Amy Hill is not just telling stories
In the second part of the Digital Hero Book Project series, Steve explores the use of digital storytelling for advocacy and as a democratising agent in a world where dominant media giants often portray only half the story. He speaks to Amy Hill, Director of Community Projects at the Center for Digital Storytelling, the birthplace of this modern twist on the age-old art of telling stories.
icommons.org: What do you do at the Center?
Amy: I oversee our various initiatives done in partnership with grassroots groups, nonprofit organizations, health and social services agencies ‘ all for purposes of integrating digital storytelling practices into efforts to promote individual and community health and well-being, and support campaigns for social, environmental, and economic justice. This involves developing collaborative relationships, training ‘trainers’ to do community work, and serving as lead facilitator in a variety of digital storytelling workshops.
The core focus of our community work is to elevate the voices and images of those who are typically under- or mis-represented in mainstream media. We offer the equipment, teaching, and a safe environment for them to explore their stories and those of their communities. The digital stories that emerge from these workshops are used in a variety of ways ‘ as public education tools, to mobilize communities to take action on critical social or political issues, for policy advocacy and much more.
icommons.org: How did you get involved in digital storytelling?
Amy: I worked in community-based women’s health for about ten years prior to learning about digital storytelling. I was coordinating a number of projects to build local capacity for addressing and preventing gender-based violence, and I grew discouraged with the lack of relevant and realistic visual media to use in educating and motivating people to get involved. I stumbled across digital storytelling and connected with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley. I worked with them to co-found a project called Silence Speaks, which adapts digital storytelling methodology in a way that supports survivors and witnesses of violence and trauma, in sharing their stories. I fell in love with the process because of its dual focus on individual voice and narrative, and on producing truly compelling media pieces that can make a difference in the world.
icommons.org: What is your definition of digital storytelling?
Amy: People in a variety of sectors use the term ‘digital storytelling’ these days to mean a number of different things, ranging from community photography initiatives that are showcased online in digital format, to short-form highly professional documentaries. Because my introduction to digital storytelling was through the work of the Center in Berkeley, which essentially coined the term way back in the early 1990s, I define it as a workshop process in which small groups of people come together to share stories and develop them into short digital videos. You can read about the history of the Center and the ‘what is‘ of digital storytelling on our site.
In my opinion, an important aspect of digital storytelling is the group process element, in terms of the ways in which interaction and dialogue within the group supports each individual in framing, shaping and developing their story. The other important aspect is the participatory production approach, which allows the members of the group to have control over not only the content of the story, but also the editing decisions. This means we teach people how to edit - we don’t generally do it for them, unless someone is really resistant or is having a lot of difficulty with the technology. We value this aspect deeply, because for us it’s a way of promoting skills transfer and leaving something behind with individuals and in communities.
We try as far as possible to prioritise approaches that institutionalize the teaching, facilitation skills and technology within local communities. This is very different from other more traditional forms of media production, which involve trained professionals ‘dropping’ into communities, shooting interviews and footage, and then taking that material outside of the community to do the editing, which has everything to do with how stories are ultimately framed and shaped. It’s more aligned with pioneering facilitative filmmaking approaches and activist video production strategies.
icommons.org: Have you noticed any changes in this space over the last few years?
Amy: The most significant change that I’ve noticed in this space has been the absolute explosion of short form video content on the web. This has opened up important possibilities for the distribution of digital stories. It has also opened up a number of thorny ethical issues.
With some of our work on more sensitive topics, the push by our partners to come away with pieces that can be shown broadly has meant that we’ve had to pay much closer attention to informed consent in recruitment processes, and to ways of protecting privacy, if this is desired by storytellers. Related to this has been the gradual incursion of documentary filmmakers and commercial media producers and broadcasters into the space of personal storytelling in a digital environment. The proliferation of blogs, homemade videos on YouTube and other distribution channels, for example, has led professionals to see the commercial possibilities that lie in what is typically referred to as ‘user generated content’, or ‘citizen journalism’. I think it’s incumbent upon those who are trying to implement very thoughtful community processes, to be clear on their agendas and to be focused on protecting the value of process, instead of jumping ahead to the excitement of opportunities to spread content far and wide. While there are great possibilities for distributing amazing stories, there’s also great possibilities of the same kinds of media exploitation that have plagued communities of colour and the global South since the advent of filmmaking and photography.
