I see stories. At the bus stop, in the pub, even on Twitter. It's how we communicate. This thesis is no different. It tells lots of stories, how you hear them depends on the reader as much as the writer. One of the stories in this book is of my own personal journey from a lowly PhD student to a fully fledged member of the storytelling community in Scotland. The personal narrative is woven throughout the text as a series of reflections and diary extracts. Another story is the development of Blether Tay-gither, the local Dundee-based storytelling group which was set up during the course of my research and continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Blether Tay-gither gave me my ticket into the storytelling world, validating my credentials.The main tale however, is that of storytelling in contemporary, technological society. What does it mean to be a storyteller? Why would someonebecome a storyteller? And what possible relevance could it have to today's society? These questions are answered largely by the tellers themselvesthrough a series of interview snapshots and discussions. What is not addressed by them, though, is the relationship between storytelling and digital technology, or new media. Whilst storytellers are not inherently anti-technology, they are not in general, avid consumers of digital media. Yet by comparing a set of characteristics for storytelling and new media (generated through extensive participant observation), and developing a lens for reflection, the connections between them can be probed. These connections are proof in and of themselves of the continued relevance and need for engaging stories and strongly suggest that creative technology-enabled storytelling experiences would be well received. A set of such creative hybridised storytelling environments was developed by introducing young designers to traditional stories and storytelling techniques, allowing them to generate a range of innovative prototypes. This case study is examined in some detail and the reflection tool used to consider the success of each conceptual idea.

The Scottish Gypsy Travellers have transmitted their stories as a living oral tradition for centuries, partly to maintain their distinct cultural identity, partly as an educational tool, 'and partly as entertainment. My thesis proposes that the 'discovery' of a select group of Scottish Gypsy Traveller memory-bearers by the folklorist Hamish Henderson played a leading role in the Scottish Folk Revival. It additionally suggests that while this 'discovery' has contributed to the re-inscribing of Scotland's national identity, its legacy, in terms of re-defining the socio-cultural praxis of the wider Scottish Gypsy Traveller community itself, has been negligible

Storytelling is a natural way for humans to make sense of their world. Narratives structure experience into expected forms that improve understanding of relationships between discrete objects and events. This is the rationale behind museum curation, which organises objects in the physical museum space to reveal how they are related. This thesis explores how to support people to tell and experience narratives across multiple objects. For the online world, a model of curatorial inquiry is introduced which is designed to support a historical inquiry from online sources. This model extends existing inquiry models and is inspired by museum practice in which curators organize objects into museum narratives. For the physical world, a model is introduced that describes navigation through both the physical and conceptual neighbourhood of a set of objects. It is designed to support tourist activities across a non-portable set of cultural objects, such as statues, buildings, or landscape features. Key findings, based on both participant studies and analysis of data from Foursquare, is that while people are keen to understand stories that link places in a physical space, they prefer to navigate using physical, rather than conceptual proximity, and to visit places that are popular. This is counter to many mobile tour guides that focus on prompting navigation to similar places. The proposal of this thesis is therefore to develop applications that support tourists in understanding both what is physically nearby and conceptually nearby. This would allow them to use physical proximity - or any preferred alternative – to select where to go next, whilst supporting them to make links between the places they visit. In this way tourists would be provided with enough information about the relationships of places within a physical neighbourhood that they can start to understand and create their own stories about them.

The thesis discusses the result of a critical language study (CLS) of Tanzanian Presidential Kiswahili political oratory (TPKPO). The CLS was motivted by the belief that one of the principal contributions that linguists could make to the survival and development of their societies is to adopt what Shapiro (1990:12) paraphrasing Foucault (1977) has callled "a commitment to a form of inquiry aimed at the continuous disruption of the structures of "intelligibility" upon which some of the prevailing hegemonic political prejudices and biases are based. Faifclough's (1989) ideas regarding the need for and how to conduct CLS were dapted to suit the specific goal of the curren study which was to determine the inter and intra speker vriation within contemporary Tanzanian Kiswahili political discourse taking the oratory ex-president J. K. Nyerere and tha of Prersident A. H. Mwinyi as a case in point. The results of the study, which adopted a largely ethnographic research design, permit one to make two important observations about TPKPO.

