Turtle Joke

Found this here and just had to post it!

One day a lion wakes up in a bad mood and summons the other animals in the jungle.

"I want each of you to tell a joke, but I warn you that if anyone of you fails to laugh, I'll kill the one who told it. Let's see, monkey, you will be first."

Shaking with fear the monkey begins, "Two men are in the street and..."

When he finishes, everyone bursts out laughing save the tortoise. "The tortoise didn't laugh!" roars the lion, pouncing on the monkey and ripping him to pieces. Then he orders, "Elephant, you're next."

Cursing through clenched teeth, the elephant begins, "A drunk walks into a bar and..."

When he finishes, all the animals split their sides laughing except the tortoise, who remains impassive. "The tortoise didn't think it was funny!" exclaimed the lion who, seeing that the furious elephant is about to step on the tortoise, kills the elephant with his claws.

By now, everyone wants to murder the tortoise, but nobody dares move. "Now it's your turn, tiger," orders the lion.

The scared tiger begins, "They say that Little Red Riding Hood..."

At that moment, the tortoise falls over laughing. "What's with you?" bellows the lion. "Tiger hasn't finished yet..."

To which the tortoise replies, "The monkey's joke is hilarious!"

Alternative Realities: A Storyscape

What follows is an excerpt from my thesis, a description of a digitally enhanced storytelling experience.

---

The background noise dies down as Owen adjusts the dials on the speakers and laptop.

A soft, poignant melody washes over the studio and Owen’s voice comes out of the speakers. As his words begin to fill the room, I can see the form of a traveller, walking the roads with his bag of dreams, carefree, alone. The notes of his simple tune, slightly discordant, hint at the story to come. I am aware that the students sitting around me are still, and I hope that they too can see the traveller in front of them, now resting under a hawthorn tree.

The alternative reality is that of a top floor art college studio, painted white and filled with desks, swivel chairs, computers and the debris of student projects past and present. Cold January light seeps in through skylights. You may think it is perhaps not the best space from which to enter the land of stories but it does show that the doorway can be opened from anywhere. The third year design students sit gathered round the front half of the room, the lucky ones slouched on the black sofa. Owen’s storyscape comes near the end of a day-long workshop on practical storytelling techniques, part of the Re-Telling module I am running to explore how storytelling and digital technology can interact.

Owen watches the laptop screen intently, making small adjustments every so often.

The rich, verdant story landscape is untouched by town or traffic, devoid of even the incessant hum of electricity. The traveller man is running across the landscape, heavily, clumsily, but swiftly all the same. The green woman he chases runs just out of reach, leading him over hills and through trees, almost floating over the ground as she dances effortlessly in front of him. The timeless layers of harp notes weave through the landscape, shaping the contours as Owen’s voice shapes the story.

I met Owen through the Dundee storytelling group, Blether Tay-gither, and he was an obvious choice to run a guest workshop for a number of reasons, not least because I consider him to be an excellent storyteller. Blether is a predominantly female group, with a tendency for storytellers to be older rather than younger and, in general, not eager adopters of technology. Owen is younger than most of the group in Blether and his background in sculpture along with his experimental soundscape storytelling made him the ideal person to introduce the basic concepts of storytelling to the students. Owen’s style of telling is quite traditional, in that it is clear, understated and well paced, allowing time to watch the story unfold in your mind’s eye.

I smile to myself as I remember Owen telling me about Robin Williamson and how inspirational he was. ‘I listened to his work and I was blown away by it. He plays a harp and it’s quite bardic, you know. It sounds like it’s coming from a place back in time, beautiful stories, and I was really inspired by what he was doing.’

It was during this interview that Owen told me about the electronic soundscapes he had created. As he explained to the students, normally the soundscapes are put together live, with the story told live too. For the purposes of this workshop and because the piece was unfinished Owen used a pre-recorded version.

Days have now passed in the chase of man and woman. The man struggles on, slower now but not defeated. Yet the green lady is swifter than ever before and try as he might, it is all the traveller man can do to just keep up with her. And still the landscape rolls on relentlessly, dreamlike in its insubstantiality.

On reflection, I find myself surprised by the storyscape. It was not what I was expecting when I asked Owen if he would show the students an example of a story soundscape. Yet I struggle to know what I was expecting. The style matches Owen’s normal telling, but has a more detached edge to it; the story is more elusive, almost mythic in its ephemerality.

I think back to our conversation a few months earlier in the local arts centre.

‘One of the things that I’m interested in doing is using modern technology, especially sound and music, combining it with storytelling so that there’s something that people can access a bit more easily.’ Owen’s interest in combining electronic sounds and stories comes from a love of electronic music and a need to bridge the worlds of bardic-inspired storytelling and modern culture.

‘It’s a way of letting them know what storytelling is and then they can trace it back and hear what real, simple storytelling is if they want to. But I love electronic music and it’s a way for me to fit in with modern culture and what my friends are into, you know. And that’s electronic sounds and computers and iPods so it’s a way of bringing it to them.’

Owen pauses, taking a drink of tea. The café area is getting busy and tables are being set for the evening although it’s still only late afternoon.

‘There’s one particular festival that I go to called Solfest and you’ve got a big storytelling centre there, lots of storytellers and theatre groups come and do their thing. And then at night you’ve got a tent that’s playing full on electronic music and I like that balance. There’s people coming to the storytelling sessions who are going out at night to dance to the electronic music and I’d like to find that middle ground where you can bring the two together and make it work.’

