21. Everybody left 22. I went to bed
Brooke went to bed at around 11:30.
In re-organizing Brooke’s story according to stanzas and chapters, I work to discover and reveal meaningful patterns in my five-year-old daughter’s narrative. This macro-level analysis
allows me to get at the basic themes in Brooke’s recount of an exciting day. As we can see, chapters in her story carried thematic focuses that varied in scope and perceived significance. For example, her lasting obsession with a strawberry chiffon cake, an artifact that is emblematic of the occasion, probably led to the descriptive weight going into the chapter about making the cake. Similarly, she selected the incident of Nathan blowing the candle because of the emotionally “devastating” and therefore memorable nature of that event. As any storytelling enterprise, Brooke’s story made selective use of events that took place during that day. With selection, however, comes exclusion. What she decisively left out, for example, were details of the meal that took us a whole day to prepare and a face-painting session that everybody loved.
An important idea here is events that were reappropriated not only had thematic qualities, but also distinct temporal qualities, as my notations revealed. They took place in real time and were therefore temporally related to each other.
Another task discourse analysis assays is to understand how such thematic chapters are organized in the story. For the type of narrative analysis I perform, a temporality-informed representation helps me to explore the intersection of two temporalities—the order in which actual events took place on Brooke’s birthday and the order in which Brooke’s story represented such events. I argue, for the broader project, that the intersection of these two temporalities often reveals areas of correspondence and disruption that are often informed by genres and genre practices. I present the temporality-informed visual model in Figure 1.
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Figure 3. Brooke's Birthday Story, A Visual Model
As I have previously discussed, the visual tool was designed to represent the intersection of two temporalities, with the x-axis representing the progression of ideas in the narrative over time, and the y-axis representing the temporal order in which natural events take place. Thus, on the x-axis, we see the story unfolding in a sequence of chapters from the beginning to an end. On the y-axis, we see the rearrangement of natural events, with a particular attention to how they exist in temporal relation to each other. In stories I analyzed for this dissertation, most of which created by adults, however, markers for temporal frames were often present and useful. What is worth noting here is that I did not follow an exact scale of time distribution (e.g. using singe unit to represent the elapse of every hour) when mapping the trajectories of either temporalities in this visual model. Instead, my goal was to model the rough temporal trajectory of the progression of ideas and events. A practical, methodological concern underlined my decision here. That is, more sophisticatedly executed personal stories often treat time as a highly plastic construction.
An author may brush off a 20-year elapse by one adverbial phrase, while investing extensive
amount of details developing the moment-by-moment movement of events in a half-hour time frame. Therefore, I designed the visual model to accommodate such plasticity of temporality. To refine this model, however, I suggest that a researcher attends to the scale issue by first deciding on functional temporal units, such as minute, hour, day, month, year, decade, and so on and then by developing formal features with which the distribution of time can be reflected according to units.
In this visual model, Brooke’s story roughly resembles a y=x plot because it is a story told according to chronological order. Despite the fact there was an extensive lapse of time in between the first and second chapter of the story (from making the cake in the morning to the arrival of the first guests in the afternoon), the unfolding of events in the story largely followed the same temporal order as actual events unfolded in real time. The only exception was when Brooke created two parallel accounts of Stanley and Nathan bringing presents, which happened in an overlapping period of time but unfolded in her story in the order of Stanley and then Nathan. See Figure 2 and 3 for how events were organized differently in the two temporalities.
Figure 4. Narrative Temporality-How are events represented in the story?
Figure 5. Natural Temporality--How did things actually happen?
Stanley Arrived (parked car,
brought a present) Tried to open Stanley's
present and was stopped Nathan Arriveed (with a watermellon shark)
Stanley arrived (parked car,
brought a present) Nathan arrived (with watermellon
shark) Stanley, Brooke, Nathan tried to open present but was stopped
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In making this thematic move, Brooke allowed thematic order to temporarily override temporal order. She let the theme of each friend bringing a present (and illustrative details that highlight such events) to guide her construction of the two parallel accounts (Nathan came, we tried to open his present in vain, Stanley came, he brought a watermelon shark), while these events followed a different temporal order in real time (Stanley arrived, Nathan arrived, they all gathered to open a present and were stopped). This type of thematic move may seem the most mundane in storytelling, but in the visual representation, it created a disruption in the temporal flow of the story, thus creating a slight visual dip in time. That is, account of Nathan’s present took us back in time while the story itself progresses forward, leading to a slight deviation of that stanza from the overall y=x plot and creating a visual dip.
