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This thesis presents three case studies in which comic-based digital storytelling is adopted as a means to support the reflection on particular situations involving conflicts. The potential of digital storytelling combined with the comic’s genre has been identified in previous works. Anyway, there is a need of empirical evidence on the advantages and disadvantages on which this approach can be based. Moreover, in most of the research, it has to be noted that digital comics have been identified, in the majority of the research, as a medium to access content, not to create them. Consequently, this thesis contributes to the investigation of employing digital storytelling based on comics informed by previous practices to narratives’ use. Therefore, the case studies are conducted to deeply explore how comic-based digital storytelling can support the reflection of significant troubling experiences. Quantitative and qualitative methods, related to both the user experience and the comics’ construction, are used, which show the benefits and drawbacks when adopting digital torytelling in the form of comics. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of this approach are described in the conclusion. As a matter of fact, in the conclusion, we report a final reflection on the engagement, stakeholder involvement, collaboration, technology, comics, and reflection concepts while considering possible future works on the research topic.

No / Memories on film is the outcome of an 18-month study funded by the National Institute for Health Research’s School for Social Care Research. Based on the principles of Participatory Video (Milne et al 2012), the study used digital storytelling and co-production techniques to create short films with 10 participants in a Leeds dementia care facility. Choice of images and narrative content were decided by the participants, who were aged between 76 and 99 years, and had lived in Leeds for most if not all of their lives. Almost all of them decided to tell the story of their own early life and its defining events, and the participants’ own voices, both speaking and singing, feature on the soundtrack to their films. We made extensive use of local history websites, and archives such as Leodis, when putting the films together. We were particularly keen to find out whether the creation of digital stories with this group of people – who can experience isolation and marginalisation – would help to increase their social participation. As a result we are now interested, not only in discussing the film-making process and the study outcomes, but also in identifying opportunities to have the completed films hosted by other websites and community groups. The summative focus groups for the study identified a number of potential uses for the films, including inter-generational work with schools, staff development initiatives, and raising public awareness.

This study investigated the experiences of emerging First Nations adults in extensions of care and transitioning out of care in Manitoba. Four research questions were explored in this study: 1) What do you remember about your time in care and what was your transitioning experience out of care or upon reaching 18 years of age? 2) What challenges, barriers or opportunities have you experienced since leaving care or turning 18? 3) How have you maintained the connection to family, community and culture since transitioning out of care? 4) Do you think you have reached adulthood? These questions were discussed through two digital storytelling workshops where over the course of five days participants developed and embedded individual responses to these questions into their own digital video. Follow up interviews were conducted with the participants to get feedback on their perspectives and evaluation about the digital storytelling workshops. Digital storytelling, through the art of combining oral tradition with digital technology, is a participatory, arts-based, learner-centered approach to generating knowledge. It involves using computer software to create a three to five minute video to illustrate a personal history. The findings suggest that Indigenous emerging adults in extensions of care and transitioning from care in Manitoba continue to experience difficulties on their journeys toward adulthood. However, the findings also suggest that the participants in this study are resilient despite the fact that they are dealing simultaneously with memories of being in care, negative peer pressures and problems in getting their basic needs met as they navigate life beyond their child welfare experiences. This study enhances the understanding of First Nations young peoples’ experiences in extensions of care and as they transition out of foster care, and contributes to the growing body of knowledge that utilizes digital storytelling as a contemporary method conducive to working with Indigenous emerging adult populations. / May 2016

