Digital storytelling

Digital storytelling is a narrative-driven form of digital media production that allows people to share aspects of their life by making a short film, or audio or photographic essay. While digital storytelling is a relatively new visual methodology within academia, it has a much longer history in the media and the corporate spheres. With the addition of increasingly affordable high-quality digital media tools – such as photography equipment, video cameras and voice recorders – digital storytelling is a performative practice that can be undertaken by almost anyone. As a practice, digital storytelling is very diverse and might produce short radio documentaries, photographic essays, participant-directed autobiographical films or stop-animation stories.

For the Residents’ Voices Project we commissioned Information and Cultural Exchange,¹⁹ a community arts organisation, to run our digital storytelling workshop as a capacity-building process for the university researchers and tenant collaborators. Lundby argues that increasing access to the Internet, low-cost or free software and the rise of social media rise have allowed some marginalised groups to redeploy ‘the age-old practices of storytelling’ to self-represent their own social experience.²⁰ Therefore, we wanted the residents not only to create a digital story through the workshops but, more importantly, to acquire the skills and knowledge to create and teach others how to create additional digital stories in the future. This workshop involved five residents and three university researchers. We conducted two technical sessions in a studio space and four content development sessions in a computer room at the local library near the residents’ homes. In the first two sessions, the digital storytelling facilitators conducted classes on ‘talking about personal stories’, ‘storyboarding for narrative development’, ‘using digital recording equipment’ and ‘using digital editing software’. In the four content development sessions, the residents drafted a narrative and recorded it on a voice recorder. They also collected a suite of photographs to match their verbal narrative. With help from the digital storytelling facilitators, the residents produced their digital story by building a photographic essay over the top of their oral narrative using movie-editing software. The stories covered topics including living in social housing with a mental illness, criminal activity and violence, interactions with law enforcement agencies, experiencing and addressing both personal and geographical stigma, and living in social housing with family members with complex needs.

Guillemin and Drew describe the academic digital storytelling process as follows: ‘participants are asked by the researcher to produce photographs, video, drawings and other types of visual images as research data’.²¹ However, we set out to challenge the relationship between the researcher and the researched. In our first digital storytelling project, we found that the production and consumption of the digital cultural products was more dynamic and contested than Guillemin and Drew suggest. Participant-generated visual methodologies are not bound by the constraints of positivist empirical research frameworks, which define clear roles for the researcher and the researched. Indeed, one of the (student) researchers from the Residents’ Voices team participating in this workshop was at the time a social housing tenant living in the neighbourhood alongside the other participants. Thus our digital storytelling project involved multiple stakeholders with complex identities that very clearly called into question the researcher/researched dichotomy. At the request of residents, in our project we exposed the ‘researchers’ to the same digital storytelling process as the residents, and the ‘researchers’ created digital stories alongside the residents about their experiences with social housing. Our project became a collective process of knowledge creation whereby all the participants became autobiographical researchers.²²

Much of the literature on digital storytelling is focused on the way the participants have sought to deploy their stories to talk back to, or to talk up to, audiences of power. Others show how the storytellers have used their narratives to pursue ‘transformations’ of the social, cultural or political ‘context in which it operates’. The case studies presented in this chapter outline a different suite of audience target groups and more nuanced forms of political action. They show that the storytellers have complex motivations for using digital storytelling and when freed from the constraints of external mediators, including researchers, the stories that they choose to tell can challenge our assumptions about their political motives.

In many cases, the people making digital stories do so with the aim of sharing their story with a particular audience. In the Residents’ Voices digital storytelling project participants were offered the chance to share their stories with other residents, in locations around Australia and in the USA through publication on a website. The communicative aim was focused on horizontal connections between tenants rather than, at this stage of the project, of speaking directly to the powerful. However, participants did not all share the same understanding of the purpose or impact of their products.

Anita chose to tell a very shocking story about being consistently harassed and frightened by a regular visitor to her housing block, leading to her applying for an ultimately unsuccessful court order and eventually for a transfer to another location.²³ She did not appear in the video, and the images which she chose are not dissimilar to many tabloid images of public housing. However, at the public launch of the video stories Anita recounted the way in which telling the story had reinforced her belief in her own strengths and ability to deal with what life throws at her. Lachlan was very enthusiastic about the project and produced a digital story but didn’t want anyone to see the film, which was never released on the website, while Linda was happy to tell her story of moving out of the home she had lived in happily for decades as a sound recording, but provided no pictures. Peter’s story was explicitly political and directly criticised the common stereotypes of public housing. He wanted policymakers to see it and hear the story.