Made this DS106 Design Assignment and added a Coen brothers twist. If you’ve ever seen The Big Lebowski, you’ll understand the context. Very simple design using (gasp!) Microsoft Power Point.
Month: March 2016
Weekly Reflection: Getting Farther Away From the Campfire
(Photo by Emeldil at English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
In chapter 3 of Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, author Joe Lambert discusses a live stage project of one of his collaborators, Dana Atchley. In 1990, Atchley began performing a one-person show in his San Fransisco studio called Next Exit, a guided tour of his life traveling across the United States. Part of his performance involved a campfire, or more specifically, the image of a campfire on a video monitor. Atchley would tell stories about meeting “offbeat Americans” and interact with video segments projected on a backdrop. This metaphor made me think of the times I would be with fellow campers, camp councilors or friends and there would be an exchange of stories near the fire.
In recent years, however, I feel that I am getting farther and farther away from that friendly circle of warmth. I’ve worked a variety of temporary, seasonal, and part-time jobs since getting laid off from my full-time employer in 2010. What’s worse, that was the third layoff from a full-time job I’ve had to endure since 2003. During this time of economic uncertainly, my relationships with work colleagues and friends have weakened. The shame of not having a steady job makes a person withdraw. I have two part-time jobs now, but there are semester-dependent positions through higher education institutions. Come mid-May, I may have to find some other steady work as a source of income. This employment instability, constant job-searching and feeling of embarrassment has kept me from coming closer to the campfire.
To a certain extent, being enrolled in graduate school has improved my self-esteem and given me a better idea of a possible career track. The total online nature (and dramatic lack interpersonal engagement) of the Information and Learning Technologies program, however, is giving me some off-campus blues. WordPress blogging, Twitter exchanges and Zoom meetings are useful, but there’s still a great distance between the “camper” and the “campfire”. Plus, it seems I am not the only person in my INTE5340 class that has succumbed to disengagement.
Truly, I do want to get closer to the campfire and engage again with my friends, former coworkers and current students. My fear is that even if I talk, will anyone really listen? I hope so.
Digital Story Critique: “It Takes a Crisis”
Often times, an instance of adversity can have long-lasting effects. In searching for digital stories that give a short glimpse into how people adjust to sudden changes in their lives, I found another story from the Charlestown Digital Story Project entitled “It Takes a Crisis.” The narrator, Charlotte Valentine, talks about how the psychological adjustments she had to make before and after she decided to divorce after 13 years of marriage. For this critique, I chose to critique the story using the following assessment traits:
- Originality/Voice/Creativity – From her time as a shy child to her success as a confident Certified Public Accountant, Valentine narrates her own story. She discusses how growing up, she always was tough to “please others” and then later on, she learned how to “please herself.” Although the narration sounds a bit scripted, it feels genuine. The story collaborator, Daniel Rodriguez, gives Valentine “room” to tell her story through her voice and her archived photographs.
- Flow/Organization/Pacing – Rodriguez wisely presents the story in chronological order. He organizes the still photos making it easy for the viewer to absorb. There’s a nice variety of image movement (some story creators rely too much on bring the photos in and out, which was popularized by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns). The pacing of the images is accompanied by cuts of light and playful piano music.
- Media Grammar – Overall, the media elements are put together well, but their is a moment where it looks like a photo of Valentine in her flooded basement, after surviving a hurricane, appears to be Photoshopped. This moment seems to interrupt the genuine nature of the archived images.
I highly recommend anyone to view either this story or the many other stories on this site.
Chapter Critique – “A Road Traveled”
I was intrigued by the first chapter of Joe Lambert’s book, Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community. In chapter 3, Lambert tells his own story of how he, along with several other key contributors, founded the Center for Digital Storytelling. His journey began in 1950s Dallas, where he grew up in, as he put it, a “small oasis of liberal friendliness in the desert of 1950s Texas conservatism” (p.26). I was intrigued about how folk music of that era played a major role in shaping Lambert’s idea of storytelling. He comments “digital storytelling is rooted fundamentally in the notion of democratized culture that was the hallmark of the folk music, reclaimed folk culture, and cultural activist traditions of the 1960s” (p.26).
Coincidentally, my mother has had a life-long interest in folk music since her days as a student at Iowa State University in the early 1960s. On many a long drive to my grandparents’s house in Iowa, we would hear Peter Paul & Mary, Joan Baez and The Kingston Trio. Although I’ve never been a huge fan of the genre, I understand why young people connect with those songs as well as with the songwriters of that time period. Much of the folk music inspired college students during the protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Lambert, the folk music gave him ideas on how individuals, especially those marginalized by factors such as income, race and ethnicity, could tell their stories. As Lambert puts it, “… the populist artist in the folk traditions sought out a way to celebrate the ordinary, the common person, and their daily battles to survive and overcome” (p.27).
In discussing the significance of folk music, Lambert brings up the idea of “citizen-centered authorship and authority” (p.27). He further expands on the significance of this concept when discussing how, in 1993, he and his future Center for Digital Storytelling collaborators “came to understand that mixing digital photography and non-linear editing were tremendous play spaces for people” (p.32). To me, the 20th century concept of “citizen-centered authorship” sounds very much like what we have now in the 21st century internet with WordPress blogs and YouTube videos. These are forms of personal expression that are not subject to centralized editorial control. As someone who went to college in the early 1990s and studied television production, our generation were just beginning to understand the possibilities of using video for storytelling purposes. Unfortunately at that time, my educational institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, only had Panasonic camcorders and simple linear editing systems for us to put together our personal narratives, which were largely inspired by indie filmmakers of fiction such as Richard Linklater, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino. I never thought I would drift off more towards the documentary genre later in my career.
One thing missing from this chapter was information on where Lambert went to college. That might seem like a small omission to some, but I was curious as to what type of institution helped steer Lambert in his thinking. He mentions coming to San Fransisco in 1976, but everything between his arrival there and his childhood in Dallas seems to be a mystery. Personally, I found my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to be incredibly rewarding, despite learning with out-of-date video technology. Overall, it was a very enlightening chapter that gave me a glimpse into the author’s journey. I am already delving into the next chapter.