Performative Methodologies: Geographies of Emotion and Affect in Digital Storytelling Workshops

This thesis advocates digital storytelling as a geographical methodology to understand how emotion and affect are produced. Digital storytelling is a flexible and workshopped methodology that captures experimental, creative and imaginative performances of emotion and affect. Through digital storytelling geographers may build understandings of how emotion and affect are experienced individually and collectively. I use 11 digital storytelling workshops, with more than 100 participants, as the primary sites for my research. The workshops were conducted in the United States and New Zealand and were modelled on the practice established by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, United States. It is argued that digital storytelling workshops co-create emotion, affect, people and place. Individual and group interviews, reflexive autobiographical journal writing, and digital storytelling workshop training, participation, and observing are used to access emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. A combination of qualitative research methods and critical social theories are used to highlight embodied, emotional and affectual geographies. Three findings frame my discussion. First, digital storytelling workshops are performative spaces for the staging and circulation of emotion and affect. The concepts of infrastructure, improvisation, and intimacy are critical for understanding the dynamic nature of emotion and affect in digital storytelling workshops. Second, a focus on relationality allows for an examination of psychotherapeutic practice and the transformative capacity of digital storytelling workshops. Workshop spaces are understood as ‘connective mediums’ in which a third position – the gap between the flow of emotions and the representation of that experience - is possible. Third, voice in digital storytelling is a political process of speaking and listening. A focus on voice permits an exploration of the acoustic politics of emotion and affect at individual and collective spatial scales. Digital storytelling workshops facilitate processes of seeing, hearing and experiencing emotion and affect as a way of interpreting the geographical worlds of research participants. The Center for Digital Storytelling’s model incorporates a commitment to social justice that honours and values emotional knowledge. As a practice-based research methodology digital storytelling requires researchers to be reflexive and negotiate their multiply layered ethical positionings. As geographers continue to experiment with innovative ways of conducting research, the messiness of digital storytelling can contribute to methodological debates about the ‘doing’ of emotion and affect in geographical research

A close look into the storytelling process: the procedural nature of interactive digital narratives as learning opportunity

Differently from traditional narratives, which focus on the output, i.e. the oral or written text, interactive digital narratives provide a more holistic view of the storytelling process, considering as integral part of it the system, the user, the process and the output. In this framework, the procedural nature of IDN as a reactive and generative system becomes prominent. Such an approach is particularly interesting when considering educational appli- cations of IDN and how they can support early literacy practices in pre-and primary school children. Here, we take a close look into the procedural nature of IDN, presenting observations and results from two pilot studies carried out with six to seven-years old children, arguing that interactive digital narratives can provide a window into (i) how the children plan their story, (ii) how, along the storytelling process, the children learn the rules and constraints provided by the IDN system, which they appropriate and incorporate in their storytelling to achieve a certain output, (iii) how the children empathize with the story characters, diving into the story world and (iv) how the system provides opportunities for mediating new knowledge in a meaningful way, which was visible e.g. in the way the children immediately appropriated and used the new conveyed vocabulary.This work has been financed by national funds through the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) - and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program under the reference POCI/01/0145/FEDER/032580

Ijiam: Augmented Reality Technologies for the Adaptation of Ecuadorian Intangible Cultural Heritage

Oral storytelling is a dynamic cultural expression for passing down human knowledge and perceptions of life and nature, building a meaningful bond between the past and the future. Over time, much oral expression has lost most of its unique flexibility and generativity as a result of textualization. This project uses digital technologies to create critical adaptations of ancestral wisdom from the Shuar indigenous community of the Ecuadorian Amazon, transposing relevant concepts of their cosmovision into a new digital storytelling experience. Following a post-colonial ethnographic research approach, this thesis employs decolonizing methods to analyze the complex knowledge system of the Shuar culture, engaging the community through a communication protocol of reciprocity and fair exchange of knowledge. The outcome of this project is an interactive digital installation that allows participants in the Shuar community and elsewhere to embody an audiovisual experience based on Shuar ancestral wisdom