This dissertation considers the impact mobile media technologies have on the production and consumption of memory narratives and cultural memory discourses in Canada. Although this analysis pays specific attention to concepts of memory, heritage, and public history in its exploration of site-specific digital narratives, it is set within a larger theoretical framework that considers the relationship between mobile technology and place, and how the mobile phone in particular can foster both a sense of place and placelessness. This larger framework also includes issues of co-presence, networked identity, play, affect, and the phenomenological relationship between the individual and the mobile device. This is then considered alongside memory narratives (both on the national and quotidian levels) at specifically sanctioned sites of national commemoration (monuments, historic sites) and also in everyday urban spaces. To this end, this dissertation covers a wide range of augmented reality apps and forms of digital storytelling including locative media narratives, site-specific digital performances, social media and crowdsourced heritage archives, and urban mobile gaming and playful mapping. Despite common criticism that mobile phones only serve to distract us from our surrounding environment, I argue that mobile technology can generate deeper, more affective attachments to places by reformulating ways of perceiving and moving through them. They do this by insisting that place is more than just its material properties, but rather is composed of a fluctuating relationship between materiality, time, and affect. Following this framework, I also emphasize how mobile technology shifts the traditional mission of the archive to preserve and protect the past to something more playful, more affective, and more preoccupied with the circulation of the past in the present. Included in this analysis are crowdsourced archives created on social media platforms which, I argue, are particularly well suited to capturing the dynamic qualities of memory and living heritage practices. A contributing factor in this is the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy and co-presence, which situates it in a long history of communication technologies that employ rhetorical and technological strategies of co-presence, immediacy, and intimacy. Chapter one examines the role that locative media narratives play at official sites of memory in Canada’s capital region from app-based historical tours to more playful narrative encounters, through the lens of the archive and the repertoire. Chapter two then considers the digital site-specific performance piece, LANDLINE, to unpack how mobile media foster everyday place memories in urban spaces through the mobile phone’s position as a site of intimacy for geographically distant, but virtually co-present, individuals. Chapter three analyzes my own experimental method, Maplibs, which follows a mobile game structure to encourage participants to engage in acts of playful placemaking and collaborative storytelling in order to highlight an alternative process of engaging with place that carries the past forward in meaningful ways. And finally, chapter four analyzes the social media group “Lost Ottawa” to explore how collaborative memory communities mobilize through social media platforms like Facebook and create new forms of participatory heritage. In all of this, place is understood as a dynamic assemblage of stories and memories that the mobile phone, through its ubiquitous impact on social practices, plays a key role in shaping.

This study takes a cultural studies approach to investigating the ways in which the articulation of vernacular creativity with digital technologies and the networked cultural public sphere might constitute sites of cultural citizenship. In the thesis, the concept of 'vernacular creativity' describes the everyday practices of material and symbolic creativity, such as storytelling and photography, that both predate digital culture and are remediated by it in particular ways. The first part of thesis, covering Chapters 2 and 3, develops a theoretical framework and cultural history of vernacular creativity in new media contexts. Chapter 2 introduces the idea of vernacular creativity and connects it to cultural studies approaches to participatory media and cultural citizenship. Chapter 3 theorises and historicises the relationships among vernacular creativity, technological innovation and new media literacy, drawing on social constructionist approaches to technology, and discussing concrete examples. The first of these examples is the mass amateurisation of photography in the first half of the twentieth century, as represented by the monopoly of popular photography by Kodak in the United States and beyond. The second is the domestication of personal computing in the second half of the twentieth century, culminating in a discussion of the Apple brand and the construction of an ideal 'creative consumer'. The second part of the thesis, covering Chapters 4 and 5, is devoted to the investigation of two major case studies drawn from contemporary new media contexts. The first of these case studies is the photosharing network flickr.com, and the second is the Digital Storytelling movement, structured around collaborative offline workshops in which participants create short multimedia works based on their biographies and personal images. These case studies are used to explore the ways vernacular creativity is being remediated in contemporary new media contexts, the socio-technical shaping of participation in digital culture, and the implications for cultural citizenship. In Chapter 6, the thesis concludes by suggesting some further implications of the research findings for cultural and media studies approaches to the relations of cultural production and the politics of popular culture.

Nowadays people got used to short text answers, likes and shares. Anyone can feel it by entering popular forums or social networks. Modern platforms such as Twitter or Facebook contribute to this situation with their symbols per message limitations. The quality of content produced in such conditions is not high. According to Knight and Burn (2005): “The rapid growth of the Internet and the lack of enforceable standards regarding the information it contains has led to numerous information quality problems.” The possible solution to this problem is called mobile digital storytelling. It replaces traditional communication mechanisms (text, photos) with a digital narrative, thus making a stronger impact on user. Besides, it allows creating interesting content at any location with the help of mobile phone. However, it is hard to make a high quality story from scratch without prior experience. Viewing through previously created high quality content provides such experience. At the same time, reusing this content would allow creating story by combining and rearranging instead of producing from scratch. But state of the art mobile digital storytelling applications don’t provide any possibilities for content reuse. In addition, the influence of content reuse on the story creation process was not studied. Hence, in this work the researcher will explore and try to develop alternative ways to support content reuse in mobile digital storytelling (mDS). For this purpose a mechanism called RecSM (a recommendation system using content from Social Media) is introduced. The main goal of development is to create RecSM for mobile digital storytelling application. The influence of RecSM on mobile content reuse as well as the influence of reuse on storytelling process is the main study goals. The thesis is based on research conducted in Linnaeus University, Sweden. The research is divided into two main parts: gathering requirements for RecSM and the case study. 10 users are involved in both activities. Initial requirements for RecSM are defined after conducting research in the topic but final requirements are determined with the help of users. Based on them the RecSM is developed and added to a mobile digital storytelling application. A case study in Teleborg Castle (Vaxjo, Sweden) follows afterwards. Participants create stories about their castle experience with the help of mDS or mDS-RecSM application. The data for further research is retrieved through field notes, personal interviews and a survey. Then stories and answers of people that used mDS with and without recommender are compared and analyzed. Based on the study outcomes it is concluded that developed RecSM supports content reuse in mobile digital storytelling.

