Digital Storytelling

Derek's Digital Story | Other Tulane Digital Stories

Recently, we've begun an exploration of digital storytelling at Tulane. It's a wonderfully expressive and accessible tool especially as practiced and taught by the Center for Digital Storytelling headed by Joe Lambert out of Berkeley. Read more about it...

Digital storytelling artfully combines narrative with image, voice and even music to produce powerful personal stories and statements from even the most unlikely of "media producers."

It works the other way, too. I've been a television videographer and editor for more than 20 years, but the three days we spent with Daniel and Jessica made me cognizant of techniques I'd never considered and assumptions I didn't know I was making. Just limiting myself to still rather than motion images opened up entire new methods of representations.

Check out my first digital story...

Other members of the Innovative Learning Center produced digital stories, too. Take a look at their efforts...

One of the considerable lessons learned during the workshops were the seven elements that work to make a good digital story:

- A Point (of View): "By point of view, we primarily are addressing this issue of defining the specific realization you, as an author, are trying to communicate within your story. Because every part of the story can service this point, it becomes imperative to define this goal in order to direct the editing process."

- A Dramatic Question: "In a romance, will the girl get the guy? In an adventure, will the hero reach the goal? In a crime or murder mystery, who did it? When any of these questions are answered, the story is over."

- Emotional Content: "A story that deals directly with the fundamental emotional paradigms–of death and our sense of loss, of love and loneliness, of confidence and vulnerability, of acceptance and rejection–will stake a claim on our hearts."

- The Gift of your Voice: "Those of us fortunate enough to be able to talk out loud should love our voices, because they tell everyone so much about who we are, both how strong we can be and how fragile."

- The Power of the Soundtrack: "We are all aware of how music in a film stirs up an emotional response very different than what the visual information inherently suggests."

- Economy: "Storytelling with images means consciously economizing language in relationship to the narrative that is provided by the juxtaposition of images. There are two tracks of meaning, the visual and the auditory, and we need to think about the degree of closure each provides in relation to the other."

- Pacing: "Pacing is considered by many to be the true secret of successful storytelling. The rhythm of a story determines much of what sustains an audience's interest."

We're working with faculty to incorporate digital storytelling into the curriculum, starting with the English Department but expanding to all areas after we gain some expertise and traction within the community. At some point, we'll also begin offering workshops of our own to the Tulane community.