Chapter Critique – “A Road Traveled”

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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.

DS 106 Daily Create: What Is The Lion Thinking?

These DS 106 Daily Create assignments really help me work on my Adobe Illustrator skills from time to time.  Gives me some idea on how I could use the application.Tourists

Digital Story Critique: “This is My Story: Dawn’s Story”

One of the Denver public television stations, Colorado Public Television 12 (CPT12), is supporting an initiative called American Graduate, an ongoing project to help local youth in their quest to avoid the pitfalls of life and graduate from high school.  Digital storytelling plays a key role in this initiative and CPT12 has posted a variety of videos created by American Graduate participants.  One of them is a story about a girl’s perspective in the foster care system called “This is My Story: Dawn’s Story.”

For this critique, I chose to review the video using the following assessment traits:

  • Writing – The author, Dawn, uses a very simple narrative to describe to the audience her experience as a foster child.  Details, like meeting her foster parents for the first time and going to church with her “new” sister, draw the viewer into her life.  On the whole, it sounded like Dawn had a good relationship with her new family while striving to maintain ties with her birth mother.  There was no hint of animosity or malice towards either group of people.
  •  Flow/organization/pacing – Not including American Graduate promotional material, Dawn’s story runs about 4 minutes.  She organizes her experience in a very simple chronological timeline from meeting her foster parents to seeing her birth mother again.  The linear progression is effective and, in some ways, takes the audience on a bit of an emotional roller coaster ride.  Nothing feels rushed and the photo images appear at a very steady pace.  The background music compliments the tone of the video.
  • Media application – In addition to the aforementioned background music, Dawn includes a good mix of original photos and video.  At the end, Dawn shows a present-day picture of the young woman she has become.  On the other hand, I thought she repeated a number of images too often and used some odd video effects that seemed out of place.

Stories of adversity take many shapes. I’m glad there’s a Denver-area television station that is giving young people an opportunity to express their rocky journeys through life.

Scholarly Response: “Who is Trying To Destroy Digital Storytelling?”

Every week when I conduct a Google search to find articles on “digital storytelling”, I come up with a variety of links.  At the top of the search page came this piece posted yesterday: “Who is Trying To Destroy Digital Storytelling?”   It comes from a website created by a Boston-area digital marketing firm called Skyword.   Personally, I’m a little suspicious of for-profit organizations that describe digital storytelling in terms of “brands”, “markets” and “entertaining experiences.”  I’ve come to believe that true storytelling should be influenced by factors such as personal desires rather than corporate profits.

Still, I decided to delve into the reading.  The author, a content marketing specialist named John Montesi, gives some compelling examples of well-know tech companies making investments and taking risks in far away lands to give people an opportunity to tell their stories online.   Montesi cites YouTube’s relaunch in Pakistan to meet the government’s rules about illegal content while striving to ensure that the citizens there still have an opportunity to upload and view content.   In addition, Montesi mentions Twitter’s battle with ISIS after it shut down many terror-related accounts.  It’s a tightrope that Twitter must balance between confronting the promotion of terrorism but not to the point where the company denies account users’ rights to freedom of expression.  Much of the article praises the efforts of these social media companies dealing with very tighly-controlled governments and radical organizations.  I wish Montesi would have said something about how many of these same companies are blocked completely in China.  I guess that will be something for another article.

Much of what is considered digital storytelling, whether for-profit or non-profit, would not be possible without the efforts and investment of companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.  Definitely something we should all “Like.”

DS106 Daily Create: It’s 1:06pm Somewhere….

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… but it’s not happy hour yet.  Dang it!  Had to plan to get this photo at Union Station in Denver.  Fortunately, the clocks inside were set correctly.  The ones on the outside are not always so precise.