LONDIE T. MARTIN, PH.D.

University of Arizona School of Information Resources & Library Science 1515 East First Street Tucson, AZ 85719

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520.621.0242 [email protected] www.londietmartin.com

digital storytelling and culture

spring 2014 / 30 students course description
Now, perhaps more than ever, our daily lives require, invite, enchant, or otherwise call us to engage in multimodal communication or communications that make meaning through multiple modes of expression: linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural. In this course, we will consider what we, as digital storytellers, gain from increasingly multimodal communication as well as what we lose. We will consider the ways in which alphabetic text has been privileged as our primary method of creating and circulating knowledge, and we will, ourselves, attempt to shake up this privilege by crafting digital stories that explore multimodality, challenge assumptions of linear narrative by exploring alternative forms, and advocate for local community issues and concerns. Thus, this course will lay a foundation for understanding how stories shape communities, identities, memories, and perspectives on our lives. In addition, this course will provide opportunities for the theoretical analysis of representation, composite narratives on behalf of others, cultural heritage, and memories as they are preserved and performed within stories and through narrative. Influences on digital storytelling such as the sociocultural and institutional contexts of production, the audience, and the needs or goals of the digital storyteller will be examined. Students will be required to call on their own intellectual, emotional, and imaginative processes, as well as to develop their own skills in digital storytelling, interviewing, oral history collection, and the use of relevant digital storytelling tools.

suggested materials
While there are no textbooks required for this course, the digital nature of the work we will do this semester makes certain materials desirable for the course: a flash drive or portable hard drive suitable for storing and transferring large media files and headphones for engaging with digital audio.

required materials
There are only two required materials for the course, and both are digital media platforms. First, you will need access to Google Drive (drive.google.com) through either your UA CatMail address or your personal Gmail address. Second, plan to spend $15-$20 purchasing Gone Home, a game text we will be playing and reading during week 11 (March 27). Purchasing information for the game is available here: www.gonehomegame.com. You can expect to spend approximately 2-4 hours attempting to complete the game, so please plan your study time accordingly.

course objectives
Upon completion of this course, students should be able to: Articulate the role of narrative in everyday life as well as the ways in which stories shape communities, identities, memories, and cultural perspectives. Define basic concepts that relate to digital storytelling such as representation, life history, cultural heritage, memory, and narrative. Critically evaluate the many ways that narratives impact or function within cultures and communities as

Digital Storytelling and Culture Syllabus

well as for individuals. Comprehend relevant theories used in research on digital storytelling (e.g., approaches to narrative, multimodality, ). Exhibit understanding of storytelling events (e.g., contexts, teller, audience) and of skills in composing stories for particular groups, gathering narratives through interviews, writing composite stories from individual narratives, and/or performing community narratives or oral interpretations of stories.

summaries of major assignments

Graded Short Assignments (10%) Short assignments may include short-answer reading quizzes on course texts, in-class writing exercises, or other brief activities designed to prepare you for larger, more complex aspects of the course projects. Collaborative Course Facilitation (15%) In the collaborative course facilitation project, you (together with 2 peers from class) will facilitate one of our class meetings. The primary goals for facilitation are to: (A) stimulate productive discussion of the course readings, (B) help each other connect personal experience to theory, and (C) generate ideas for connecting the course readings to the shape and purpose of our semester projects (see each of the assignments detailed below). Class activities should focus on specific issues raised by the readings and create opportunities for all members of the course to contribute. In your groups, you will decide how to facilitate class for the day, and I encourage you to consider some of the following activities: guided analysis of relevant examples, small group work to explore specific concepts, mini-workshops on a particular skill, performative expressions that illustrate important concepts, and larger class discussion about key issues and concerns. One week prior to your course facilitation day, your group will meet with me during office hours to share a first draft of your detailed class agenda. In advance of the meeting, you should read the course text(s) for the day you will be facilitating class, locate at least 2 potential digital story examples that connect to the days text(s), start writing down issues you want to raise in your facilitation, and begin mapping out a detailed agenda for the class day. Audio Intertextual Collaboration (15%) This assignment will give us the opportunity to experiment with the orality and aurality of collaboration, multiple perspectives, and experimental narrative structure. First, you will use the texts weve explored thus far in the semester (those on visuality, spatiality, orality, aurality, and multimodality) to record an audio essay in which you reflect on, explore, and perform the affordances of sound as an aspect of digital storytelling: What can we do with sound that we cant do with written text? What are its limitations? In what ways does sound, specifically storytelling, shape community? During the second phase of the Audio Intertextual Collaboration, you will weave excerpts from you classmates audio essays into your own essay in order to heighten, extend, or complicate the ideas (and the narrative structure through which you present them) you developed in your essays first iteration. Course Research Journal (20%) Throughout the semester, I will invite you to use thick description to craft critical responses that consider and connect the texts we engage in the course and the projects we pursue, both individually and collaboratively. At the end of the semester, your research journal should provide us (you and me) with a richly textured map of your experiences this semester. In evaluating your journal, I will consider: Do you strive to unearth the many and sometimes taken-for-granted rhetorical decisions you encounter as you shape your various projects? And do you consider semester readings with curiosity and creativity as you attempt to make meaning of your project experiences? You will compose a total of 7 journal entries: 4 journal entries in class and 3 journal entries (approximately 3-4 pages) outside of class at your own pace. Collaborative Documentary Digital Story (30%) During this capstone project, you will work with a small group of classmates (in pairs or trios) to craft a digital
LONDIE T. MARTIN, PH.D.

