Digital Storytelling
In this chapter, digital storytelling means a short digital work that combines narration and visual-auditory material, such as photographs, music, and movies, produced by an individual as his or her own story1. The origin of digital storytelling was a kind of democratization movement of visual art on the West Coast of the United States in the 1970s–1980s. In the 1990s, the movement developed through the appearance of low-cost and easy-to-use equipment, such as personal computers, digital cameras, and the Internet. In 1994, the San Francisco Center for Digital Media was founded and developed into the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in 1998 (Lambert, 2013). Although a virtual reality game in which players develop their own stories with a character is also called digital storytelling (Murray, 1998), this chapter addresses digital storytelling following the CDS’s movement.
Lambert, one of the founders of the CDS, pointed out that digital storytelling has seven components: self-revelatory, personal or first person voice, scenes of a lived experiences of the storyteller, photos more than moving images, soundtracks, short-length (under five minutes) and simple designs, and the storyteller’s ownership of the entire process and distribution (Lambert, 2013). As Lambert (2013) noted, the storyteller’s private life need not always be revealed, but telling a storyteller’s non-fiction expressed in the first person is recommended because it is the easiest way to deeply reflect himself or herself.
Regardless of whether or not a story is the storyteller’s nonfiction, digital storytelling is oriented to be subjective, personal experience-based, emotional, sensory, and self-reflective in general. Through these aspects, digital storytelling contrasts with the ideal of logical scientific presentation in academic society.
Hartley and McWilliam (2009) added the definition of an element: that digital storytelling is a workshop-based practice called a story circle, although the workshop basis is an implicit premise from the beginning of the digital storytelling movement. In a story circle, participants not only learn how to create works but also communicate with each other during the process of developing stories. A story must be told to someone; thus, members of a story circle function as both author of their stories and hearers of other members’ stories. In addition, if the workshop has a specific social theme, such as an environmental problem, digital storytelling can assist the social movement by sharing members’ consciousness.
Digital storytelling has been applied to a variety of fields, not only visual arts but also a new style of media, education, therapy, and various social movements in public health care, social services, and others. Digital storytelling has spread not only in the United States but also in countries in Europe, Oceania, North America, Asia, Africa, and South America (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009). In Japan, where the workshop for this research was held, workshop-based practices by educational institutes and non-profit organizations have been observed since the 2000 (Nishioka, 2014).