In our Stories-in-Motion workshop, we start with a writing prompt, I borrowed from the wonderful Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach.

Quickly draw a map of your childhood neighborhood, if you had several, choose one between ages 6-11, try to include 4-6 blocks or ¼ mile area from your home.

Quickly draw a map of your childhood neighborhood, if you had several, choose one between ages 6-11, try to include 4-6 blocks or ¼ mile area from your home

In your mind’s eye, circle three locations where 3 of the following five events likely happened.

• You learned something useful (think riding a bike, climbing a tree, how to cross a busy street, shop at a store, make a special meal/item)
• You lost something you valued/found something you valued
• You were hurt or associate with some type of minor injury
• You were successful (won a contest/game, completed a task, did something you hadn’t done before)
• You made a new friend/relationship that lasted

Choose one and write in one paragraph what happened, and in the second paragraph why you think it mattered.

Preparing for this Spring’s online course, I went back and re-made a map of the Vickery Meadow Neighborhood I grew up in during the 1960s.

You can find it here, Vickery, Texas StoryMap.

Each time I assign this prompt, people find some critical memory unfold before them. I am reminded of all my reading into memory, and the ways sensory embodiment allows us to retrieve seemingly long forgotten parts of our lives. That skinned knee story remains with you, as does the feeling of accomplishing something new, and your first kiss, but so does the time you stood at a crosswalk, on your own, and stepped off the curve into your future.

Our workshops are precisely where folks get to explore place and memory, even as they explore the dilemmas of their current life, and their aspirations for the future. Storymapping is the kind of tool that reminds us to pay attention to our surroundings, to find insight in the details, in the little things, that make a place our own.

Reflection on the Stories-in-Motion In-Person Workshop
Santa Fe – Sept. 30 – Oct. 3, 2021
Joe Lambert/Hanna Seydel, StoryCenter

StoryMap of Movies from the Workshop

Joe
Deciding to re-locate this past July was a big deal.  After 45 years of living in one area, one state, one way of being that grows out of a distinct place, in this case, the San Francisco Bay Area, to my new home of Santa Fe, New Mexico, meant I was removing myself from the deeply familiar, and beginning again to define myself  in relation to a completely different geography – physical, human, and psychological. 

In the online way of doing our work, the place didn’t matter, a zoom room was the same here as in Oakland.  The pandemic has offered a separate dislocation with place, in my work life, I no longer needed the ceremony of shared air, shared context.  I just logged on and went to work.

Hanna

I had done various workshops with the StoryCenter before, but only online. I had met Joe only briefly in the Bay Area before he left and still didn´t know his partner Brooke in person. Therefore, travelling to Santa Fe, meeting them, staying at their new home and doing a full workshop in person seemed very exciting. When I arrived in Santa Fe, I immediately felt that it was a special place. A place with a history that seems very important for understanding the U.S. today. It is a place so different to Germany, where I am from, that you can still find similarities.

Last year I started working on a PhD project about storytelling as a participatory method in urban development processes. Through a Fulbright scholarship, I got the opportunity to do a research stay in the Bay Area – a very important step for me personally. Since I am here, I have been learning a lot about the Bay Area way of life and more about American history. I am fortunate to be learning from a diverse group of people. With that in mind, the workshop was an exceptionally intense time. I became to know so many different characters, mainly through their stories, which in a way created a special connection. Being there, working on their stories, also on mine, was a way to connect more than through a normal conversation or let´s say a conference about storytelling. I feel like I can reach out to any of them in the future. I read about the power of storytelling to create a shared identity or at least a feeling of belonging and connection before, but this time I could experience it myself.

Joe

I knew in the choice of where I decided to buy a home with my partner Brooke, that I wanted a place where we could bring people back together.  So it was not a big surprise that I scheduled a workshop at what I felt the soonest possible moment that people might risk travel, shared space, and up close interaction.  This workshop was part of my arriving, to feeling settled into a future made more distinct by the act of hosting others in our creative process.

