Digital Storytelling – Practices, Potential and Limits to Communication

Semester and Year Offered: Semester III or IV

Course Coordinator and Team: SurajitSarkar(C)

Email of course coordinator: surajit.cck@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: None

Objectives:

• To provide an overview of digital communication in the contemporary world.
• To develop digital storytelling and narrative making skills, both self-generated and based on listening to others.
• To develop communication skills with the subject.
• To understand important aspects of interviewing and audio recording.
• To prepare students with skills for handling equipment to carry out digital AV recording, editing and dissemination, both on-line and off-line.

Course Outcomes:

By the end of this course the students will be able to:

• Mark out the steps in digital storytelling.
• Identify and use storytelling skills and develop a narrative on paper in visual frames.
• Identify sources of knowledge – codified and un-codified, life histories and sources of interdisciplinary knowledge.
• Understand the use of oral techniques and fieldwork to unravel the experiential aspects of recollection

Brief description of the Modules

Module 1: Storytelling and Communication – Born Digital, and pre-Digital (analog).

Module 2: Digital techniques, practices and audio-visual equipment.

Module 3: Usingmemory and experience – from Digital archives to Social Media - Histories of everyday lives, livelihoods and as sources of intangible knowledge. Aspects of Orality – from ethnography, literature and films.

Module 4: The Social in Storytelling.Developing Oral Narratives – methodologies and interpersonal processes.Co-authorship and building contributions. Ethics – privacy, consent and copyright.

Indicative Reading List:

• Dalrymple, William. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred and Modern India. Bloomsbury, 2009.
• Lanning, Greg; Television History Workshop, Project No 1: The Brixton Tapes, History Workshop, No. 12 Pg 183-88; 1981 (as pdf)
• McDougall, D. Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press, 1998
• Panos Institute ; Giving voice: Implementing oral testimony projects, Panos, London, 2003 (as pdf)
• Sontag, Susan .On photography. Penguin: Harmondsworth 1977.
• Pinney, C. and Peterson N. (eds). 2003. Photography’s other histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Banks, M. ,Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage. 2001
• Ghosh, Amitav, In an Antique Land: History in the guise of a traveller's tale. Vintage Books, 1994.
• Grimshaw, A. The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Ledwith, Margaret, and Jane Springett. Participatory Practice: Community Based Action for Transformatory Change. Bristol: Polity Press, 2010.
• Thompson, Paul: The Voice of the Past, 3rd edn, OUP , 2000
• Portelli, Alessandria. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. State University of New York Press, 1991.
• Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: 20 Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Harvard University Press, 1988.