An example: Temporal visual model for Ironing
For the broader project, this attention to corresponding temporal matches as well as disruptive temporal dips (rises) are important to the analysis of more sophisticated stories that often demonstrate strategic and creative manipulation and remix of memories, events, and accounts in and out of a wide range of temporal frames. In this section, I apply this model to Ironing and work to reveal the qualitatively different temporal features Brooke’s story and Ironing each manifest.
To perform this kind of visual analysis, I have built in visual conventions to arrive at a more accurate visual representation of the temporal arrangement of a narrative. First, the basic unit of visual representation is a stanza, s stretch of multimodal constructions that deliver one chunk of information around one theme. Depending on the thematic nature of a stanza, a stanza is represented either by a green circle or a square, which, when considered together, constitute the thematic flow of the story. A circle represents a stanza that is descriptive in nature; a square
represents a stanza that is analytical in nature. This methodological distinction between the descriptive and analytical was very much informed by comparative analysis of stories across institutions—some digital stories are purely descriptive in nature while others tend to have a stronger analytical bend. I try to map the distribution of semiotic resources as well as the varying thematic weights of stanzas and chapters by manipulating the size of stanza circles/squares.
Written in the center of each stanza circle is the keyword that reminds the reader of the highlight the theme of the stanza. For example, in Ironing, we observe the presence of a rich moment, represented by a string of circles and squares that are similar in size, as they represent extensive vivid sensory details (positioning of mother and sons, what she wears, the smell in the room) as well as the author’s retrospective analysis of unrecognized significance and meaning behind this ritual. In the visual model, the rich moment is therefore represented by an extensive string of stanzas that are intricately connected to each other. In comparison to the previous chapter, in which the author covers many grounds and briefly touches upon the discovery of father’s death, the rich moment is not only “longer,” but is “heavier” with conceptual and emotional weight.
Second, I use floating texts, which are relatively larger in size and not attached to any visual thematic unit, to mark chapters, or rather typified, recurrent compositional features. These typified patterns, I argue, arose in response to institutionally specific ideological, aesthetic, and pedagogical orientations and emphasis. For example, the CDS’ pedagogical emphasis on creative narrative structures, as opposed to a more conventional, linear structure of narrative, has led to stories that feature rich moments at their center. As my analysis will show in Chapter 4,5, and 6, the rhetorical exigency specific to each institutional setting directs and frames the individual’s performance of the genre in powerful ways.
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Thirdly, I use different color schemes to make clear the presence of a dominant thematic thread and its relationship to emergent, recurrent analytical themes. In the case of Ironing, I use green circles/squares to show the dominant thematic thread. Parallel, lightly-colored stanza circles/squares represent what I call “mirror” moments, which are stanzas found in dominant thematic threads and are re-invoked, referenced and remediated elsewhere, often for analytical purposes. For example, the author’s discussion of a recent experience, ironing in his basement, involves a direct reference to a parallel moment in the past, of watching his mother ironing. The two moments, temporally distanced from each other, was brought together by the author to impregnate each other with meaning and emotional relevance. In making “mirror” units visually present, I hope to reveal the broader theme of “change,” which the dominant and the mirror moments work in concert to realize. Change, in the context of CDS, refers to new insights and refreshed understandings developed through a reflective analysis of past experiences. In Ironing, the two thrusts of analysis derived from the author’s retrospective examination of the rich
moment (the pain mother must have felt and the questions she must have asked), when invoked again, give one additional layer of insight to the story. Its emergent meaning was applied to help the author make sense of his own loss and to enable a powerful and meaningful connection between his mother and himself.