I also wanted the workshop to function as a way for me to investigate, and celebrate, the amazing location I now inhabit.  Santa Fe is a destination precisely because of its evident beauty, and active creative community, but perhaps more profoundly because it has a thousand layers of culture, of physical history, that unveil themselves slowly, stories beneath stories beneath stories.  So that the feeling of walking around the hills, or  a street in a neighborhood, and being attentive, mimics the process of our own journey down into ourselves, where we peel later after layer of knowing by poking at our myriad memories, and the emotions that emerge.  

Hanna

In addition to the people, the place was very important to all of us and the stories we told. There were two layers of place. One was the place we did the workshop in: “The Commons”, the other one was Santa Fe itself. The first afternoon for me at the commons, before the workshop started, I decided to sit on the main plaza to get some work done. The moment I opened my laptop, the first person came around. We chatted a bit about how beautiful this place is and how lucky I am to be visiting. Then another person, that I met before came and we talked about the indigenous history of the area, when another person came and shared his knowledge. That is how the afternoon passed on. I had already learned a lot about the commons and the area around Santa Fe, when we came together to eat dinner. During the workshop, being there at the commons, having an open space to work and a relaxed atmosphere during our story circle influenced everyone. When the voice for words was no longer there, we could listen to the birds, when we needed a hug, there was some sitting close by, and we could always wonder around, get inspiration and take some picture within the commons itself. Another layer of space was Santa Fe and its surrounding area. Some people participated in the workshops because they had a special connection to this area: An important memory, a shared moment with loved ones, the history of ancestors or a place of retreat. Given the history of indigenous tribes, Hispanics, and current White settlers, we were all confronted with thinking about our positionality.

Joe
We tried to find the right balance between allowing these little trips around the area, with the feeling of being hosted in a communal setting.  The Commons, the co-housing community where we live, was designed precisely to embrace you – to make you feel like you’ve wandered into an oasis of some kind.  At the simplest level the architecture of the Commons, the paths winding through, and the common area, is a place that invites intersections of the residents.  But there is something more.     From our first day in the garden of our house, to the following days in and around the Common House (a shared kitchen, dining room, library, and other rooms), the workshop participants were given the sense the Commons has created sanctuary as well.  A type of calm, a type of friendliness, that one associates with any well-designed retreat campus. All the better for a workshop dedicated to creating in motion, in moving through and documenting place, and seeing how that might shape an important story we had to tell.  

I like to think surprise is always out in our world. If you can call on your childlike fascination with what’s right there before you, that looked at again and again, gives you a discovery, shows you something you somehow missed.  In this way, metaphors are abundant in every place, if you just allow them to reveal themselves to you. And the approach of the workshop was to encourage the closer look, the look behind and around, the macro establishing shot, and the micro detail. We saw this come out in the stories that were created, people taking in a vista (the sky, the clouds, alone here are an endless inspiration), or an image o corner of a corner of a dollhouse, or part of a figurine from the Folk Art Museum, and the stories were transformed. Would the stories have felt equally transcendent if illustrated with photos that we would have found in our normal lives, in our known spaces, it is hard to say.  What’s clear, in all the stories, is that the process changed the way the participants saw their stories being realized.  

Hanna

In the end, we were all fascinated by Santa Fe, its mountains, and the plants that thrive in a harsh environment and showed us how to be resilient. This workshop opened up many layers of our relationship to space and connected people with very different stories by sharing them with each other.

Joe
And hopefully they left with fresh awareness about how place and context shapes the conception and realization of any story we have to tell. 

