Digital Storytelling, Emotion And Place

9 May, 2013

Digital Storytelling, Emotion And Place

PhD candidate and digital storytelling practitioner Elaine Bliss from Waikato University believes that digital storytelling has huge potential to help us understand more about people, emotion and affect.

Elaine has been taking digital storytelling workshops and collecting data on the way emotional knowledge is expressed and acknowledged in different settings as part of her doctoral research.

Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows people to share facets of their life story, or a specific personal experience.

“They are snippets, anecdotes, moments in time, fragments of spatialised memory of everyday life,” says Elaine.

This particular form of storytelling is predominantly used in education, social services and health settings with only a very small body of academic research available.

“I believe it has great potential as another methodological tool to help geographers and other social scientists understand people and place.”

Elaine is specifically focusing on the models used by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California, which has brought storytelling and communicative practice into contemporary everyday life.

One of her supervisors, Professor Lynda Johnston of the Geography Programme at Waikato says Elaine's thesis adds new insights into social and cultural geography. “She takes stories and storytelling seriously and hopes that other geographers will too.

“The simple question 'what do stories and storytelling reveal about space, place and people?' is at the heart of her thesis,” says Professor Johnston.

Combining Geography and Screen and Media Studies for her PhD, Elaine also presents in papers on Digital Storytelling to history, tourism and Māori media and communication students.

In one third-year Tourism Studies class, Elaine set students the task of creating a digital story that asks them to personally reflect on their ethnic identity in the context of how New Zealand heritage is represented in tourism.

As well as completing her PhD, Elaine is also a partner in Digital Storytelling Aotearoa – www.digitalstorytelling.co.nz , a business that runs workshops servicing organisations around New Zealand.

Elaine will also be sharing her expertise as New Zealand’s only representative at the 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference in Turkey next month.

With her thesis to be completed later this year, Elaine hopes that her research will be picked up across disciplines and thinks that it will be useful to those who are interested in the use of new media for teaching and research.

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