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School of Library and Information Sciences
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The
Digital
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ABOUT THE PROJECT |
Introduction
and Contextualization
Life is, truly, the grand narrative. Some theorists believe humans are born with stories living inside us and that we develop language for the purpose of being able to tell those stories. Imagine a group of people sitting around an evening campfire – the atmosphere is rich with mood and tone – and while around that fire, storytelling will naturally emerge. Stories enable children and adults to understand and make meaning in their lives [1]. Storytellers tell tales of life past, present, and future – “story is the richest heritage of human civilizations” [2].Storytelling
has emerged from the grande oral tradition into “modern day”
platforms represented in books, dance, music, theatre, movies, etc.
With the advent of the Internet/World Wide Web and new
technologies to support storytelling, narrativity in the “virtual
campfire” has been transformed into a more dynamic and powerful system
of communication with sound, music, visuals, and interactivity.
Story preserves, perpetuates, and transforms culture and is
finding new applications in education, corporations, industry, and
entertainment – in settings in which people interact or seek to
“escape”. Some call it virtual
storytelling
others call it digital
storytelling; whatever it is called, it is an emerging frontier with
compelling possibilities. Narratives
can be captured, modified, displayed, indexed, retrieved, and
transformed for new uses and applications for enjoyment, work, and
research.
Objectives
of the Digital Storytelling Project
The
University of North Digital Storytelling Project has been in development
for over one year and has seven objectives:
1
To
develop the University of North Digital Storytelling Project and make
all of its components 100% useable, searchable, and retrievable via the
Internet/World Wide Web. 2
To
develop the Digital Storytelling Gallery (DSG) to collect, preserve, and
make accessible in digital recordings of live storytelling performance
events and the transcripts of the performance narratives for
informational, entertainment, and research purposes. 3
To
develop standards for the preservation of digital recordings of live
storytelling performance events and their related transcripts. 4
To
develop standards for the development of metadata pertaining to digital
recordings of live storytelling performances and their related
transcripts. 5
To
develop a new technology – an XML generator – to automate the
development of metadata for live storytelling performance event
recordings and their related transcripts. 6
To
develop a new technology – an automated lexical indexer for extended
metadata – to extract from storytelling performance narrative
transcripts concepts specific to a storytelling ontology. This will use
statistical and inferential methods to construct a lattice of
storytelling classes to automate the development of classification
schemes and deep content analysis (taletypes, motifs, themes, story
structures, etc.). 7
To
develop a new technology – the VISTA Project: Virtual Interactive
Story Telling Agents, an artificial intelligence-based talking character
system – to support interactive question-answering in an online
Web-based chat platform between visitors and VISTA, the storytelling
agent, about the content of stories (the narrative content and
structures) for stories in the DSG Collection. The
Collection of Stories
Professional
and amateur digital storytelling performances have been recorded in
studio and in live settings to develop the Digital Storytelling Project
as well as to support the online teaching of storytelling [3] to
over 150 students per year in a Web-based graduate-level course. The
nature of teaching storytelling as an art form and technique for
communication has been proven to work very well in the Web-based
environment. WebCT, a proprietary software product, serves as the home
base for the computer supported cooperative work necessary to
effectively teach this content online. This platform offers course
content modules, asynchronous threaded discussion forums, synchronous
online chats, email, and high-level interactivity.
Storytelling is a performance-based learning experience and the
use of digital storytelling technologies (digital voice recording
software and digital video) is of critical importance.
Professional storytellers are recorded in studio as exemplars for
excellence in storytelling and these performances, which are donated to
the project, are linked within 13 modules classified by themes. These
storytelling performances and their story content are similarly analyzed
in module discussions and in online synchronous chats with the
professionals as “guest artists in residence”.
As well, each student in the storytelling class submits three
digital storytelling performances (both audio and video), which are
streamed to play over the Web for performance analysis and critique via
teacher and peer review, as well as to analyze the story content.
Students may voluntarily donate their performances to the project
as well. Currently,
approximately 400 performances are part of the Digital Storytelling
Project. Virtual or
digital storytelling results in the development of information access
and retrieval systems. Information systems form from the convergence of
artifacts and are useful in their preservation [4]. Consider that many
of the most prominent professional storytellers in the world are aging
and because the nature of their performance work is ephemeral and not
replicable, artifacts of world culture are being lost. In other types of
work settings, corporate memory and organizational knowledge is being
similarly lost or not exploited for its optimal use. Using virtually
reality technologies for storytelling has been shown to "bring to
life" the collaborative computer-centered work environments
necessary to sustain and make thrive the work of distributed teams,
groups or academic classes working in virtual environments [5].
Developers approach this in a number of ways through new technologies
[6], applications [7], authoring tools [8], virtual characters [9], and
models for narrative construction [10]. The core constructs of these
developments are stories, techniques to share stories, and methods to
make meaning of them for purposes to support work.
References
[1]
B. Bettleheim.. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1976. |
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