Reflection on the Stories-in-Motion WS Spring/Summer 2021

I am an urban researcher from Germany. I studied urban planning and storytelling was a marginalized topic. Therefore, when I started to explore storytelling as a participatory method in urban planning, I first needed to comprehend the meaning and functions of storytelling itself. That is why I reach out to the StoryCenter. Mainly to better understand what constitutes a story and how storytelling works, but also to learn the technique of storytelling myself. During this process, I gained more knowledge about the relationship between stories and space and became curious about how storytelling helps us capture, experience, and interact with different places in the world. One way to work with stories and space is through story mapping. The Stories-in-Motion workshop (SiM-Workshop), one of the most recent additions to the StoryCenter program, incorporates the story mapping method, connecting my research interests to the work of the StoryCenter. I participated in the first official Stories-in-Motion workshop in spring 2021 and was fortunate to get a Fulbright scholarship that allowed me to Berkeley in the summer of 2021 to conduct research in the Bay Area. I now want to share with readers of this blog what I learned from attending the workshop and what the other participants experienced.

Besides “narrative atlas” or georeferenced storytelling, “story map” is one of the terms that characterize the growing interest in the relationship between maps and narratives (Caquard 2013: 137). This interest is evident in many papers and blogs that present and discuss maps that appear in various narrative forms. The new trend is especially evident in new story mapping tools by ArcGIS and google maps. Esri (AcGIS) designed a new tool for creating georeferenced story maps. The tool offers a predesigned choice of templates for tours, cascades, journals, series or shortlists where everyone can create an individualistic story map. “ArcGIS Story Maps let you combine authoritative maps with text, images, and multimedia content, and make it easy to harness the power of maps and geography to tell your story. Story Maps can be used for a wide variety of purposes; for advocacy and outreach, virtual tours, travelogues, delivering public information, and many more.” (Szukalski, B.; Carroll, A. (2020).

However, it is not necessarily easy for everyone to tell and portray a story, let alone mapping. Questions that arise: How to write a story? What contains a story? How to be aware of your own voice? How to handle all the elements of a story map? Who will be your audience? And how does georeferenced mapping work?

These questions lead to a powerful story that not only contains a narrator, but also an audience. To create those stories we need spaces for listening and sharing. As the pandemic started, the StoryCenter began to offer workshops online to provide individuals and organizations with skills and tools that support self-expression, creative practice, and community building. Although one important part of storytelling is the emotional and personal exchange of stories, it was still possible to create a safe space online, where people from all over world could work on their digital stories and story maps and share them.

Such a safe space could be realized in the SiM-Workshop. The workshop focused on the integration of mobile documentary media production with Geographical Information System. Interactively the participants learned how to use their mobile devices to produce powerful and effective digital stories and connect them with maps. The workshop took place online during May to July 2021 every Wednesday from 10am to 12pm, with 21 participants from the US, Canada and Europe. The goal is for people to create digital stories (images, videos, audios) that they connect to georeferenced points on a map in the ArcGIS StoryMap tool.

Through this workshop, we learned more about the connection people make between stories and maps, about the process of story mapping, but also about using a new technology and creating trust and safe space through digital communication tools. Below we would like to reflect on these insights. We conducted a survey with the participants about their experience in the workshop. We asked them why they participated in the workshops. The answers are represented in a word cloud.

I would like to talk about this in more detail by discussing storytelling and the “task of stories” (Lambert/Hessler 2018: 13) as a deeply rooted part of human life and relating it to the experiences of the participants in the workshop. To begin with, I address the importance of stories and storytelling for human beings and then story mapping as a process.

First, the meaning of storytelling for people is profound. People´s identities are defined by their stories. As humans, we perceive historical and current events by connecting the past to the present through storytelling. Telling someone about our experience gives meaning to our perspective, so we shape who we are through the stories we tell about ourselves. (Moenandar/Wood 2017: xii). The act of storytelling, where the narrator takes responsibility for events, that conveys feelings and thoughts that would otherwise be inaccessible, makes it an act of empowerment. The use of storytelling, then, is anything but abstract: given its inherent and universal ability to convey “strategies for coping with situations,” storytelling is, according to Burke (1973: 293), an “instrument for living.” Showing this, one participant reveals his or her thoughts about this in the survey: “Because of the multi-media I was able to incorporate, I uncovered a new piece of my story. This new information showed me my self-esteem was deeply affected after my best friend dumped me when I was a young girl. Transforming that moment into a video, of my friend literally disappearing from my life, was an unexpected healing for me.” (Quote Survey).

