Feb/100
Defining Digital Storytelling…
My Digital Storytelling class was asked to try to define “digital storytelling.” Below is my reply.
It seems to me like we’ve got one of those blind-men-and-an-elephant problems, here. I’ve been playing around with trying to come up with a working definition of “digital storytelling” for a couple days, now, and honestly, anything I can come up with is simultaneously:
- So broad as to be meaningless.
- Still far too restrictive.
This does not bode well for the prospect of coming up with anything that even resembles a “definitive answer” to the question of what “digital storytelling” is.
Which makes this class seem a bit amorphous.
The best I can come with is this: “Digital storytelling” is the use of digital (non-analog, usually computer-based) media to create (or suggest) a narrative (or set of narratives or narrative possibilities).
I could unpack that a little, but I’m afraid to do so too much, because the more you do, the more restrictive your definition becomes. So let me just sort of ramble about a couple of the implications of this.
The use of digital techniques alters older technologies by lowering barriers to use in both cost and necessity of technical skill. While techniques like sophisticated 3-d rendering are still prohibitively difficult for amateur users, digital photography, videography, sound recording, and image alteration have continued to get cheaper, faster, and easier. Looking at a the technological forces behind this, things like Moore’s Law, Rock’s Law, and Nielson’s Law all suggest that this pattern will continue. All things digital will continue to get faster, cheaper, easier, and better, as long as research and development continue.
Not only is this true with individual digitized media, but it is also true of the ability of computers to integrate various forms of media into a coherent whole. Digital technology continues to make it easier, faster, and cheaper to put together still and moving images, sounds, and written words, to combine them into new integrated wholes.
And just like the words and pictures of a comic strip, each of these elements gains something in combination with other elements– it’s a synergistic relationship. Looking at just the words or just the images of your average comic strip, you realize that either element is less meaningful when not interacting with the other. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. It’s the same thing with digital stories that incorporate multiple media.
While words, pictures, sound, and video are all clearly important building blocks for digital stories, it is important not to exclude the “natively digital” media that can be incorporated into digital storytelling projects– the two that spring immediately to mind are simulation and databases.
Both of these technologies present us with some of the most dramatic possibilities of digital storytelling: they do not necessarily follow– and indeed can be used to actively undermine– the traditional notions of narrativity we have from old media. Storytelling is no longer necessarily limited to a single beginning, middle, and end. Instead, creators have the ability to chart various paths that audiences can take, indeed– audiences are no longer limited to “passive” intake, but can actively guide their own user experience, taking the driver’s seat or even helping to build and extend the story itself.
Of course, audiences have never been particularly passive, and have always re-purposed, remixed, and reinterpreted the media they consume. The difference now is that we can construct stories that encourage or even force audiences to do just that. It can be built into the medium itself, now, rather than just being built into how humans consume stories.
Jul/080
The Early Comic Strip Archive, Part Two: Why a Database?
In my last post about building a digital comic strip archive, I tried to sketch out why I thought early comic strips would make a good subject for an Omeka-based archive. (I could have gone on for ages, but I’m trying to keep this brief– also the reason for breaking it up into installments…) This post is dedicated to looking at why a digital archive using Omeka would be an optimal format to explore the topic.
The best online projects are the ones that don’t try to mimic the functionality of any other medium– if your website could just as easily have been a book, you’re not adding much value by putting it online. I think an online database collecting early comic strips would be the optimal medium for such a project.
The primary advantage of an online database would be the ability to use multiple categories or tags as organizational tools. A single strip could be included in multiple categories. To take one example, a single strip from Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, a strip about a European Jewish immigrant, a car salesman who was also vehemently and vocally opposed American involvement in what he described as “that Europel war.” One strip from this comic could be categorized according to the various newspapers that included it (it was notably more popular in urban costal cities, and not distributed to many middle-American small town newspapers), under King Features Syndicate, which distributed the strip, under the strip’s title, the cartoonist’s name, under “automobiles,” “Jewish characters,” “WWI”… the list goes on.
The ability to sort by a variety of means brings together the collection as a dynamic thing, a research tool in and of itself.