In Table 5, I provide a list of multimodal and discourse analytical constructs that were focal to the transcription and modeling method I developed. As the reader can see, formulation of these notions were informed by previous scholarship (Gee, 2005) and my own effort in developing such analytical methods.
Table 6. A List of Multimodal and Discourse Analytical Constructs Analytical
Construct
Definition Description Visual Symbol
Semiotic Idea Unit
Small chunks of
information that contain one piece of salient information.
Idea units are not visually represented in the model.
Descriptive
Stanza A unitary larger block of semiotic information devoted to describing a single topic, event, and image.
A circle that is small in size. Often
connected with stanzas in the same chapter to portray unity.
Analytical Stanza
A unitary larger block of semiotic information devoted to presenting an analytical insight, perspective, and theme.
A square that is small in size.
“Mirror”
Stanza
A unitary larger block of semiotic information, whose meaning is dependent upon a stanza presented elsewhere in the story. A mirror stanza typically revisits,
references, and builds upon an original stanza.
A unit that is of the same shape and size as the main thematic chapter it mirrors, but is portrayed
Chapter Typified, higher-level organizational chunks of information that
constitute a story. A chapter has its own smaller parts, largely constituted by stanzas.
Flowing text that is not visually attached to visual
representations of chapters.
Temporality of Natural
Events
Temporal order in which natural events unfold.
Axis x
Temporality of Narrative
Events
Temporal order according to which natural events are arranged in a story.
Axis y, often marked with temporal adverbs or phrases indicated in the story.
132 Figure 6 shows a visual mapping of Ironing.
Figure 6. Ironing, Visual Model
Genre Analysis
As this visual mapping of Ironing shows, the author’s recounting of a series of memories and his ongoing reflection are intimately interwoven together and center around a single theme—
the seemingly mundane act of ironing. This is most tellingly shown through the shifting of time frames. That is, ongoing reflections of life circumstances, which typically take place in the present, often draw upon and are inflected with meanings from past experiences and memories.
For example, the author’s brief account of a moment in his recent memory—ironing clothes in the basement of a house is immediately bridged with a moment in the distant past—the
accidental discovery of father’s death in the family’s house. The author then follows the natural temporality of events and brings the audience a rich moment in the young author’s life. In comparison to the linear narrative Brooke told, the thematic movement of Ironing involves uneven shifts and bridging of the present and the past, which the visual model adeptly captures.
That is, the sudden visual “rises” and “dips” the model projects revealed an important dimension of the author’s creative intention—strategic interruption of the linear narrative structure.
Another significant feature we observe in this story is the strategic construction of a rich moment--the use of vivid sensory details, lively characterization, and detailed descriptions of activities and thinking to recreate a finite moment and the use of this moment to anchor the development of an overarching theme of change. This rich moment, of a young mother ironing clothes with her two young sons, is pregnant with meanings, emotions, and themes that the following chapters build upon. This constant thematic movement between the past and present, in a 25-year range, unfolds often in reference of the rich moment, including the author’s analysis of recent experiences, his reminiscence of losing his father, and his own grief of losing his mother. The culminating act even relies on a strategic repetition of both the linguistic structures and thematic focus of the rich moment—the questions and pains suffered by both mother and son—to bring together preceding memories and analysis and to drive home a focal point.
Through creative arrangement of reflection and reconstruction of memories, the author brings to the forefront the focal insight of the story-- a therapeutic revisit of a childhood trauma and a refreshed understanding of a seemingly mundane everyday act as a meditational tool, a ritual that helped a widow and a son to cope with the loss of loved ones. In doing so, Ironing fulfills a critical ideological commitment of the CDS—the use of personal stories for therapeutic purposes.