Moreover, the fact that there is the term Homo Narrans makes clear how much storytelling shapes the human communication paradigm. Humans develop narratives as a means of making sense of the world (Deuten/Rip 2000: 136). A process that one SiM-Workshop participant reflected on: “I love my neighborhood and found myself taking pictures and shooting short videos to document different aspects. The opportunity to turn it into something more coherent is what inspired me to take the workshop.” (Quote Survey). However, storytelling is also “the way people share ideas and meaning.” (Chancellor, Lee 2016: 39): “My neighbors’ and neighborhood’s experiences through the pandemic, supporting each other, are important to me. I focused on locations/people locally that/who were bright spots during the pandemic.” (Quote Survey). Thus, on the one hand, stories serve to understand and order our world (Ricoeur 1986); on the other hand, they also reflect the subjective perceptions of the storyteller. Both mean that personal stories convey information about the narrator’s view of his environment, in this case their neighborhoods.

Second, understanding story mapping as a process contains a closer a look at the meanings of maps and their connection to stories. Just like stories, maps help people understand the world they live in. Maps also influence the way they see and understand the world. Maps can have real impacts on the people in the area they depict because every map tells a story by itself. Stories of past lives, of mineral resources, of ancient walls, stories of wars and border crossings, stories of values.

Connecting stories and maps is a complex process. It involves an effort to understand the world as a landscape made up of relationships – relationships between places and sociological, cultural aspects and values that shape us. Through the survey, I learned about new discoveries participants made during the process:

“I spent a lot of time in the park gathering information for the video, and thinking about the qualities of the park helped me appreciate the open spaces in our neighborhood.” (Survey quote).

“I learned more about a geography I already knew. I was forced to interact with space again and […] had to look at it in a more reflexive way.” (Survey quote).

The process of story mapping also shows how working with stories in conjunction with maps helps changing perceptions, “I realized what a small town I live in. Culturally and geographically.” (survey quote). The workshop is more than just locating a story to a map, it is a process for the participant’s that might change their sense of belonging: “[The workshop] made me really appreciate the people in my neighborhood, because we all survived the crisis – until now. Especially the neighbors closest to us, on our block.” (Survey quote).

Story mapping as a means of communicating allows people to share their perspectives and personal experiences with others. Related to broader issues story maps can be very powerful, especially if they have a deep connection to space. “I normally try to be “deep” “insightful” “analytical” but this time, I just let the love for this place guide me and it was delightful.” (Quote Survey). The results were story maps, consisting of digital stories as poems, written and spoken words, images, videos and georeferenced current or historical maps with different layers. As one participant summarized: “The map became the backdrop for the story.” (Quote Survey)

Literature

Bamberg, M.; Georgakopoulou, A. (2008): Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis. In: Text & Talk 28, 3, 1. doi: 10.1515/TEXT.2008.018.

Caquard, S. (2013). Cartography I: Mapping narrative cartography. Progress in Human Geography, 37(1), 135-144.

Chancellor, R., & Lee, S. (2016). Storytelling, oral history, and building the library community. Storytelling, Self, Society, 12(1), 39-54.

Lambert, J.; Hessler, B. (2018): Digital Storytelling. Capturing Lives, Creating Community. Milton.

Moenandar, S.-J.; Wood, L. (2017): Stories of Becoming. Using storytelling for research, counselling and education. Nijmegen.

Ricoeur, P. (1986): Life. A Story in Search of a Narrator. In: Doeser, M.C.; Kraay, J.N. (Hrsg.): Facts and Values. Dordrecht, 425-437. = 19.

Szukalski, B.; Carroll, A. (2020): The Myriad Uses of StoryMaps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/1b38cf02f39849478d3123dcd9465022

Further Reading

Eckstein, B.J.; Throgmorton, J.A. (2003): Story and Sustainability. Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities.

Finnegan, R.H. (2004): Tales of the city. A study of narrative and urban life. Cambridge.

