How Digital Storytelling Became a Digital Story: This Post
Storytelling is magical you hold something sacred when you've been entrusted with someone's story. Listening to a story and telling a story are both equally important. Also, a community that engages in storytelling honors and heals its people.
The unexpected nature of zines is something that has always spoken to me: I love little squares of folded paper that people have labored over and made in an effort to communicate the big stuff and the little stuff, and I will always pause at that intersection of ink, paper, and politics. Also, a story that fits in your pocket, hello!
With regards to the scholarship of zines, Anne Hays writes:
...zines are influential and worthy objects of study, not just as a form of print media, but as educational and pedagogical tools in the classroom, as evidence of activism, political movements, third-wave feminism, cultural critiques, cultural movements, and much more. Future scholars may use this study to build upon more established topics as well as those that are understudied.
So, don't dismiss the knowledge-creation and cultural significance of storytelling made possible by notebook paper and a medium point Sharpie. Look! Another TOOL!
Confession time!
I also love research, I love compiling and building the information that will be the foundation of a project, I don't even really care what the project is--If it has to do with equity and humans, great! But if the research entails the very big engine on an El Camino, that works, too. I will get all of the information, I will create tabs and files and utilize the Dropbox that is dusty from being ignored.
/EndConfession!
Aside: The Dropbox has my old research on Daughters of Bilitis from 2018. I have no reason to keep paying for Dropbox, but I can't let go of the scanned images and information that keeps me tied to a favorite professor who used to update the files all the time, but hasn't in awhile.
And I love stories about humans, and an annotated bibliographic writing-style (there is probably a term for this) that further tells a story within the story. (The term is auto-theory, I had forgotten it.) Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a great example of this. So is The Mother of all Questions by Rebecca Solnit. Some pieces of writing simultaneously challenge me and offer answers to questions that I didn't even know I had.
Similarly, I always have to read posts by Humans of New York. I need to know what is up with people and their lives that I could be walking by and never know.
Everyone has an intriguing story.
Our class this semester has learned a lot of different methods to pull together information and tell a digital story and we were introduced to digital literacy that asks the viewer to explore meaning further than we might, in this digital age.
So, what are you going to do with digital storytelling?
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