a way to help their students learn. Rami has built the application in Flash on the Adobe Air platform.

This means it will work on both PC and Mac. I was delighted at DS6 to see Rami discussing a trial with Mog and Angharad Dalton of Communities 2.0. Eventually, after initial testing, Rami will release his digital storytelling wizzard to a wider audience, so watch this space for news.