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Digital Storytelling and Culture Syllabus

story that documents and engages with an issue of local concern. The form that your digital story takes will be up to you. Your project as a whole should demonstrate a critical understanding of the dynamics of narrative structure, genre, form, and audience awareness. That said, your digital story might take the form of a film, an animation, a hypertext environment, a game, an audio landscape, or something entirely different. Additionally, your digital story should demonstrate a nuanced understanding of and ethical engagement with the people you represent in your work, the interview and consent methods you use to invite community members to participate in your project, the audience you want to reach with your work, and the positions you advocate. Finally, at the end of the semester each group will present its digital story to the class, and I strongly encourage groups to invite community partners to class presentation days. This event will give you the opportunity to share what youve learned with a wider, interested audience, and it should also help you grapple with and negotiate the complexities of performing for/with community audiences. To complete this assignment, each group will deliver four items: (I) a proposal describing your groups anticipated digital story project, (II) a finished digital story, (III) a collaboratively written Artists Statement with Works Cited to accompany your groups digital story, and (IV) a class presentation of your groups digital story. Digital Storytelling Reflection (10%) At the end of the semester, after all projects have been completed, I will invite you to write a brief narrative essay (approximately 3-4 pages) in which you reflect on your experience with the Collaborative Documentary Digital Story assignment. In your writing, you should also reflect on how your experience of this assignment connects with other course assignments and readings. This reflection assignment offers you a moment to pause, to reflect on what you have learned, and to make predictions about how you will carry what youve learned into your bright future.

daily course schedule

Unless otherwise specified, media referenced in the calendar can be found on our course D2L website.
Week & Topic Date Thu 1/16 Tue 1/21 Thu 1/23 Tue 1/28 Thu 1/30 Daily In-Class Activities Readings & Assignments Due at the Beginning of Class

1 2 3

Introduction to the Course Terminology: Multimedia & New Media

Welcome! Course information, syllabus, assignments, themes Introductions through stories Reading quiz & class discussion Reading quiz & class discussion Research journal 1: everything I learned about technology I learned from... Reading quiz & class discussion Research journal 2: who are your storytellers? Reading quiz & class discussion Research journal 3: what stories need to be told?

o Read: o Read:

Practices of Looking

Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths Ryan, Will New Media Produce New Narratives? o Read: Punday, From Synesthesia to Multimedia: How to Talk about New Media Narrative o Read: Berger, ch. 1, Ways of Seeing o Read: McCloud, ch. 6, Understanding Comics
o Read:

Mirzoeff, The Right to Look

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Digital Storytelling and Culture Syllabus

Week & Topic

Date Tue 2/4

Daily In-Class Activities Field Trip: Meet in the lobby of the Center for Creative Photography. We will engage in a graded short assignment while at the CCP (which will include todays reading). Collaborative Course Facilitation, Group 1 In-class guided practice: preparing for the Audio Intertextual Collaboration assignment If you can, bring a laptop with Audacity installed Collaborative Course Facilitation, Group 2

Exploring Visuality & Spatiality

Readings & Assignments Due at the Beginning of Class o Read: Nast and Kobayashi, Re-corporealizing Vision