Children’s Augmented Storying in, with and for Nature

Drawing on a relational ontology and scholarship of new literacies, we investigate the materiality and performativity of children’s augmented storying in nature. Our study is situated in a Finnish primary school in which a novel, augmented reality application (MyAR Julle) was utilized as a digital storytelling tool for children (n = 62, aged 7–9), allowing them to explore, interact, and imagine in nature and to create/share their stories. The data corpus consists of their narrations of their augmented stories in nature, their augmented story artefacts, and video/observational data from their construction of such stories in nature. Narrative analysis reveals how the children’s augmented storying in nature was performed through playful, affective, and sensuous, identity, cultural, and critical literacies, which were imaginatively constructed into being at the nexus of their sensed reality and fantasy. These literacies make visible human–material–spatial–temporal assemblages during which the children played with/through the augmented character Julle, felt and sensed with/through Julle, and re-storied their experiences, cultural knowledge, and identities with/through Julle. They also engaged in critical thinking with/through Julle. The study contributes to knowledge on the meaning of materiality in children’s storying in, with, and for nature and the educational possibilities of augmented storying for children’s (eco)literacies

Children’s Augmented Storying in, with and for Nature

Drawing on a relational ontology and scholarship of new literacies, we investigate the materiality and performativity of children’s augmented storying in nature. Our study is situated in a Finnish primary school in which a novel, augmented reality application (MyAR Julle) was utilized as a digital storytelling tool for children (n = 62, aged 7–9), allowing them to explore, interact, and imagine in nature and to create/share their stories. The data corpus consists of their narrations of their augmented stories in nature, their augmented story artefacts, and video/observational data from their construction of such stories in nature. Narrative analysis reveals how the children’s augmented storying in nature was performed through playful, affective, and sensuous, identity, cultural, and critical literacies, which were imaginatively constructed into being at the nexus of their sensed reality and fantasy. These literacies make visible human–material–spatial–temporal assemblages during which the children played with/through the augmented character Julle, felt and sensed with/through Julle, and re-storied their experiences, cultural knowledge, and identities with/through Julle. They also engaged in critical thinking with/through Julle. The study contributes to knowledge on the meaning of materiality in children’s storying in, with, and for nature and the educational possibilities of augmented storying for children’s (eco)literacies

Telling timber tales in higher education: a reflection on my journey with digital storytelling

The challenges of the Higher Education landscape are the result of massification and globalisation. The general lack of preparedness in students and lack of academic literacy means that plagiarism is increasingly a challenge in written assignments. In the South African context, this is amplified, as students may be studying in their third or fourth language. Relying on students' affinity for visual learning, digital storytelling was first used as an alternative assessment method (to a written assignment) in 2011. This paper is a reflection on a lecturer's journey with digital storytelling, beginning with the first project in the Industrial Design programme at a University of Technology in South Africa. The short movie clips, known as digital stories, were created with off-the-shelf equipment and techniques, and any open source software available to the students. By evaluating the project using the lens of Authentic Learning, some of the benefits and challenges of using this alternative means of assessment could be identified. The authentic learning, the polished end products, the engagement of students with the material, the decidedly independent learning, and the collaborative practice were recognised as key benefits. The students also saw the visual orientation of the project, the digital literacy-building, and freedom of creative expression as benefits, and revealed their resourcefulness during the student-led project. This paper also acknowledges the two models of digital storytelling, the growth of communities of practice and the possibilities for further research into this growing area of learning in Higher Education

Digital tools disrupting tertiary students’ notions of disciplinary knowledge: Cases in history and tourism