Recent studies in Applied Linguistic (MOTTA-ROTH, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010; SILVA, 2012; SILVA, PILATI, DIAS, 2010; FUZER, 2012, 2014 among others) show gaps in the process of learning and teaching of textual production in the Brazilian context.Therefore, it is essential to the school provide development of competences and abilities that enable the student to be part of the society when using verbal and nonverbal language to produce texts that embrace the use of different semiosis into the school practice. In this scenario, the text production task at school needs to be rethought to consider such needs, mainly as a way to create motivation and student‟s engagement in learning their mother tongue, in order to set up the act of writing as social practice (MOTTA-ROTH, 2006) which to communicate to life (HYLAND, 2007).Thus, in this study, we elaborated a proposal of a pedagogical approach in teaching Portuguese language (PL) through the use of digital narratives, based on the teaching and learning genre cycle (ROTHERY, 1996; ROSE; MARTIN, 2012), the concept of teaching approach proposed by Almeida Filho (1998) and the Digital Teaching Material Cycle (REIS; GOMES, 2014) with the purpose of promoting multiliteracies practices at school. In this way, an action research was developed in the public school context, in which didactic and pedagogical interventions were applied by the teacher-researcher and conducted to design a final proposal of digital storytelling online course, using the Moodle Platform. Four practical interventions were carried out with high school students from a public school of Santa Maria / RS.The data collected in the pilot pedagogical practices were obtained through two questionnaires (a diagnostic and evaluation one) applied during the course, through the analysis of four digital narratives produced by students and their responses to the proposed activities in the applied course and as through reflective journal produced by the teacher-researcher.The results show an encouragement of multiliteracies practices by the students involved in the process. By working with technologies associated with the study of language and digital storytelling production, the students developed school, digital and multimodal literacies in writing texts based on genres and making use of technological resources in the process of building knowledge at school. Moreover, it also became evident that the development of the teacher‟s digital literacy was essential to elaborate the digital teaching material used, as well as the academic literacy allowed the suitability of the teacher‟s writing in the scientific context. As the final product of this research, we can glimpse a proposal of teaching Portuguese language within a contextualized approach, integrating the use of technologies, that we call as Digital Storytelling Teaching and Learning Production‟s Cycle, based on six activities phases (Explore the narrative genres; Collaborative production of genres; Rewriting the genres; Independent Production of genres; Designing the Digital Storytelling; Sharing the Digital Storytelling). To sum up, we believe that this proposal may guide teachers in training and continuing education in their didactic and pedagogical practices for teaching digital storytelling in language classes. / Estudos recentes na área da Linguística Aplicada (MOTTA-ROTH, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010; SILVA, 2012; SILVA, PILATI, DIAS, 2010; FUZER, 2012, 2014 entre outros) apontam lacunas no processo de ensino de produção textual no contexto brasileiro. Diante disso, parece imprescindível a escola proporcionar o desenvolvimento de competências e habilidades que capacitem o aluno a inserir-se na sociedade para usar a linguagem que abarque diferentes semioses nas práticas escolares. Para isso, a tarefa de produção textual precisa ser repensada para contemplar tais necessidades, principalmente como forma de gerar motivação e engajamento dos alunos na aprendizagem de Língua Materna, a fim de configurar o ato de escrever como uma prática social (MOTTA-ROTH, 2006) que visa comunicar para a vida (HYLAND, 2007). Sendo assim, neste estudo, elaboramos uma proposta de abordagem pedagógica de ensino de Língua Portuguesa (LP) por meio de narrativas digitais, tendo por base o ciclo de ensino e aprendizagem de gêneros (ROTHERY, 1996; ROSE; MARTIN, 2012), a concepção de abordagem de ensino proposta por Almeida Filho (1998) e o Ciclo de Produção de Material Didático Digital (REIS; GOMES, 2014), com vistas a promover práticas de multiletramentos no contexto escolar. Para isso, foi desenvolvida uma pesquisa-ação em contexto escolar público, na qual intervenções pedagógicas foram aplicadas pela professora-pesquisadora e embasaram o desenho da proposta final do curso online de produção de narrativas digitais, usando a Plataforma Moodle. Foram realizadas quatro intervenções práticas com alunos do Ensino Médio de uma escola pública da região de Santa Maria/RS. Os dados coletados na prática pedagógica piloto foram obtidos por meio de dois questionários (um de diagnóstico e um de avaliação) aplicado durante o curso, por meio da análise de quatro narrativas digitais produzidas pelos alunos e suas respostas às atividades propostas no curso aplicado, bem como por meio do diário reflexivo produzido pela professora-pesquisadora. Os resultados apontam o favorecimento de prática de multiletramentos dos participantes envolvidos no processo. Ao trabalharem com as tecnologias associadas ao estudo da linguagem e produzirem narrativas digitais, os alunos desenvolveram letramentos escolares, digital e multimodal. Além disso, ficou evidente a ampliação do letramento digital da professora, tão essencial à construção do material didático digital utilizado, bem como o letramento acadêmico, que possibilitou a adequação de sua escrita ao contexto científico. Como produto final desta pesquisa, podemos vislumbrar uma proposta de abordagem de ensino de LP contextualizada, integrando o uso de tecnologias, a qual denominamos como ciclo de Ensino e Aprendizagem de Produção de Narrativas Digitais, tendo por base 6 fases de atividades (Conhecer gêneros narrativos; Produção compartilhada de gêneros; Reescrita do Gênero; Produção Independente de gêneros; Design de narrativas digitais; Compartilhamento de narrativas). Para finalizar, consideramos que essa proposta poderá nortear professores em formação e formação continuada em suas práticas didático-pedagógicas quanto ao ensino de narrativas digitais em aulas de línguas.

