Links of the week – digital storytelling edition
While it seemed so far away when I applied for it, the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 2012 conference is roughly two weeks away and I still have many more metaphorical miles to go before I can sleep. Flights still have to be booked, sleeping arrangements must be made, and I should probably move some money around so I have disposable funds while I’m in Japan.
Everyone I know who has been to Japan talks about how expensive the country is. Korea, while not a cheap place to live, is a rather affordable country. I feel like I may be in for some sticker shock in addition to some culture shock.
In preparation for my paper on the role of storytelling in digital engagement, I’ve been reading as much as I can find about the art and purpose of storytelling. Here are five links to interesting reflections on the role storytelling plays in our culture.
1. Advertising in academia? Maximizing research potential in the humanities – Being a good storyteller involves being able to sell yourself to an audience. Whether it’s an idea, a project, or a story, it’s important that academics be able to convey their ideas to an audience. I’ve written about Jo Hawkins’s blog History Punk in the past and it continues to be one of my favourite academic blogs. In this post Jo provides a great list of lessons that academics can learn from advertising executives that will make their work, and the stories they tell, stronger.
2. Young historians ‘are damaging academia’ in their bid for stardom – This is an article that makes me angry, not because ‘young’ historians are ‘damaging academia,’ but because I believe it represents the kind of regressive thinking that is actually harmful to academia. Oxford historian Sir Keith Thomas believes that early-career historians are damaging history by attempting to turn their dissertations into books for a more general public. He cautions, “the reality is that only a few of these works (history books written for a general audience) succeed commercially.” Compared to what? The 0% of dissertations that are commercially successful? This interview reads like a manual for how not to succeed in connecting with an audience. I find this article so problematic that I plan on writing a more developed post about my feelings some time this week.
3. How much for my garden gnome? How stories make objects significant – A great post about how stories can imbue objects with greater worth (both social and financial). It raises the question, if we thought more about the stories behind our possessions, would we throw as much away?
4. Why storytellers lie - This may make me sound like a border-line sociopath (or worse, a politician), but I’m pro-lying. This isn’t to say that I’m a compulsive liar, but there is something to be said for lies that bridge the narrow gap between truth and fiction. This article discusses the book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. It examines why humans are so likely to bend the truth (especially when it comes to themselves). Based on this article, the book sounds fascinating. I’m going to buy a copy of the book and will likely write a post about the book in the near future.
5. N165 – a Mars rock’s story – This last link takes an interesting approach to telling a story. A twitter account was created for the Martian rock N165. The author of the account tells the story of a single rock 140 characters at a time. The creator of the Storify page the records N165′s account wonders if this technique could be used by museums to tell the stories of individual objects. Could twitter accounts for inanimate objects be a new future for telling the stories of objects?
Well that wraps up another edition of links of the week. Look for a fairly busy week on the site. My preparations for the JADH 2012 conference is giving me a lot to think and write about; I’m sure many of these thoughts will turn into posts.
Also look for an article about how to make the best of academic burn out and my response to Keith Thomas’s assertion that young historians are damaging academic by writing non-academic history books.
Finally, the ivrytwr Road-trip 2012 continues this Friday as we explore a Teddy Bear Museum in Gyeong-ju – believe me when I say you’ve never seen anything like this before.