Omeka has two primary functions: collections management and exhibition. So far I’ve just been discussing the former. Now a few thoughts on the latter:
Once the collection has a substantial number of item/strips within it, I think it would be a great thing to have thematic essay/exhibits. An essay on the debate over neutrality during the Great War, accompanied by strips that reflect the debate. Another on issues of race and ethnicity in early comics. Another on the formal evolution of the medium, the gradual conventionalizing of things like word balloons, thought balloons, elements of visual storytelling, etc.
What makes these comics an invaluable tool for historical research is the multitude of voices, perspectives, and themes that they encompass. An online collection could highlight a variety of issues within this multitude, allowing visitors to follow their interests, rather than making some hierarchical linear narrative.
Comics history is an under-researched topic. Aside from the ghettoization of the medium itself, it’s commonly being assigned to the dustbin of kiddie fare and ephemera, what little attention the topic does receive is divided into several niche markets of interest. There’s the Nostalgists, the people who want to look at the history of comics fondly and rather uncritically. Then there’s the Cultural Historians, who want to look at the medium simply as a lens to broader social and cultural trends within society. Finally, you have the Artistic Formalists, who– inspired by the seminal works of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, or Matt Madden, want to look at comics as an artistic medium, and to look at older comics as a window into the evolution of a symbolic system, an artistic code, a mechanism for storytelling.
All three approaches have merit.
All three approaches, however, also have pitfalls, blind spots, and difficulties. This fracturing of the already-small number of those interested in looking at this topic is a perpetual frustration to those of us who want to look at something approaching the bigger picture.
I think that an Early Comic Strip Archive could attract attention and use from all three groups, and that moreover, because the database format is well suited to multiple approaches, it could serve the additional function of bringing these three tribes closer together. Beyond this audience of enthusiasts, as I mentioned earlier, I think that an archive like this could be an invaluable resource to educators trying to make history more interesting to resistant or reluctant students. Comics have humor, visual appeal, and an ever-present iconoclasm that can make history more appealing to the same student who get bored with slogging through dry textbooks and memorizing dates and names.
Next: Potential Pitfalls and Possible Partners
Jul/083
The Early Comic Strip Archive: Part One
I’ve been trying to come up with a project that would be well-suited to Omeka. I want to learn to use it, want to give myself practice with it, play with the insides, see what I can do with it. I think I’ve come up with a decent idea.
I’m thinking about creating a digital archive of early newspaper comic strips.
Why Comic Strips?
A personal anecdote, before you dismiss the concept as purely self-indulgent: comics were what made me interested in history in the first place. I was a very visual kid. I loved drawing. And my hometown library had a decent collection of comics. But not too many of my favorites. After reading all the Garfield and Peanuts books in their collection, I started branching out. The library had a lot of “The year’s best editorial cartoons” collections. I started picking them up for the art. I kept reading them for the history. It was a unique window into times and topics I didn’t know too much about. The editorial cartoons led me to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Walt Kelly’s Pogo. To this day, my view of the political history of the twentieth century is shaped, in part, by political cartoons.
Comics are a fascinating cultural artifact. They can give a lot of insight into a time. And they’re a good inroad into history for students who may otherwise be resistant. They add a visual element, humor, and a window into how ideas and events were being received within popular culture. They don’t give a single view– reading a comics page from, say, 1911 can give you a great insight into the debates of the time.
Because of my lifelong interest in comics, I decided to do a seminar paper a few years back on the ethnic and racial images in early Hearst newspapers’ comics pages. I found a surprising heterogeneity of topics, portrayals, and ideas. In the years leading into the US’s involvement in WWI, I found that while Hearst demanded his editors toe a party line of German sympathy and non-intervention, the comics page of the New York Journal was actually the site of a rather lively debate. Some strips came down firmly for intervention, and mocked neutrality. Others were firmly opposed to American involvement in a European war, strongly advocating isolationism. While Hearst is famous for supporting his cartoonists, he apparently also felt they were unimportant enough to be allowed a greater degree of freedom than many of his prose journalists.
Whether you trace ethnic images, political debates, class sympathies– the early comics page was one of the most multivocal sites in the newspaper business. And they drew readers. People sometimes picked their newspaper based on the inclusion of their favorite comic, just as others might choose to read a paper because it sympathized with their political beliefs.
And best of all, these early strips, from 1895-1932, are in the public domain.
