Notes on Digital Storytelling
How to talk about new media narrative (Punday)
Some theorists talk about the ‘game-like’ qualities of ‘cybertext’ as being very different from the traditional narratives discussed and needs to be protected from their entrenched attitudes. (interactive narrative has lots od critics within the trad forms).
What is digital storytelling? Simply put, it is telling stories with digital technologies.
“Freytag tri-angle - This is the customary sequence of exposition or introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and a dénouement, first codified by the
German writer Gustav Freytag (1816–1895) in the nineteenth century. Nearly every person will recognize this sequence on its own terms, perhaps rephrased in the ancient trinity of beginning, middle, and end, or through variations like inception through crisis and resolution”.
The linear nature of stories is crucial to many definitions of story. Events arranged in time, or an event broken down into a temporal sequence: these make intuitive sense. Given that stories reassemble previously existing materials
(language, media, audience, lives), perhaps we can go further and see stories as consisting of some selections from the set of available cultural practices, crafted to represent events chronologically. But focusing on the importance of time to stories risks being too obvious. How can a story exist outside of time, beyond the cliché of being timeless?
Stories must engage the viewer/reader/listener; this can be a way of excluding frustrating data piles and documents or simply moving from one htp to another. nonstories (or very bad stories) are things which do not attempt to engage us, or fail miserably at it. As Nick Montfort argues, a story “has a point. There’s a reason for introducing it, there’s a reason for bringing it up. If it means something to our situation, and to the way we talk to one other, then we’re doing storytelling.”
Are there some ‘data piles’ can you imagine might make good stories, or do in fact tell stories? (data.gov) http://visual.ly/
Stories as challenge or problem and have ‘meaning’ for the audience distinction between fiction and nonfiction Journalists / courts-solicitors/ businesses persuasive stories about their goods

For a given audience, a story is a sequence of content, anchored on a problem, which engages that audience with emotion and meaning. Breaking this down, audience is a crucial definitional component, simply because what makes a story for one group might fail utterly for another.
Sequence is important
Second, we can explore how the digital story functions in ways emphasizing the unique affordances of cyberculture. How does being digi- tal enable new aspects of storytelling?
Perhaps the greatest example comes from the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. If elections can be seen as storytelling contests, where candidates battle to promulgate the most effective narratives about their pro- grams, then the Obama campaign conducted the largest digital storytelling exercise to date. The thencandidate’s strategy included many social media components, including
Facebook and MySpace pages, Twitter feeds, public and password-protected
Web sites, and YouTube channels. Fan-made content was published, shared, and spread widely through these networks, along with blog posts and Wikipedia entries. Think, for example, of the many remixes of fan videos like the “Yes We
Can” series. Mobile devices carried all of this still further, with the additional features of smartphone apps and text messages purportedly from the candidate himself. (transmedia narrative)
Alexander gives us a list of what constitutes a digital story – some of these things we might not have considered a ‘story’
 A very short story about growing food, made out of remixed archival photographs
 A podcast about medieval history, where each installment takes listeners through the extraordinary lives of Norman rulers
 A blog novel about America in 1968, following two teenagers as they travel through political and personal landscapes
 AnaccountofanalieninvasiondeliveredthroughmultipleTwitteraccounts: an updated War of the Worlds hoax, tweet by tweet
 A video clip about a mother–daughter relationship over time
 A game of sorts seemingly about TheMatrix, based on a Website, but mysteriously extending across multiple platforms including your email inbox
 Novels read on mobile phones—and often written on mobile phones
 Hundreds of Vermont teenagers creating multimedia stories for each other
 A Holocaust victim’s life retold by Facebook1

It’s vital to realize that people tell stories with nearly every new piece of communication technology we invent. Portable video recorders led to video art, starting in the 1960s with the Portapak and Nam June Paik’s work. Long-playing vinyl records enabled concept albums, from Gordon Jenkins’s Manhattan Towers
(1958) to Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick (1972) and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979)
Social Media
New web making the production and dissemination of content easier
Microcontent / small bits of content smaller than an entire website and easy to produce – wiki’s, blogs, Picasso images, podcasts, slideshare
Social element with multiple accelerated connections
Consider, for example blog posts and how the comments work…. Could you make this into a narrative somehow? How would you make a story out of a blogpost?
Lets get a few examples…
Alexander uses gaming as a storytelling device / doesn’t seem to draw a distinction between them. A lot of people might say that an interactive narrative
is a game.
Multiple Proscenia. Increasingly, there is no single point of story experi- ence. If digital stories are distributed in space and time, this can necessitate multiple platforms for experiencing them. Henry Jenkins’s model of trans- media storytelling means creators and audiences meet each other across multiple stages for the same story or world Social media routinely cross locations, media, languages, and styles.
Platform Affordances. Every digital story can take advantage of the unique affordances of each digital platform it uses
Mobile devices – small screens
 Ubiquitous computing describes a much broader world— one where digital networked devices are not only widespread but blended into the world - such as the internet of things. It is now commonplace to see nontraditional devices located on networks, like printers and projectors.
 Geolocation provides another way to index physical objects, either through embedded GPS or by manually assigning latitude and longitude, perhaps with a connection to a mapping service like Google or Bing Maps.
We are rapidly adding a digital layer to the Earth’s surface
In such an environment, how do we tell stories?

A very different environment to consider when so many people are uploading content in a physical form, photo’s, video’s etc.
For example, the Choose Your Own Adventure stories we discussed in chapter 2 have been resurrected and reimagined as iPhone apps. It’s a natural combination of gaming with digital storytelling:
Instead of turning to a particular page to make a choice, the U-Ventures apps allow the reader to tap the screen and enjoy, with sound, light and other special effects—music and alien voices, for example—added to the titles, as well as new variations and endings dreamed up by [author Edward] Pack- ard.
Enhancements include readers having to remember codewords and type them in to affect the course of the story.
The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age,” then we should expect more developments like this.9 Cell phone novels are becoming populare – subscribers are given a chapter a day and can leave comments etc.
Beyond these mutated story forms, mobile phones also increase the num- ber of opportunities for us to view, read, or listen to traditional forms, be they Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS)–style videos, Flickr image sequences, podcasts, or text. Joseph Esposito suggests a different form of storytelling may surface via mobile phones, during a certain kind of reader’s time
The launch of Apple’s App Store triggered a huge creative boom, as devel- opers sought to outdesign each other for market and mindshare.
Storytelling through mobile apps has taken several forms. One is the e-book-asapp format, where a book or group of books is simply made available as a downloadable app. unique affordances of a mobile phone to influence a story’s dynamics. Ruben and
Lullaby is a good example of this, where the story concerns an argument between two lovers.14 The user advances the story by touching the screen to alter a character’s stance, or by shaking the entire phone, which activates its accelerometer, changing a character’s mood. Both of these changes are shown by different drawings of each person’s face. A musical track plays, changing to reflect different stages of the conversation. The reader/listener/ audience/player can thereby drive the discussion’s outcome. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFlkbCbCg8&list=PL550753330998FD04
&index=2
Apps can also blur the classic divide between game and story, by inte- grating game mechanics into chunks of story.
Tab- lets may rival mobile phones and laptops as digital storytelling platforms by the time you read this. As digital storyteller and instructor Doug Reilly anticipates: “I can imagine a student or group of students spending a morn- ing scripting and shooting raw material for a digital story onsite, spending the afternoon in a café putting the digital story together on an iPad, and showing it in the evening at a group session.”26