This paper reports on the findings from a two year research project that explored the potential of digital tools in support of teaching–learning across different disciplinary areas at a New Zealand university. Two courses (in History and Tourism) are case studied using data collected through interviews with lecturers, tutors and their students, and an online student survey. Findings from the research revealed that both lecturers and students were challenged in learning about the affordances and use of the lecturer selected digital tools as a mediational means. The tools were not initially transparent to them, nor were they able to be easily deployed to undertake their primary task—teaching for the lecturers, and, learning and demonstrating learning for the students completing assigned tasks. The process of learning and using the tools disrupted participants’ prior thinking and led to new understandings of both disciplines and of effective pedagogies for the two disciplines. The findings increase our understanding of the ways digital tools can develop, challenge and expand tertiary students learning and have implications for practice

Digital practices to enhance Intangible Cultural Heritage

The term “cultural heritage” has been enriched with multiple contents in the last decades, partly thanks to the protection instruments developed by UNESCO. Despite the past, the cultural heritage is not limited to monuments and collections of objects. The term nowadays includes tangible and intangible cultural heritage (ICH). ICH includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts. Within this context, the Museum of “Passione di Sordevolo” preserves and spreads the cultural and social value of the largest representation of popular Christian theatre in Italy, called “La Passione di Sordevolo”. The paper presents the results of the research of the reconstructive modelling and visual storytelling project called "Digital historical scenic design". The project explores the use of digital technologies to create new content compatible with the Museum’s mission: dissemination, communication and valorization of the documentary heritage (photographs, sketches, drawings) and the systematic collection of the oral tradition of this theatrical tradition

Europeana communication bug: which intervention strategy for a better cooperation with creative industry?

Although Europeana as well as many GLAMs are very engaged - beside the main mission, i.e. spreading cultural heritage knowledge- in developing new strategies in order to make digital contents reusable for creative industry, these efforts have been successful just only in sporadic cases. A significant know how deficits in communication often compromises expected outcomes and impact. Indeed, what prevails is an idea of communication like an enhancement “instrument” intended on the one hand in purely economic (development) sense, on the other hand as a way for increasing and spreading knowledge. The main reference model is more or less as follows: digital objects are to be captured and/or transformed by digital technologies into sellable goods to put into circulation. Nevertheless, this approach risks neglecting the real nature of communication, and more in detail the one of digital heritage where it is strategic not so much producing objects and goods as taking part into sharing environments creation (media) by engaged communities, small or large they may be. The environments act as meeting and interchange point, and consequently as driving force of enhancing. Only in a complex context of network interaction on line accessible digital heritage contents become a strategic resource for creating environments in which their re/mediation can occur – provided that credible strategies exist, shared by stakeholders and users. This paper particularly describes a case study including proposals for an effective connection among Europeana, GLAMs and Creative Industry in the framework of Food and Drink digital heritage enhancement and promotion. Experimental experiences as the one described in this paper anyway confirm the relevance of up-to-date policies based on an adequate communication concept, on solid partnerships with enterprise and association networks, on collaborative on line environments, on effective availability at least for most of contents by increasing free licensing, and finally on grassroots content implementation involving prosumers audience, even if filtered by GLAMs

Creating stories for reflection from multimodal lifelog content: An initial investigation

Using lifelogging tools, digital artifacts can be collected continuously and passively throughout our day. These may include a stream of images recorded passively using tools such as the Microsoft SenseCam; documents, emails and webpages accessed; texts messages and mobile activity; and context sensing to uncover the current location and proximal individuals. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our personal life history provides us with the opportunity to review, reflect and reminisce upon our past experience. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections creates a barrier to such activities. We are currently exploring the potential of digital narratives formed from these collections as a means to overcome these challenges. By successfully reducing the content to that most appropriate to the story, and by then presenting it in a coherent and usable manner, we can hope to better enable reflection. The means by which content reduction and presentation should occur is investigated through card sorting activities and probe sessions which nine participants engaged in. The initial results are discussed, as well as the opportunity, as seen in these sessions, for lifelog-based stories to provide utility in personal reflection and reminiscence