Another interesting and exciting shift has been the need to develop models for digital storytelling which don’t rely on written narrative, or which assumes high levels of literacy. As we move into doing work in multiple languages, in areas where a community’s first language perhaps doesn’t exist in written form, we are moving into workshops and production processes which preserve the core of what we do ‘ sharing stories verbally, in a group ‘Story Circle’ ‘ and coming up with alternatives to writing and recording a script. This may involve short interviews followed by joint audio-editing, to zero in on the core of a given story. We’re also challenged to work with our community participants to generate original still images and video clips with which to illustrate their pieces.
icommons.org: What do you think about Creative Commons and digital storytelling?
Amy: Creative Commons is a wonderful resource. A Creative Commons licence was used for the website of our pilot South Africa project Men as Partners. We regularly promote Creative Commons as a good resource for folks interested in ways to protect their work and make it available on a wide scale for activists and community groups to use. I’m really interested in connecting with Creative Commons to get some fairly detailed answers about the best options for my various partners, I just haven’t had the time to attend one of the local meetings yet.
The biggest issue that we confront around copyright is that of music rights. People have very particular notions about the music they are drawn to for use in their stories. If there’s a plan for broad distribution, they often can’t use popular music. So we really steer people towards using copyright-free music or encourage them to compose their own. We also steer people away from downloading random images off the internet, but I must say this can be tricky, again, when working with groups who don’t possess lots of original visual material. I’d love to see a huge, collective source of copyright free images. The Internet Archive can be useful, but it’s not too user-friendly for beginners, and most of our community work is done with people who don’t have much, if any, prior media-making experience.
icommons.org: Does everyone have a story to tell?
Amy: Yes. We believe everyone has a story to tell. In fact, that everyone has multiple stories to tell. To draw out these stories, we have developed a core curriculum called ‘The 7 Elements of Digital Storytelling’ Cookbook. In our workshops, we share examples of other participants’ work, and we talk about issues like point of view, narrative structure, emotional content, pacing, and judicious decisions about images and editing. Of course we tailor this aspect of the workshop to the needs of specific groups, in terms of the level of detail we go into.
One thing I love about our approach to personal voice is that it really allows people to focus on their own experiences. And whether you’re working with youth who’ve never been heard, or survivors of trauma whose stories have been exploited or silenced - this is very powerful. I also love the emphasis on meaningful content. People often speak about how accessible the tools of media production are. This may be true, at least in some sectors of the population - for those people who can afford to buy these tools, but the fact is that many more can’t. But simply having access to a camera or a computer does not mean you have something meaningful to say. There are lots of great videos up on Google video and YouTube and the other user-generated content sites, but there is also a lot of offensive and insipid stuff. This doesn’t surprise me, it mirrors our reality as human beings. Some people want to get involved in making change, and some people have bought into the dominant ideologies.
icommons.org: What do you find fulfilling about digital storytelling?
Amy: It’s an incredible honor and privilege to be offered a window into people’s lives. What gets shared in our workshops can include the most intimate details of someone’s experience, and to be able to hold that with care, and follow the participant’s lead in terms of offering help with shaping it into a story, is a beautiful thing. It doesn’t feel like work at all, it feels like a very basic form of human connection. Which is what it is. So the blend of the formation of such a relationship with the development of a piece of art, which is quite often shaped to contribute to a much larger dialogue or campaign to address many of the looming social, economic and human rights issues of our time. That’s very fulfilling.
icommons.org: Do you have any thoughts on where digital storytelling is going in the future?
Amy: I can’t speak for some monolithic field of ‘digital storytelling’ because our work at the Center is quite specific, in terms of the emphasis on personal voice and participatory production processes. But within that sector, I see a continued expansion and adoption of the work in public health, social services, economic development and environmental justice sectors. I also see a huge expansion of the work internationally, particularly in the global South, where we have colleagues who are initiating projects in India and China, and where we’re supporting efforts in various countries in Africa. I think that as access to technology continues to spread, these kinds of content-based, social-issue focused projects will follow. Certainly digital storytelling isn’t a panacea for the world’s problems, but as long as the element of human connection and group sharing isn’t lost, it has a lot to contribute.
Picture: Amy Hill, by Daniel Weinshenker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.5