Sep/060
…rethinking my entire take on the role of the librarian…
I just finished my MA last year at Umass Boston. My first year, I had a normal Teaching Assistantship. It was fine. But the next year, I had to hunt down an alternate source of funding. I ended up getting an Assistantship through the library, working at the Reference desk. It was, I hate to admit it, a FAR more educational experience than keeping attendance and marking papers. I was, despite my lack of an MLS, basically working as a part-time reference librarian… although there was almost always a real reference librarian available on-call if I got in over my head. Nevertheless, I got very acquainted with databases and systems I never would have otherwise– I now can find chemical abstracts over the Internet. Why I would ever want to again, I can’t tell you, but I can do it. I also know how to deal with business databases, and other systems I’ll never use again.
But I liked it. Actually, I even toyed with the idea of getting an MLS. But there was something about the culture of libraries that I never got comfortable with. One librarian, in the midst of a long conversation one slow Friday afternoon, helped me put my finger on it, very precisely.
I forget how we got on the topic, but we started talking about the role of libraries– what all should be kept, and what should be thrown out as detritus. Coming from an American Studies department that valued Cultural Studies and Social History, I was adamant that too much was being lost to the selections of archivists and librarians. Too many voices are lost to the authority of the archives. Who can judge what is going to be important 15, 20, or 100 years from now? As I saw it then, the goal of libraries and archives, ideally at least, should be one of collection– collecting for both depth and breadth. Collecting indiscriminately. I was tired of finding so many topics I was interested in working on were things that no one had cared enough to keep and preserve. It was then the goal of librarians, and especially reference librarians, to make these huge quantities of information navigable for patrons.
In contrast to my collection/preservation model, the librarian I was speaking to offered a completely different model– one that is taken from communications theorists of a generation ago, and which they borrowed by means of metaphor from electrical engineering. He talked to me about signal-to-noise ratio. He told me that the goal of a librarian was to be a custodian of information, constantly overhauling the collection in order to increase the amount of signal (usable information) and to try to eliminate noise (detritus, misinformation, things that lack scholarly value.)
I was aghast, and wondered how anyone would ever presume to know so much that they could understand exactly what would be of value to future scholarship, and what wouldn’t. Any Historian who’s spent weeks trying to find information about someone who seemingly only exists in a single fascinating document will understand where I was coming from. Today’s trash can be tomorrow’s treasure.
However, after reading this article, I’m starting to wonder if I wasn’t being a bit naive– or at least thinking in impossibly idealized terms. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if there’s not just too much information, and if that "custodian" model isn’t as outdated as I thought. Looking at the sheer volume of information being produced in a single year, it seems an impossible task to keep it all. (Even when you discard the somewhat-misleading on data that is non-recorded, such as telephone conversations, in the report, the number is staggering.)
I mean sure, we can spider and scrape systems, we can come up with clever ideas to get people to provide tags for free, but ultimately, the methods we have of automating such things are always going to provide as many blind spots as moments of insight… or at least I’m afraid that’s the case.
I think H-Bot, for example, is a brilliant idea, but it sort of points toward the stupidity of computer intelligence… Here’s a little trick: ask H-Bot "When was Teddy Roosevelt president?" And then ask it "When was Theodore Roosevelt president?" You’ll find that Teddy was president in 1908, and Theodore was president in 1903. Both answers are correct, in a fashion, but don’t give the whole story. It’s all because of the very method of data-collection that H-Bot uses.*
Don’t get me wrong, I know the thing’s just beta testing, and it’s not complete, and honestly, I still think it’s a cool project, and I’ve been playing with the thing since I found it last year. But any mechanized data-collection, data-pooling, or data-mining software will always have these sorts of problems– they’re simple little machines, and cannot comprehend complexity. Maybe, at least for the time being, we should keep on encouraging the librarians to throw some stuff out.
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*– What this result does point to that’s very interesting is the different use of language at different points in that President’s career. More web sites describe him as Theodore when focusing on the events of 1903 than any other year, whereas 1908 is the big year for Teddy. It would be interesting to look at other variations on different presidential nicknames, and see what kinds of correlations you could find– do people describe them by their nicknames during good times, showing familiarity and comfort, or during bad times, showing derision and lack of respect? It could be a fun thing to look in to…. (Although checking into that a bit, I discovered that H-Bot can’t find James Carter or William Jefferson Clinton, so the question might not be as easy to answer yet…)
