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Slideshow

So Many Stories to Tell and So Many Ways to Tell Them Digitally

by Lindsey Harding

In Digital Storytelling, a course I’ve been teaching for the past three summers online and last spring for the first time in a face-to-face learning environment, I continue to be amazed at the narratives my students brainstorm, plan, draft, build, revise, develop, design, and ultimately share in a final online showcase. Their digital stories, which they work on tirelessly all semester long, range from personal media-rich essays and fandom podcasts to transmedia mysteries and wild satires. Matthew Karshna, a student from last spring who created his digital story on TikTok, reflected, “This class pushed me to new areas as I created my own story on a social media platform and gave me confidence in my abilities in the emerging digital story-building space.”

Screenshot from “Lemon Honey: An Advice Blog,” by Livia Yau, summer 2022
Screenshot from “Lemon Honey: An Advice Blog,” by Livia Yau, summer 2022

This class invites students to interact with digital stories, investigate digital media affordances and phenomena, and engage with various media and modes in their digital writing. While we discuss the opportunities, trends, and challenges of storytelling in the digital age, the class is largely built around a longform, and at times epic, digital story project. Students begin to think about this project in the first couple weeks of the semester, brainstorming all sorts of possible stories and possible platforms and genres for telling their stories. From there, they narrow down to a single project, for which they first compose a proposal to explain, contextualize, and outline the work they hope to accomplish over the course of the semester. Then, over the next few weeks, students wireframe (i.e., create models for their stories in digital space) and draft content before taking their work online. While they continue to develop and design their narratives on digital platforms like Instagram, Twitter, custom WordPress websites, Twine, and more, they create home pages for their projects and compile design toolkits. Finally, as they polish their work and prepare to submit to our final showcase, students have the chance to reflect on the goals and choices that guided their work all semester as they prepare an artist statement. Meanwhile, students share and review each other’s work and receive formative feedback from me throughout the process: on their brainstorming, wireframes, content drafts, digital story drafts, project home pages, and artist statements. As a result, the classroom (both online and in Park Hall) becomes over the semester a deeply collaborative space that pushes students to innovate, advance, and refine their work.

Screenshot from “STUFF: The Culture of Buying,” by Lindsay Owens, spring 2022
Screenshot from “STUFF: The Culture of Buying,” by Lindsay Owens, spring 2022

As the Digital Storytelling Showcase demonstrates, our students have myriad stories to tell and just as many ways to tell them as they leverage the affordances of digital media to do so. In just a single semester, students have created an entire podcast season to explore the relationship between body image and dance, share experiences of seeing Hamilton on Broadway, and tell a horror story. A student developed a choose-your-own-adventure story about a hike gone wrong; another told a multimedia, multigenre story of his mother. One student told a story through a fake advice column while another recounted eight first-love stories and the lessons learned from them. Students built speculative and fantasy worlds, they considered what it means to be a graduating college student and a Braves fan, and they grappled with how to tell stories through text, audio, images, and videos that could only be told digitally. For Cindy Nguyen, whose digital story “Run with the Pages” won the English Department’s Digital Humanities Prize last spring, “The class for digital storytelling was such a worthwhile opportunity. In the class’s modules, investigating and interacting with the different storytelling methods of the modern, digital era was thrilling. But that's not all. What made the cherry on top, was the creation of our website and digital project. I ended up spending my time mixing in what I liked to do, digital art, with the process of applying some forms of digital storytelling. What also aided this process was understanding the different approaches to writing and how peer review is a crucial part of making a piece engaging. Overall, this class made me experience a type of burning passion that I haven't felt in a while.”

Excerpt from “Ibu: A Portrait of a Mother,” by Alexander Hoefer, summer 2022
Excerpt from “Ibu: A Portrait of a Mother,” by Alexander Hoefer, summer 2022

Dr. Lindsey Harding is the Director of the Writing Intensive Program at the University of Georgia. 

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