Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Open access. Includes bibliographical references (p. 253-262). Print copy also available.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Nov. 30, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-90).

In this study, differences between literary and digital storytelling are identified as a context for the issues explored within this thesis. I argue both the strengths and weaknesses of both the written and digital arratives. It is difficult to apply the same standards to two exceptionally different genres, but it is the truest way to compare and contrast the two. I will examine a few of the studies that have already been done that are similar and some of the assertions they have concluded. / Storytelling : past and present -- An objective comparison of narrative -- Literary and digital narrative -- Digital media and the digital narrative -- Objective and subjective issues. / Department of Telecommunications

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Guzdial, Mark; Committee Member: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Member: Mynatt, Elizabeth; Committee Member: Smith, Michael; Committee Member: Thomas, John. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Businesses, be it large corporations or small, and medium businesses are today hard pressed to find ways to effectively reach out to consumers. The simple reason for this is the advancements in technology. The Internet is forcing marketers to adopt new methods of engagement. Thus, businesses are jumping on the social media bandwagon. However, presence on social media networks does not necessarily equate to interactivity and engagement with consumers. This research examines three automobile companies for interactivity and engagement using thematic analysis and a multi-platform interactivity analysis. The conclusions drawn from this research are: (1) companies are good at interacting or engaging but are seldom good at both, and (2) companies do not necessarily utilize their online resources on multiple platforms efficiently. / Department of Telecommunications

In this thesis, I developed an empirically and theoretically grounded understanding of participatory action research (PAR). My aim was to develop and explore PAR methods within three culturally different fishing communities located in India, Portugal and the UK in order to generate emotionally meaningful stories. The work was conducted as part of the practice-led TOTeM research project and aspires to be associated with such works that have been able to make a methodological contribution by introducing theoretical insights, innovative methods and analytical concepts. In this study, the key finding is revealing the importance of the preliminary activities that helped design the innovative methods. I assess how my PAR methods, such as story interviews, digital storytelling workshops and story kits, helped me to gather participants’ personal experiences within the three chosen communities. Photographs and ‘objects’ provided a medium through which to identify stories that were emotionally meaningful to the participants. These stories gathered from the three chosen communities were analysed through a story narrative analysis method. Each method evoked strong, emotionally meaningful responses from the participants with regard to human relationships and demonstrated the vital role of objects in identifying stories that illustrate the participants’ intimate relationships. The collective findings from the three communities established that the methods utilised provided a new way of synthesising storytelling with digital technologies. The findings reinforce the role played by the participants as co-creators in collaboratively designing the methods, enabling me to craft a better way to gather stories. Upon critical reflection of the methods, supporting evidence was found that storytelling serves as an invaluable technique in providing participants with opportunities to explore their cultural identity through uniquely self-reflecting narratives and shared moments. I present the three stages of the participatory methods as my story culture framework and the findings and challenges as my original contribution to knowledge. I propose that this transferable framework will support designers as they engage with various settings to elicit information from user and stakeholder participants, develop their own experiential and critical perspectives and utilise their intuitive and expressive expertise to establish, manage and sustain productive human-centred design relationships.

Digital storytelling as a pedagogical practice has been extensively explored as a means of increasing engagement, developing 21st century skills such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication, and refining digital literacies in students. However, there is a lack of data on how the use of multimodal digital tools can be used to explore pervasive social issues such as bullying in adolescents. In this study, a group of grade seven students provided their views and self-assessed their levels of empathy and understanding for victims of bullying, bullies and bystanders prior to and after the completion of a digital storytelling project. Using Likert scale data, along with an in-depth content analysis of the stories and presentations the students produced, the study explored whether participation in this digital storytelling project led to a noticeable and measurable impact on their understanding of and empathy for victims of bullying, bullies and bystanders.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-270).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-230). Print copy also available.

Includes bibliographical references / This study is set against the background of a continued lack of social engagement across difference in South African classrooms. It set out to explore the potential of a specific pedagogical intervention - digital storytelling - as a post-conflict pedagogy in a diverse pre-service teacher education classroom. Personal storytelling has long been used to unearth lived experiences of differently positioned students in the classroom. More recently, the use of digital technologies has made it easier to transform these personal stories into publishable, screenable and sharable digital resources. In general, digital storytelling is lauded in the literature for its potential to facilitate an understanding across difference, allowing empathy and compassion for the 'Other'. In this study, I question this potentially naive take on digital storytelling in the context of post-conflict pedagogies. I was interested in the emotions emerging - particularly in what I termed a potential sentimentality - in both the digital storytelling process and product. I looked at sentimentality in a specific way: as the tension between the centrality of emotions to establish an affective engagement between a storyteller and the audience, and digital stories' exaggerated pull on these emotions. This is seen, for example, in the difficulty that we have when telling stories in stepping out of normative, sentimental discourses to trouble the way we perform gender, race, class and sexuality, all of which are found in the actual stories we tell and the images we use. It is also found in the audience response to digital storytelling. Adopting a performative narrative inquiry research methodology, framed by theorists such as Butler, Ahmed, and Young, all three feminist authors interested in the politics of difference, working at the intersection of queer, cultural, critical race and political theory, I adopted three different analytical approaches to a narrative inquiry of emotions. I used these approaches to analyse stories told in a five-day digital storytelling train-the-trainer workshop with nine pre-service teacher-education students. Major findings of this study are: In everyday life stories, students positioned themselves along racial identities, constructing narratives of group belonging based primarily on their racialized identities. However, in some students' stories - particularly those that offer a more complex view of privilege, acknowledging the intersectionality of class, gender, age, sexuality and race - these conversations are broken up in interesting ways, creating connections between students beyond a racial divide. Looking at the digital story as a multimodal text with its complex orchestration of meaning-making through its different modes, it became clear to me that conveying authorial intent is difficult and that the message of a digital story can be compromised in various ways. The two storytellers I looked at in more detail drew from different semiotic histories and had access to different semiotic resources, such as different levels of critical media literacy, with this compromising their authorial intent to tell counterstories. Finally, the genre storytellers chose, the context into which their stories were told, along with their positioning within this context in terms of their privilege, affected the extent to which they could make themselves vulnerable. This consequently shaped the audience response, which was characterised by passive empathy, a sentimental attempt to connect to what makes us the 'same', rather than recognising systemic and structural injustices that characterise our engagements across difference.