Welcome to this blog

Thank you for stopping by.  This is the archived blog in support of The New Digital Storytelling.

For a couple of years I used this to share digital stories and to explore these new narrative forms.  I’m no longer updating the blog, but you are welcome to peruse its contents.  You can also purchase the book from Amazon or Praeger.

My main blog these days can be found here.  Sometimes I share digital storytelling thoughts there.  You can also find me on Twitter, where I do the same.

Seattle Noir: storytelling by Twitter

Seattle Noir is another Twitter-based storytelling project.  Microstorytelling, really, as each bit of story consists of a single Tweet.  Said Tweets combine noir fiction (plot and/or style) with life in Seattle, flagged by the hashtag #SeattleNoir.

For example,

Or:

Twitter continues to be a lively ground for new digital storytelling.  Soon we won’t call this “new” any more.

Noir has been a digital storytelling theme for a while.  Small Town Noir did a fine job of combining local archival research with blogging.  Alan Levine (of course) offers a neatly unsettling noir through Cowbird.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

 

 

Long-form journalism meets digital storytelling

“Snow Fall” is a fascinating experiment.  It’s the story of an avalanche in the American northwest.  That story appears in text format, along the lines of long-form journalism.  But “Snow Fall” also includes well done, nicely selected multimedia, including a 3d map/flyover of the catastrophe’s location, photos from involved people, and an eerie opening video of a windblown snowscape.

In a way, “Snow Fall” is a big budget, large-scale version of what the rest of us do in Cowbird.  Coupling well-written text with chosen non-text media might be the new normal for digital storytelling.

(cross-posted to my main blog)

New interactive fiction

“howling dogs” is a splendid new piece of interactive fiction.

The plot concerns a person charged with visualizing certain scenes.  I phrase this in such a vague, cold way in order to save you the pleasure of exploring its unsettling plot and lyrical beauty.

On Cowbird

Transom has a nice piece explaining Cowbird.

It’s a good introduction.  The article also gives us a good sense of how far Cowbird has come.  Now it has a library.  Now it’s a multimedia storytelling first-step tool.

Writing revolutions

“First Draft of the Revolution” is a Flash-based epistolary story.   The reader/player helps letter-writers revise drafts.  Each page develops the story:

(via MetaFilter)

Digital storytelling in Vermont

Two Middlebury College students used digital storytelling tools to explore central Vermont.  Here’s a sample, their discussion with a dairy farmer.

This was one project from Peter Lourie‘s series of adventure writing classes.

Small town noir or Gothic?

Alan Levine offers this microtale of American Gothic, “A Model City“, using the Cowbird digital storytelling service.

Look at how neat the mayor’s house is, with the shiny brick facade and the rows of roses down the path. Out in the shed is a table with a note and a rope tossed over the rafters.

(cross-posted to Infocult)

Celebrating cliffhangers

Emily Nussbaum sings the praises of cliffhanger narratives, from early film serials to tv soaps.  It’s a celebration of the segmented form (which I touch on in chapters 3+5).

Nice observation on cliffhangers in digital media:

In the digital age, that gap is an accordion: it might be a week or eight months; it may arrive at the end of an episode or as a season finale or in the second before a click on “next.”

(via Jason Mittell)

Choose your own adventure deaths

One of the key components to a Choose Your Own Adventure book is the series of death pages.  (If you haven’t played/read one, these are pages to which you turn when selecting a seemingly nonlethal choice.)

One helpful blogger has gathered up a bunch of death pages, like

I discuss CYOA books in NDS, chapter 9.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

(cross-posted to Infocult)