Digital Storytelling

Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 2011

2013

This eBook contains a selection of chapters that were presented at the first global conference entitled Storytelling: Global Reflections on Narrative, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in May 2012. The conference marked the start of a new Inter-Disciplinary.Net project aiming to provide a space in which ‘stories about story’ can be told, and the use of stories in the widest possible range of aspects of human life can be reported. With this intention proclaimed, delegates were invited to contribute papers on a series of core themes: story as a pedagogical tool in academic disciplines; narrative and the gathering of stories of lived experience; and the place of story and storytelling in any area of professional practice. The chapters in this volume reflect this cross-disciplinary dimension with contributions from a range of fields and backgrounds - media studies, anthropology, political science, literary studies, medicine, and visual arts, among others - and, crucially, from around the world too, enriching the content with a variety of international perspectives.

Human experience seems a never ending narrative. Whatever said or thought it takes the form of a report or storyline. Even formal expressions like logic or chemical formulas do not escape that condition. They are narratives under restrictive conditions. Narration seems a defining feature of the human, enough reason to take a closer look at some characteristics. As it comes down to bringing forth a story rather than offering a one on one depiction, the burning question sounds why should it be taken serious after all? Further: are all stories of the same type and if not in what do these differ? This contribution wants to offer some reflections on this intriguing subject.

Unfortunately, I began reading stories very late i.e. in my graduation. Before that there was no access to story books at my home. Even I do not remember going in school library for borrowing books. Though my mother like reading, I do not remember her reading something during my childhood. Thus, there was no-one at home who used to tell me stories of prince, princes, jataka tales etc. It is very true that "the process of writing unfolds the truths which the mind then learns. Writing informs the mind, it is not the other way round". . Now, when I am telling you (writing) my story about the story, interesting thing from my childhood experience unfolded in front of me for the first time. At that time my brother wrote an interesting story of a little prince who fought with a devil whose life is entrenched in a pendant and saved his people. I read that story, obviously I read such story for the first time, and for so many years after, when I decide to write something, I was confined to that story written by my brother. As Chimamanda Adichie said in her talk "the single story creates stereotype", the unavailability of other stories of that sort made the story written by my brother as the 'only story' for me. Even though I haven't had access to written stories, I heard a lot of stories from the kitchen, corridors, from our maid, my friends, my cousins etc. Those were the narrative accounts of experiences of different people. One can say there is a difference between those stories and fictions; but for me, now with the enhanced understanding of stories, they are similar. And I believe that these heard stories were what that helped me to go through a long duration of my life without reading stories.

Self and Identity, 2018

For millennia, narratives have been a primary mode of oral discourse. Narrative presentation of information has been shown to facilitate interpersonal and group communication. However, research indicates that narratives are more than merely an adaptive mode of communication. Narrative is a fundamental-and perhaps foundational-element of social and cultural life. The present article posits that the centrality of narrative in social life is due to narrative's ability to help satisfy the five core social motives, as identified by Fiske belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust. In so doing, this article reviews empirical and theoretical work examining basic narrative processes, autobiographical narratives, and entertainment narrative consumption to illustrate how narrative thought helps to satisfies core human motives and in turn, how the narrative construction process informs self and identity formation. Storytelling is universal: Throughout time, cultures around the world have used narratives as a primary mode of oral discourse (Rubin, 1995). Anthropological evidence suggests that even ancestral hominids constructed primitive narratives (Donald, 1991). The prevalence of narrative is so thoroughly documented that Smith (1990) claimed that "thought flows in terms of stories" (p. 62), and McAdams (1993) described narrative as a "natural package" for organizing information (p. 27). We propose that the universality of narrative occurs not only because narrative is a fundamental element of human social and cultural life (Read & Miller, 1995), but importantly, because narrative is a fundamental element of one's self and identity. The definition of narrative varies among scholars, but at its essence, a narrative represents causally-linked actions or events that unfold over time (Graesser & Ottati, 1995). Unlike abstract, logic-based paradigmatic thinking, narrative thinking focuses on particular experiences of human action (Bruner, 1990). The present review examines how narratives affect cognition, perception, and identity formation using three interrelated streams of focus: (a) basic narrative construction, (b) autobiographical narratives, and (c) entertainment narratives. In so doing, the present paper describes how narratives can help to satisfy Fiske's (2004) five core social motives: belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust, and how the satisfaction of these core motives guides self and identity development.

In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes “people tell and discuss stories in every culture as far back as the record goes.” Donald Brown agrees in his comprehensive cross-cultural anthropological survey, Human Universals, by including mythmaking, a kind of storytelling, in his list of practices that humans everywhere do. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio even puts a kind of “wordless storytelling” at the very root of his model of human consciousness. Any behavior that is shared by all people everywhere must have a basis in our most shared heritage, our biology. This project applies a classic biological heuristic, Tinbergen’s Four Questions, to gain a fresh perspective on storytelling and to explore story as a signature activity of mind. Two experimental paradigms are developed and preliminary data presented in an effort to answer the question posed by Salmon Rushdie’s character Haroun of Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “what good are stories if they aren’t even true?” That is, what might be the biological value of the human compulsion to engage in narrative? The data support the notion that interpreting stories together primes subjects for joint action tasks, opening a connection of narrative to evolutionary processes of group selection. Finally, by focusing on space as an intersection of cognitive science and narratology, the project examines narratives ranging from spontaneous natural language utterances to the highly developed examples of literary art found in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World to explore how our biology shapes and is reflected in our stories.

Scientific American Mind, 2008

When Brad Pitt tells Eric Bana in the 2004 film Troy that "there are no pacts between lions and men," he is not reciting a clever line from the pen of a Hollywood screenwriter. He is speaking Achilles' words in English as Homer wrote them in Greek more than 2,000 years ago in the Iliad. The tale of the Trojan War has captivated generations of audiences while evolving from its origins as an oral epic to written versions and, finally, to several film adaptations. The power of this story to transcend time, language and culture is clear even today, evidenced by Troy's robust success around the world. Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?