Sandercock, L.; Attili, G. (Hrsg.) (2010): Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning. Beyond the flatlands. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York.

Hanna Seydel, 08/26/2021

Once upon a time we held the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colorado. There were about 30 of us that assembled in the old town hall’s second floor meeting room on Elk Avenue. But quite the 30 (see below). Among these amazing group of folks was my dear old friend Jo Carson. Jo was there representing the oral tradition, as a playwright and performer. Her Appalachian take on the world was very straightforward.

Place defines story. It is the dominant character.

You can’t make sense of what meaning means to a person without placing them into a rooted context of some kind, what most of us mean by “Where you from?” Not necessarily where are you living, not necessarily where you were born, but the deeper sense of belonging that most of have as our deep genetic birthright or a deeply felt sense of permanence and connection from a place we have landed.

My people are from this place…. or I found the place I truly belong.

In the journey into story over my 40 years in the arts here in the US, and really going back to my experiences growing up, my work as a tenant’s rights activist, and someone almost always part of the conversations about the dislocation of gentrification here in the Bay Area and in other parts of the United States, I have an endless fascination with place-making. With the ways people claim their connection to a location with story.

This effort led me to a decade of work, first as someone playing with the do-it-yourself map tools of GoogleMaps API (application programming interface) in the mid-2000s), and then shortly after exploring all the potential innovations in digital storytelling using mobile computing devices aka smart phones and tablets. I return to this work during the global pandemic because I feel among the many things the crimp in our relative mobility has done is force us to re-acquaint ourselves to what is right outside our door, in our neighborhoods, countryside, and walkable/rideable distances. And as a good buddhist-type fellow, I believe all the stories that ever need to be told in a lifetime can be found right there, in the square mile you exist in.

So what you’ll find on this site are the emerging efforts of a new generation of placemaking storytellers. Ones that I am meeting through workshops or our network of friends and supporters at StoryCenter. I hope you’ll find resources as well.

Joe Lambert
February 9, 2021

Original Attendees – 1995 Digital Storytelling Festival

Dana Atchley
Festival Founder & Creator of Next Exit
Denise Aungst
Festival Producer
Greg Roach
Interactive game designer and Founder of Hyperbole Studios.
Scott McCloud
Author of Understanding Comics
Harry Marks
Graphic designer & new technology visionary.
Victor Masayevsa
Hopi film maker, Creator of Ritual Clowns.
Marty Pottenger
Solo performance artist and storyteller
Pedro Meyer
Photgrapher and Digital Artist
Jon Sanborn
Interactive Director, Creator of Psychic Dectective.
Richard Conroy-Heale
Director of Publishing, Double Impact Multimedia
Jo Carson
Playwright & Traditional Storyteller.
Harry Mott
First Director of Education, American Film Institute.
Mark “Spoonman” Petrakis
Interactive Storyteller, Creator of Cobra Lounge.
Joe Lambert & Nina Mullen
Directors of the SF Digital Media Center.
Luis Humberto Crosthwaite
Interactive writer
Peter Bergman
Hypermedia Artist, Founding Member Firesign Theater
John McDaid
Hypermedia Novelist, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.
Patrick Milligan
Lingo Magician for Next Exit & We Make Memories.
Abbe Don
Multimedia producer and creator of We Make Memories.
Hal Josephson
President, Media Sense; Producer, Interactive Media Events
Chip Woerner
Director of Corporate Marketing, Radius, Inc.
Ralph Rogers
Marketing Manager, Tools, Apple P.I.E. Division.
Kate Adams
Multimedia Goddess, Apple Computer
Mark Frost
Editor-in-Chief, The Net.
Crystal Waters
Writer and Web Magician, The Net Magazine
Cynthia Decker
Media Sense
Scott Rosenberg
Writer and Journalist
Erik Geelhoed
Hewlitt Packard
Terry Taylor
Artist, Watershed Media Center
David Ditzler
Crested Butte Interactive
Don Carter
Technology Teacher, Crested Butte Schools
Students
from the Crested Butte Academy