Thu 2/6

o Read:

What Sound Can Do

Tue 2/11

hooks, Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice o Read: Anzalda, ch. 1, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza o Read: download and experiment with Audacity @ audacity.sourceforge.net o Read: browse through Audacity tutorials @
o Read:

audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/tutorials.html

Thu 2/13

6 7

What Is Said & What Is Heard

Tue 2/18 Thu 2/20 Tue 2/25

Collaborative Course Facilitation, Group 3 Collaborative Course Facilitation, Group 4

Selfe, The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing o Due: Audio Essay 1.0 is due by 5 pm on Friday 2/14 via Google Drive. o Read: Rabinowitz, Music, Genre, and Narrative Theory
o Read:

Digitizing Oral Stories

8 9

Weaving Pieces Together

Thu 2/27 Tue 3/4 Thu 3/6 Tue 3/11 Thu 3/13 3/153/23

Hands On Digital Storytelling

10

Haas, Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Green, The Way We Hear Ourselves Group 5 is Different from the Way Others Hear Us: Exploring the Literate Identities of a Black Radio Youth Collective o Read: Cherubini, The Metamorphosis of an Oral Tradition: Dissonance in the Digital Stories of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada o Due: Audio Essay 2.0 is due by 5 pm on Wednesday 2/26 via Google Drive. Sharing: listen to some of our Audio Intertextual Collaborations Research journal 4: sound reflections Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Lessig, Remix: How Creativity Is Being Group 6 Strangled by the Law Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Lotherington, Digital Narratives, Group 7 Cultural Inclusion, and Educational Possibility: Going New Places with Old Stories in Elementary School In-class guided practice I: o Read: Lambert, Seven Steps of Digital storyboarding your Collaborative Storytelling Documentary Digital Story o Read: Lambert, Storyboarding In-class guided practice II: o Read: Lambert, Designing in Digital storyboarding your Collaborative o Read: Lambert, Distribution, Ethics, and the Documentary Digital Story Politics of Engagement Spring Break, no class

Spring Break

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Digital Storytelling and Culture Syllabus

11

Week & Topic

Date Tue 3/25 Thu 3/27

Queering Storylines & Lifelines

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Action Research & Digital Stories

Tue 4/1 Thu 4/3 Tue 4/8 Thu 4/10 Tue 4/15 Thu 4/17 Tue 4/22 Thu 4/24 Tue 4/29 Thu 5/1 Tue 5/6 Thu 5/8 Tue 5/13

Media = Embodiment, part I

Media = Embodiment, part II

Readings & Assignments Due at the Beginning of Class Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Alexander and Rhodes, Queerness, Group 8 Multimodality, and the Possibilities of Re/ Orientation o Read: Alexander and Rhodes, Queered Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Aarseth, Quest Games as Post-narrative Group 9 Discourse o Play: Gone Home, a game you can purchase and download @ www.gonehomegame.com o Due: Proposal for the Collaborative Documentary Digital Story due via D2L dropbox by 5 pm. Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Turner et al., Critical Multimodal Hip Group 10 Hop Production: A Social Justice Approach to African American Language and Literacy Practices In-class workshop: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Mini-conferences with groups to brainstorm / troubleshoot project plans Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Wysocki, Drawn Together: Possibilities Group 11 for Bodies in Words and Pictures o Due: Course Research Journal due via D2L dropbox by 5 pm. In-class workshop: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Mini-conferences with groups to brainstorm / troubleshoot project plans Collaborative Course Facilitation, o Read: Ensslin, From (W)reader to Breather: Group 12 Cybertextual De-intentionalization and Kate Pullingers Breathing Wall In-class workshop: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Daily In-Class Activities

Final Project Presentations

Sharing course projects: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story All Collaborative Documentary Digital Story projects are due today before noon Sharing course projects: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Sharing course projects: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Sharing course projects: Collaborative Documentary Digital Story Sharing course projects (If we need the extra time.) Review criteria and strategies for the Digital Storytelling Reflection essay Reading Day (no class meeting) Digital Storytelling Reflection essay due by 12:30 pm (the end of our scheduled final exam time) in the appropriate D2L dropbox folder

Final Project Presentations

Presentations & Reflections

Final Exam Week

LONDIE T. MARTIN, PH.D.

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