Speakers and sessions confirmed so far:
Cowbird – Annie Correal:
Cowbird is a community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.
Annie manages content and a growing community of authors on Cowbird and she will talk about the project and how she left a job as an old-fashioned reporter to cultivate this community of storytellers from around the world. Cowbird’s short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events.
Center for Digital Storytelling – Joe Lambert
Joe founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (formerly the San Francisco Digital Media Center) in 1994 with wife Nina Mullen and colleague Dana Atchley. Together they developed a unique computer training and arts programme that today is known as the Standard Digital Storytelling Workshop. Since then Joe has travelled the world to spread the practice of Digital Storytelling and has authored and produced curricula in many contexts, including the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, the principle manual for the workshop process, and Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community.
Historypin - Natasha Armstrong
Historypin is a way for millions of people to come together from across different generations, cultures and places, around the history of their families and neighbourhoods, increasing contact and building stronger communities.
As Community Manager, Natasha leads Historypin’s work with schools, communities and volunteers, taking participation directly into neighbourhoods to deliver the inter-generational and community aims of Historypin and to create sustainable and scalable models of delivery. Natasha spent 5 years teaching history in inner city London schools before moving into the charity sector where she has been managing and developing education and community projects including inter-generational projects and digital multi-media projects ever since.
DeTales – Patrizia Braga and Steve Bellis
DeTales is a project funded by the EU which brings together digital stories about an ever-expanding Europe. This session will explore how the seven partner nations involved have learnt to capture the experiences of people’s lives, using low cost technologies, from Wrexham to Budapest and way beyond. We will look at their journey, from the formation of a group, to the realisation of 120 stories from around the EU.
Project Aspect – Mike Wilson and Sarah Chapman
Project ASPECT was born from a more general search for new communication tools to help the wider public engage with important but inaccessible issues. In particular, the project considers the complex issue of climate change, recognizing that to date, climate change communication has engaged a narrow audience and stimulated a limited public dialogue. Based at University College Falmouth, ASPECT explores how the wider public might connect to the climate change discussion through digital storytelling and other narrative approaches.
Tower of London Project – Alyson Fielding
The Tower of London project was an interesting example of how cultural and historical organisations can work with local communities and engage through storytelling and new mobile devices; and also how iPads can be a great device for creating content as well as consuming. The project looked to work with children of 8 / 9 years and their families in Tower Hamlets, the community around the Tower. The aim was to create better links with communities and for people living in the area to feel the Tower was part of their community and to create links between the rich historical stories of the Tower and the stories of people living and working in Tower Hamlets.
Using the theme of ‘Home’, iPads were used to capture and record stories, using the iMovie app and a digital stills camera – and children and parents worked together to create and edit their own short stories of home.
Alyson is Managing Director of Pyuda Ltd. and she specializes in content creation and new media. In the past she has been a producer and project manager at the BBC, working on the ground breaking Video Nation project that gave video cameras to members of the public to allow them to document their life. These short videos were then broadcast on BBC television and, later, the web.