This study responds to the following research question: How might rural school youth engage peers using social media in a participatory cultures framework to contribute to addressing gender-based violence in their community? This question is supported by the following secondary questions: How do rural school youth understand gender-based violence in their community. how might rural school youth use social media within a participatory cultures framework to engage peers in addressing GBV How can rural school youth engage with their peers via social media to facilitate youth agency in a participatory cultures framework This qualitative study is positioned in a critical paradigm and employs a visual participatory research methodology to contribute to addressing gender-based violence in the age of HIV and AIDS. The participants in this study are five learners (3 boys and 2 girls) with five of their peers (3 boys and 2 girls) from a secondary school in rural Vulindlela in KwaZulu-Natal, purposively selected from Grade 9 classes. Digital storytelling was employed as the main visual method of data generation to express the participants’ understanding of, and solutions to, genderbased violence. The stories were used by the participants to engage their peers around the topic via social media and to enable them to reflect on their own agency. The study draws on Jenkins’ theory of participatory cultures as a heoretical framework. Thematic analysis was applied to make meaning of the findings. The findings show that rural school youth understand gender-based violence (GBV) as a complex problem. Youthful learners are able to competently apply social media to address GBV and engage their peers through social media – hifting the power to participate as agents of change.The findings have implications for youth, the school, and the community. The youth are seen as knowledgeable actors who should inform intervention programmes aimed at social change. Social media can offer an engaging environment for peer learning and support. For digital participation, the youth need to acquire digital skills at school which could be integrated throughout the curriculum, drawing on participatory cultures. In the community, youth as knowledge producers are competent in leading, guiding, and instructing community members using social media spaces as more people have access to inexpensive digital technology that allows them to participate in community intervention programmes aimed at social change. I conclude by arguing that youth can express lived realties on GBV and solutions to GBV through visual methods such as digital storytelling. Their engagement on social media such as Facebook can be viewed as intervention by assuming agency through a guided process of solving community problems collaboratively with peers through the process of participatory cultures. This democratic process strengthens agency for community benefit and highlights a new youth and peer culture where youth circulate new and self-made content aimed at social action through their continuous reflection – a shift in power as the voices and actions of youth are acknowledged.