By treating genre as existing at the dynamic intersection of the collective social practice and the discursive work of the individual, I do not stop at a close observation of digital stories for systematic manifestations of patterns of thematic contents, formal features, and meanings, which constitute the core of the genre. Rather, I attend to the typified processes of production,
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dissemination and reception of digital stories, whose functions, purposes, and ideologies inform and are encoded by genre to furnish any given individual’s accomplishment of specific social and discursive goals. Surely, this intentional move away from textual meaning towards larger social systems draws a researcher’s attention to the institutional configurations of persons, activities, tools, and texts that constantly mediate situated discursive activities. Central to my thinking here is again the notion that a cultural genre is a dynamic fusion of thematic content, form, rhetorical practices, and ideology. In this light, what we observe in the product (thematic content, semiotic features, and compositional structures) indexes ideological claims, rhetorical exigencies, and typified processes of producing, distributing, and receiving digital stories, which are simultaneously durable and dynamic.
As I have begun to discuss in the previous section, the visual model allows me to consider temporal features as indexing and encoding the ratified processes and ideological claims. To that end, I examine the flexible and generative forces that manifest themselves through the innovative and novel ways in which digital storytelling unfolds to meet the needs of partially novel rhetorical problems. In that direction, I examine stories for how they
systematically profess thematic, compositional, and semiotic features that are consistent with the distinctive institutional pressures under which they are produced. I observe and analyze how ratified processes articulate institutional pressures, present partially novel problems, and
therefore unfold in unpredictable and novel ways, which leads to the unique reconfigurations of the genre and stories told. In this light, I construct an account that describes digital stories as individually and collectively “belonging to” and constituting the various social and resource configurations specific to the four programs.
In making these arguments about genre exerting significant influence upon the structures and shapes of storytelling, however, I do not suggest that the analytical and modeling attempt I have made so far will yield fully stabilized genre features. Indeed, if we read through the corpus of the stories I studied for this dissertation, every story manifests something that is out of the range of the normal and typified, which the analysis is able to tentatively define and describe.
The inferences I make here are productive only insofar as they demonstrate a socio-historical point of view that connects locally manifested features to broader ideological and institutional claims. I do not make claims that a researcher can safely predict the trajectory of a CDS participant’s storytelling or make arguments about these genre features as an abiding criterion that every CDS story has to meet in order to be considered as socially recognizable and culturally appropriate.
My Role as a Researcher
To arrive at a multi-perspectived understanding of digital storytelling, I have merged my personal plan for conducting research with multiple routes of immersion, which have continued to yield new insights and themes that shape my perspective as a researcher. In what follows, I provide a brief account of these strategies of immersion, which necessarily mapped the contours of my development as a digital storyteller, a facilitator, and a researcher. In the same process, I will comment on how such activities, sometimes casual conversations and other times intensive training, have necessarily shaped my attitudes and beliefs that inevitably influenced my work.
Site analysis and online working group
Since the inception of this research project in early 2009, I have spent countless hours watching a bulk of stories that were made publicly available by the focal programs. These
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sessions are sometimes concentrated days spent on watching hundreds of stories and allowing themes and categories to inductively emerge. At other times, sessions can be sporadic, interest- driven viewing experiences in which I spent time jotting down notes on my ideas, thoughts, and emotions in reaction to a given story. In addition to viewing the stories, I also tried to tap into the social histories, self-professed missions and values, accounts of the workshop process, as well as published participants testimonials and autobiographical accounts by perusing information that were made publicly available on the programs’ websites. To arrive at fuller accounts of the programs’ work, I have resorted to extant writings and books published by the focal programs (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009a; Lambert, 2010). Given the genre-informed analytical
perspective, I have paid particular attention to the various categorization mechanisms built into these websites’ navigational system. That is, I was interested in the particular ways in which a collection of stories is categorized. Insights garnered through such focused explorations have greatly informed the construction of my own analytical tools by generating insights and themes that have enriched my identification and definition of categories to describe the thematic, ideological, and ratified process dimensions of digital storytelling.
Since the spring of 2010, I have also participated in a digital-storytelling working group Joe created on face book. As an online space for interested professionals to have productive conversations, this space has given me the opportunity to converse with facilitators from programs at various degrees of maturity and to network with individuals that could provide valuable insights for my research. Participation in the working group has also allowed me to observe the nodes of digital storytelling and the intricate links that connect such nodes from around the world. Considered together, these initial, exploratory activities have given me macro- level view of the cultural landscape of digital storytelling, which allows me to attend to broader