Digital Storytelling

• Overview
• What is a digital story?
• 7 elements of a digital story
• Process for making a digital story
• Writing prompts
• Links & resources
• Curriculum ideas

• This toolkit is geared primarily toward community technology network staff looking to integrate digital storytelling into their organizations. Included are insights from various digital storytelling practitioners and trainers, explaining how they practically apply digital storytelling in their own work. There are outlines for the key elements and the process of digital story creation, as well as some writing prompts to give you story ideas as you and your group begin to create your own digital stories. Finally, there are several links listed if you are further interested in digital storytelling.
  
  
• In the San Francisco Bay Area, we are fortunate to have many local organizations working on digital storytelling. Contact the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley (info@storycenter.org) if you are interested in learning more!

What is a digital story?

• A digital storytelling movement has been growing over the years. Digital stories can be personal, political, and community oriented in nature. Whatever their final form, they increase visual literacy, build technological skills, refine writing, and expand our capacity for interpreting and making sense of our lives and the world around us. Creating and these stories strengthens the power of our vision, and sharing our creations confirms how important it is for us to express our insights with the rest of the world.
  
  
• The Center for Digital Storytelling, views personal storytelling as empowering and healing:
  
  
  • We all have stories about the events, people and places in our lives. Many of the stories are directly connected to the images that one collects in a life's journey. But our primary concern is encouraging thoughtful and emotionally direct writing.
    
  • We have found that writing into the images, narrating the story, and bringing the images to life using the power of digital media design tools, creates a powerful medium for presenting a story.
    
  • In a group process, the sharing of these stories connects people in special ways. People often come to our workshops feeling insecure about their writing, about the technology, about their design sensibility. At the end of the workshops, when the stories our shared, their is a bit of magic, as the fruits of their own work, and those around them, surprises and inspires.

  Digital storytelling can also be used for community organizing and political change, as articulated and practiced by Third World Majority:

  • Our mission is to develop new media practices for radical social change that challenge the notion that a media and cultural arts organization cannot also do grassroots political organizing. Our programs explore the nature of politicized new media production which include: digital video, the web, graphic design, sound engineering, and animation. Through our efforts and collaborations with other organizations, we support organizing in real, representational, and virtual worlds.
    
  
  
  • Oral history is another avenue for digital storytelling, as reflected by the work done at New York City's Digital Clubhouse's Stories of Service project:
  • This national initiative is dedicated to mobilizing young people to serve their communities by helping preserve the stories of our nation's veterans. Veterans, students and volunteers work together to create Digital Stories that preserve the historical legacy of our country while passing on priceless lessons about courage, sacrifice and service to future generations