The New Digital Storytelling

Here's the Table of Contents for my forthcoming book: 

Part 1: Storytelling: a Tale of Two Generations

1.    Storytelling for the 21st Century. A survey of different meanings and uses of storytelling, noting the different roles of different technologies.

2.    The First Wave of Digital Storytelling. (Or “the old digital storytelling”) The 20th-century background: interactive fiction, MUDs and MOOs, and hypertext. Followed by the Center for Digital Storytelling (Joe Lambert’s movement), the computer gaming resurgence. 

3.    The Next Wave of Digital Storytelling. A quick summary of major technological shifts, 2001-present. Principles of storytelling which have since emerged.

Part 2: New Platforms for Tales and Telling

4.    Web 2.0 Storytelling. Using wikis, blogs, Twitter, and social image sites to create settings, characters, worlds, and stories.

5.    Social Media Storytelling. Podcasts and Web video. The uniqueness of audio; taking video past television and movies. User participation and user-generated content, inter-media conversation.

6.    Gaming: Storytelling on a Small Scale. How gamers use Web 2.0 to build a second, distributed, accessible layer to play. Microstories from casual games, the world’s leading game form.

7.    Gaming: Storytelling on a Large Scale. How massively multiplayer online games tell stories. 

Part 3: Combinatorial Storytelling, or the Dawn of New Narrative Forms

8.    No Story is a Single Thing, or The Networked Book. How creators and consumers spread stories across platforms. Transmedia storytelling, fanfiction, remixes. 

9.    Mobile Devices. The birth of new designs for small screens.

10.    Alternate Reality Games, or Chaotic Fictions. Survey of nearly a decade of ARGs as innovative multimedia mysteries. New techniques for engaging audiences and collaboration.

11.    Augmented Reality: Telling Stories on the Worldboard. Survey of augmented reality, from initial 1990s steps through the present. Light AR: geolocating stories. Heavy AR: mapping digital content onto the real world through mobile devices.

Part 4: Building Your Story 

12.    Storyflow. Practical lessons on brainstorming, planning, and development. Building in feedback and the social effect.

13.    Communities, Resources, and Challenges. Where to find new digital stories and storytellers. Problems: copyright, the dissolving author, and the never-ceasing future.

14.    Digital storytelling in education.  Curriculum and pedagogy, students and support.

15.    Coda: Towards the Next Wave of Digital Storytelling. Lessons from the old digital storytelling. Using futures methods to think about the next narrative forms. Stories about the new digital storytelling. 

  

Comments

[Laura]

Awesome Bryan!! Really look forward to seeing it.

[Dr. phil. Nell]

Wow, that's like so boring! You should get out of academia before it eats your brain. It all sounds so naively ahistorical, and the casual reader (I) can't help thinking that's what it probably is, seeing as how you probably lack institutional authorization to think about anything else. I mean, even supposing you read Hellenic picaresque novels and Carlyle and regularly augment the reality of birdwatching with Audubon Society -2.0 field guides, if you're not allowed to say so at conferences before midnight or without a drink in your hand because you've got the wrong degree, you might as well be one of those theory-raver digital creationists with cotton candy in/on their heads. Can't you see you're being oppressed? (In digital creationism [I just made it up] the world is 40 years old, Mosaic was the flood, what came after is firsthand knowledge [the only kind admissible], what came before is fossils -)

[N.]

Correction: The Web is the ark.

[Bryan Alexander]

Thanks, Laura.

Very entertaining, Dr. Phil. Nell! You're full of many stories.