Chapter Review: “Seven Steps of Digital Storytelling”

DS imageAfter reading Chapter 4 of Joe Lambert’s Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, I was tempted to jump to other readings mentioned by my peers in my Learning With Digital Stories (INTE 5340) class.  On the other hand, I realized that I was one of the few people writing responses to Lambert’s book. So, I decided to proceed to chapter 5 to discover what Lambert and his colleagues consider the important steps in creating a unique digital story.

First of all, Lambert and his StoryCenter team believe in the importance of the digital author expressing his or her viewpoints fully and expanding upon how certain events have changed the author’s life.  More importantly, Lambert focuses on the importance of the author writing without any concern for fame or publicity.  He comments, “If you burden the beginning of your process with the external expectations, you can easily interrupt or edit the little voice inside your head that is working through why the story has great personal meaning for you” (p. 55).  The second step is the author retaining ownership of his or her emotions.  The emotional undercurrent of the story is key in establishing a connection with the readers.  At times, however, the author may be hesitant to disclose certain pieces of information out of concerns of privacy.  Thirdly, the digital story must highlight a pivotal moment when things changed significantly in the author’s life.  The more details the digital author can produce, the better the reader will be able to “see” the significance of the moment.  This concept is key in the fourth step of gathering archived images or creating new ones to create a visual narrative.  Lambert brings up the concepts of “visual metaphor” and “juxtaposition” as clever methods to orchestrate images.  On the other hand, Lambert advises against quickly gathering random images from the Internet that “can take away from the integrity of the story” (p. 63).

After incorporating visual elements, the fifth step in digital storytelling is creating the audio elements.  Key to this is the author recording his or her own voice, since, as Lambert says, “voice not only tells a vital narrative but it also captures the essence of the narrator, their unique character, and their connection to the lived experience” (p.63).  Mixing in music and ambient sound (thunder, traffic noise, etc) can be useful, but only if it adds, rather than subtracts, from the overall emotional tone of the story.  Editing the visual and audio elements together is the sixth step, where the author determines what elements of the story will be included and when those elements will appear.  As a rule, Lambert’s team sets certain constraints regarding narration words (250 – 375) and visual images (less than 20).  The final step is sharing the story with the audience, where digital authors may need to make revisions based on who they want to share their stories with on the World Wide Web.

I found these steps very easy for a novice digital author to comprehend.   Perhaps the biggest challenge for most people would be the first two steps: “Owning Your Insights” and “Owning Your Emotions.”  As an introvert, I’m often reluctant to express myself openly to a group of people, much less the whole Internet.  Still, there’s something very therapeutic about telling a remarkable story to a large group strangers in cyberspace.

Digital Story Critique: “Birth of the Internet”

For this digital story critique, I selected a video from the University of Houston’s Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site entitled “Birth of the Internet.” The author, Anita Vyas, tells a personal reflection on how the internet age affected her life.  For this critique, I choose to judge the video on the following assessment traits (as established by Jason Ohler in his book Digital Storytelling in the Classroom):

  • Research – In telling her personal story, Vyas ties into the evolution of the internet.  She includes a number of photos of major scientific contributors, like Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, but it’s difficult to register their identities with the quality of the narration.  Vyas does a good job of finding both historical archive images as well as incorporating her personal photos from her upbringing in India.
  • Flow/organization/pace – At times, I was confused about whether this video was a personal reflection or a research project.  Vyas goes back and forth between discussing her experiences using a desktop computer in 1990 to mentioning the launch of the World Wide Web in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee.  Most of the images flowed smoothly.  Vyes utilized the Ken Burns style of photo presentation.
  • Media application – About 4 minutes into the video, Vyes includes a video clip of, I believe, is Bernes-Lee talking.  This media element seems out of place given that the visual elements have mostly been still photos, illustrations and artwork.  On the whole, the mix of images makes for a nice medley of visual presentation. There are some nice close-up images of computer chips and keyboards that add to the overall flavor.  Nostalgic images of Vyas’s father and her own children are especially poignant.   She ends on an up-to-date picture of her Facebook page, which is touching.
  • Citations – Overall, Vyes attributes all the media elements she uses, including a copyrighted song from Coldplay and the theme from Sesame Street.  Likewise, there is attribution to many of the images, but this end credit segment speeds through rather quickly.

Personally, I think Vyes should have focused more on her personal reflection on how the internet changed her life rather than how the internet changed everyone’s life.