Master of Arts Integrated Studies (MAIS) 620

Overview

MAIS 620: Digital Storytelling explores a variety of storytelling frameworks. Stories—and the ability to tell them—are assuming a new primacy in contemporary culture. As the data glut of the World Wide Web threatens to drown out personal stories, social media is responding by providing a powerful forum for digital storytelling. Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Pinterest, Facebook, and Ancestry.com are symptomatic of the popularization of personal narratives in digital media. Even as the nature of contemporary stories morph in their articulation into new forms as diverse as computer games, narrative medicine, and organizational storytelling, they remain as essential as breathing.

This course will include:

• visual storytelling and photography
• oral storytelling and alternate reality games
• comics and the conjunction of image and text;
• time-based storytelling in digital video
• collaborative storytelling
• space-based or environmental storytelling in online works, games and locative media

Students will learn the practice and theory of digital media production, including working with images, audio, and video.

Outline

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• identify the differences between storytelling frameworks, including the conjunction of image and text and comics, visual storytelling and photography, oral storytelling and alternate reality games, and time-based versus space-based storytelling
• understand the basic components of a story, and how images can be used to tell stories on their own and in conjunction with words
• transform audiences by motivating them and galvanizing them into action
• understand the role that memory plays in storytelling and how it contributes to its organic structure
• understand narration, and how narrative structure and visual framing affect how a story is told and experienced
• learn the importance of location within digital culture
• understand the complexity of the concept of authorship, as well as what role collaboration plays in the creative act
• understand the difference between influence and appropriation in creative practice and be able to identify the three types of remix
• understand how the creative process adapts and reimagines connections and builds on work from the past
• understand the difference between time- and space-based narrative and be able to create them
• understand the dialectic between technology and storytelling
• learn about gaming and interactivity, and explore real world applications for digital storytelling
• be able to craft excellent stories in a digital medium (including slideshows, comics, storyboards, and digital video).

Evaluation

To receive credit for this course, students must participate in the online activities, successfully complete the assignments, and achieve a final mark of at least 60%.

The following table summarizes the evaluation activities and the credit weights associated with them.