General Terms (original) (raw)

Designing with mobile digital storytelling in rural Africa

2010

We reflect on activities to design a mobile application to enable rural people in South Africa's Eastern Cape to record and share their stories, which have implications for 'cross-cultural design,' and the wider use of stories in design. We based our initial concept for generating stories with audio and photos on cell-phones on a scenario informed by abstracting from digital storytelling projects globally and our personal experience. But insights from ethnography, and technology experiments involving storytelling, in a rural village led us to query our grounding assumptions and usability criteria. So, we implemented a method using cell-phones to localise storytelling, involve rural users and probe ways to incorporate visual and audio media. Products from this method helped us to generate design ideas for our current prototype which offers great flexibility. Thus we present a new way to depict stories digitally and a process for improving such software.

Situating Digital Storytelling within African Communities 1

2015

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users. By leveraging our prototype as a probe and observing villagers using it in two villages in South Africa and Kenya, we uncovered implications for situating digital storytelling within those communities. Finally, we distil observations relevant to localizing storytelling and their implications for transferring design into a di↵erent community.

Situating digital storytelling within African communities

2011

We reflect on the methods, activities and perspectives we used to situate digital storytelling in two rural African communities in South Africa and Kenya. We demonstrate how in-depth ethnography in a village in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and a design workshop involving participants from that village allowed us to design a prototype mobile digital storytelling system suited to the needs of rural, oral users.

Narrowcast yourself": designing for community storytelling in a rural Indian context

2015

The StoryBank project is examining technologies and practices to allow digitally impoverished communities to take part in the user-generated content revolution. The approach involves combining mobile phones to create audio-visual stories and a touch screen display situated in a community meeting place. This paper discusses the design, evaluation and refinement of the situated display. We consider how our experiences of working with a rural Indian village community influenced design processes, principles and prototypes. The work highlights the value of community-centred design practices and prototypes in such developing-world contexts. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2. [User Interfaces]: evaluation/methodology; input devices and strategies; interaction styles; prototyping; user-centred design.

StoryBank: mobile digital storytelling in a development context

Proceedings of the 27th …, 2009

VOICES 165, 1st floor, 9th cross, 1st stage Indiranagar ABSTRACT Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a crosssection of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed.

Narrowcast yourself: Designing for community storytelling in a rural Indian context

Proceedings of the 7th …, 2008

The StoryBank project is examining technologies and practices to allow digitally impoverished communities to take part in the user-generated content revolution. The approach involves combining mobile phones to create audio-visual stories and a touch screen display situated in a community meeting place. This paper discusses the design, evaluation and refinement of the situated display. We consider how our experiences of working with a rural Indian village community influenced design processes, principles and prototypes.

Mobile Storytelling: Changes, Challenges and Chances

Mobile Storytelling in an Age of Smartphones, 2021

can expand screen storytelling concepts in form and function. Existing scholarship on mobile media making and mobile story making (Berry & Schleser, 2014; Schleser & Berry, 2018) explored mobile media through an interdisciplinary approach. The Mobile Story-Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies introduced "sitespecificity", "urban makeup" and "creative misuse" (Farman, 2014, pp. 3 and 4). Since then, mobile stories continued to "reimagine our relationship to technology, place, and our own sense of self in the spaces through which we move" (Farman, 2014, p. 5). Mobile media is becoming more ubiquitous than ever and morphs audio-visual content into novel formats, merging online, short-form and site-specific authorship. Mobile stories can be crafted within existing screen industry struc- tures and storytelling formulas. In a similar way, as a film is composed of shots, scenes, sequences and narrative structures Bernard (2016), film- makers, screen producers and storytellers work with these formats to create engaging mobile stories. In addition, mobile media makers, story- tellers, filmmakers, artists and designers further expand on existing story structures. As part of the Mobile Studies Congress in 2020, Schleser co-created the key-note presentation Imaginative Mobile Storytelling. As mobile media is based on a peer and network structure, scholarship should reflect the diversity and multiplicity in voices and approaches within mobile storytelling. This chapter will highlight the comments and positions by Camille Baker, Michael Osheku, Martin K. Koszolko, Krishna S. Kusuma, Anne L. Massoni, Adrian Jeffs, Patrick Kelly, Andrew Robb, Felipe Cardona, David Scott Leibowitz, Eugenio Tisselli, David Cowlard, Gerda Cammaer and Max Schleser, who are featured in this video (Schleser, 2020). Scholars responded to the prompt; what are the changes, challenges and chances for Mobile Storytelling. This chapter explores these mobile media researchers’ approaches within the Creative Arts to mobile screen production and how they approach storytelling with, on and for mobile devices. In a transdisciplinary research context, mobile media can bring together artists, designers, creatives, digital story- tellers and researchers with various approaches to and perspectives on storytelling. This chapter further develops the prospect and potential for mobile media as a transdisciplinary field of study as mobile media can interconnect with various disciplines and approaches via storytelling.

Digital Storytelling Design Learning from Non-Digital Narratives: Two Case Studies in South Africa

Oral History Journal of South Africa, 2016

Digital tools for User Generated Content (UGC) aim to enable people to interact with media in conversational and creative ways that are independent of technology producers or media organisations. In this article we describe two case studies in South Africa that show that UGC is not simply something tied to technology or the internet but emerges in non-digital storytelling. At the District Six Museum in Cape Town, District Six ex-residents are central collaborators in the narratives presented. Ex-residents tell stories in the museum and can write onto inscriptive exhibits, such as a floor map showing where they used to live, and visitors can write messages on ‘memory clothes’, which are later preserved through hand embroidery. Such explicit infrastructures to access and protect cultural records are less available to rural inhabitants of the former Transkei. To address this gap local traditional leaders and villagers collaborated with a National Archives Outreach Programme by co-g...

Providing a Digital Voice for Storytellers in Africa

treitmaier.dyndns.org

In this paper we examine how digital technology can be used to inspire, record and present oral stories in an African context. In particular we explore how to create technologies that are sympathetic to the cultures of the storytellers, both in the capture of stories and their retelling. Specifically, we look at: inspiring stories in District Six in Cape Town; capturing digital stories from users with low literacy levels and using virtual reality to retell indigenous and personal experience narratives.