No description available.

This thesis examines what literary theory can bring to the practice of visual story telling. Through praxis it examines underlying systems and techniques relative to works of fiction, investigating what impacts and advances narratology can bring to visual communication approaches and methods. This thesis will argue that literary concepts and methods produce new thinking and perspectives on visual methodologies, by establishing a dialectical relationship between the visual and verbal in creative practice; and in respect of literary theory and visual communication.

This thesis will provide a sustained analysis of the relationship between the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its context in early first century BCE Rome. Over 250 examples in the Rhetorica ad Herennium illustrate the text’s rhetorical theory, but in so doing they also provide a significant insight into the history, law, and politics of this period. As I demonstrate, these examples show the preoccupations and perspectives of orators who were not necessarily from the political elite. They illustrate what could and could not be discussed in speech, and the modes of oratory that were encouraged by the author – popularis or not. The author’s focus on forensic oratory also has important implications for understanding the use of the law and legal knowledge. An important strand of this thesis is to compare the examples in the Rhetorica ad Herennium to those of Cicero’s contemporary De Inventione. Although the two texts have often been treated as a pair, there are differences between the two. The contrasts are noteworthy in themselves, but they also emphasise the independence of the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and the potential to adapt theories and approaches as necessary. This is also an educational text, and the way it is constructed relates closely to its audience. I argue that the post-Social War context of the Rhetorica ad Herennium is key to understanding this audience, who may include newly enfranchised Italians using the Roman legal system for the first time. By recontextualising the Rhetorica ad Herennium, it becomes clear that it is a very different text to the De Inventione in many ways. By highlighting these differences, I show that the work can stand alone as an object of enquiry and serve as a rich source for Roman Republican historians.

Le but de la thèse consiste dans la tentative de brosser un tableau du parcours occidental d’Aelius Aristide, orateur grec vécu au IIème siècle de notre ère, au moyen d’un examen des traductions latines de ses discours réalisées entre le XVème et la première moitié du XVIème siècle. Nous nous proposons de montrer que la réception d’Aristide en Occident au cours de l’humanisme a toujours été liée à des clairs intérêts littéraires, mais aussi à des raisons socio-culturelles et historiques. Pour cela, nous analysons les traductions latines de quatre discours d’Aristide : le Dionysos (or. 41), traduit par Cencio de’ Rustici en 1416 ; la Monodie pour Smyrne (or. 18), par Niccolò Perotti (1471) ; le discours Aux Rhodiens, sur la concorde (or. 24), par Carlo Valgulio ; le Discours d’ambassade à Achille (or. 16), par Joachim Camerarius (1535). Nous donnons une édition critique des deux premières traductions (Dionysos et Monodie) fondée sur les manuscrits latins et une édition moderne des deux dernières (Aux Rhodiens et Discours d’ambassade) ; nous proposons aussi l’identification du modèle grec utilisé par l’humaniste ou, au moins, l’identikit du texte grec originel lu par l’humaniste pour sa traduction. / The purpose of the thesis is to outline the western route of Aelius Aristides, Greek orator lived in II century AD, through an overview of the Latin translations of some of his speeches produced between the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century by humanists from Italy and Northern Europe. We aim to show that Aristides’ reception in Western Europe during Humanism has always been related to clear literary interests, but also to socio-cultural and historical reasons. For this purpose, we analyze the Latin translations of four Aristides’ speeches : the Dionysos (or. 41), translated by Cencio de’ Rustici in 1416 ; the Monody for Smyrna (or. 18), by Niccolò Perotti (1471) ; the speech To the Rhodians, on concord (or. 24), by Carlo Valgulio (1497) ; the Embassy speech to Achille (or. 16), by Joachim Camerarius (1535). We give a critical edition of the first two translations (Dionysos and Monody) based on the Latin manuscripts and a modern publication of the last two (To the Rhodians and Embassy) ; we also propose the identification of the Greek model or, at least, we offer an identikit of the original Greek text read by the humanist for his translation.