Digital Storytelling is evolving as a participatory media practice around the globe. Individuals in a variety of institutional settings tell short, self-representational stories with standard digital equipment. These personal narratives are usually made with self-sourced images and told with the own voice.
Although there are many forms of digital storytelling, this preconference takes as its point of departure the approach that was developed in California from the early 1990s.
The paradigmatic principles created at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley (www.storycenter.org) state that everyone has a powerful story to tell, and digital technology could help tell it. Storytellers are introduced to a 'core methodology' in usually weeklong workshops.
Their ideas of Digital Storytelling from this center in California have spread throughout the world. Why has this Californian export become so popular? Which further developing forms of digital storytelling should be observed? What are the broader meanings, the textual characteristics, it's democratic and participatory potential, and future developments of digital storytelling? How could digital storytelling be understood as mediation practices and to which extent could it contribute to media literacy? Such questions deserve critical and constructive scholarly interest.
The preconference will trace the roots and the take-up of the Digital Storytelling movement, and raise critical research questions from three different corners of the world: from the ICA host state of California, from Europe and from Australia.
The preconference is cosponsored by the Popular Communication Division and the Communication and Technology Division. The preconference takes place at the UC Berkeley campus, sponsored and hosted by the Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley.
The preconference is developed from the international research project 'Mediatized Stories: Mediation perspectives on digital storytelling among youth' based at the U of Oslo www.intermedia.uio.no/mediatized/ in cooperation with the digital storytelling research at the ARC Centre of Ecellence for Creative Industries & Innovation, Queensland U of Technology www.cci.edu.au.