Owen is the only storyteller I know, and am aware of, who actively seeks to incorporate elements of storytelling and digital media into live events or performances. However, I recall a piece of performance dance, Sensational knowledge, Sensational Ethnography, which explored the connections between digital and analogue. A collaboration between composer and programmer Curtis Bahn and dancer Tomie Hahn, it created electronic sounds from Tomie’s dance movements. Tomie embodied traditional elements through her experience of Japanese traditional dance whilst the sensors capturing her movements brought ‘a contemporary expressive moment.’

Owen continues, ‘There’s electronic music that I’ve heard that uses traditional folk music in it. And I know quite a few people who’ve learned a lot about folk music because they’ve heard this electronic music and heard that little folk tune and then traced it back and just discovered what folk music is all about. So I’d like to do the same with storytelling.’

‘Have you done that so far?’ I ask.

‘I’ve done a couple of stories where I’ve used my laptop with sound programs and I’ve mixed samples into my story live. I’ve done a storytelling live, you know, standing there telling it and used a laptop to bring in sounds at certain points in the story. It’s more been music based but I’m looking to make it more like combining storytelling and sound art, rather than just music. So that’s what I’m moving towards.’

I’m intrigued by how the audience would react to such a story, trying to imagine what the rest of the Blether Tay-gither tellers would think about it. Owen tells me of the positive response from listeners, but admits that they were festival performances.

‘I’d like to do the same thing to a traditional storytelling audience, people who are really into tradition, just to see how they react.’ Owen smiles. ‘But one festival I did it and somebody came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘You know, it’s really good just to see something different.’ And that was a great comment to me because that’s what I want. You know, I want them to hear something that is different, not been heard before. So, yeah, I’ve had a great reaction from it actually, really good.’

Owen illustrates the potential affinity of tradition and new media. He admires the bardic style of telling, with music accompanying the tale and Celtic myths, but he also wants to ground part of that tradition in contemporary contexts, distorting sounds of the harp through electronic effects and making full use of the two seemingly separate worlds.

Upon awakening beneath the original hawthorn tree, their journey come full circle, the traveller man offers a blossoming branch of hawthorn to the green-robed lady. Together, they walk into the green hills, their journey just beginning. As the last notes fade away, there is stillness in the darkening studio.

Journal extract - draft

An extract from my PhD thesis. I'm peppering it with diary extracts to illustrate aspects of the storytelling culture I've part of for the last 3 years, and my journey as a fledgling teller. Hopefully this approach will make the thesis a more interesting document to read too!

Thursday 30th July 2009

My storytelling life seems to go in cycles of intensity and the last two weeks have been the intense kind. I feel completely ‘storied-out.’ Was at Festival at the Edge (FatE) the weekend before last, which was amazing but strangely exhausting. I never thought listening to stories could be tiring, but I understand now why people say listening is a skill. Two and a half days of non-stop stories is a lot to listen to. And of course conversations with storytellers at the festival all centred around stories too. It was unlike the storytelling environments I’m used to. Whilst nearly all of the tellers I heard were excellent, the delivery mechanism was quite different. The main marquee was large, and the stage was hooked up to a PA system. The sessions I found most memorable and engaging were the ones in the smaller tents, with informal telling styles and participative elements. But this is no doubt a personal preference. Nevertheless, it was incredible to see so many tellers I had only heard about before, and I hope to return to FatE next year.

Last weekend was the Big Tent Festival in Fife where Blether Tay-gither had our own storytelling yurt (courtesy of Owen) and ran a full programme of storytelling sessions and workshops for two days. This was surprisingly less draining than FatE, partly because there was a range of different type of events at the festival but mainly because there were eight of us involved with the storytelling yurt. I didn’t really do too much in the way of storytelling, but helped out with craft stuff at the workshops and handed out flyers to folk to encourage them to come along to the yurt.

I did do a little bit of storytelling though. Our closing session each day was dubbed ‘Fairtrade stories’ and involved all the Blether ‘rainbow’ tellers. (The Big Tent weekend was the first official launch of the Blether Tay-gither logo and was proudly emblazoned onto polo-shirts, each a different colour, so that between us we were a rainbow of tellers. I was yellow.)

On Saturday we had a guest teller, Judy, who told stories throughout the day. She hosted the final ‘Fairtrade’ slot and after an opening story opened the floor to other tellers. Well, I say that, but in actual fact she asked the audience to choose the next teller. We had been expecting a range of ages in the storytelling yurt, but ended up with an audience almost exclusively composed of children. So Judy asked the children which colour storyteller they’d like to hear from next (out of red, yellow, green, pale blue, navy blue and purple). And what did they say? The brightest colour they had to choose from. Yellow.

My mind went in panic-mode. This wasn’t supposed to happen yet! The story I’d prepared was for more of an adult audience and I didn’t think would work. I drew inspiration from Blether and FatE and off-the-cuff asked Sheila if she would mind if I told a story that I’d heard her tell a couple of times and had heard Jan Blake tell at FatE the previous weekend. Jan’s version had a few rhymes and actions in it and I thought that could work well if I blended the two versions. I hadn’t read the story anywhere, nor told it before, or practised it, but figured I knew it pretty well. (I had paid particular attention to Jan’s version as I knew Sheila’s and wanted to compare the two.)

So, I got up and sat on the wooden storyteller chest at the top of the yurt and began.

The story was the one about the old woman who goes to visit her daughter at the other side of the forest. On her way through the forest she meets three animals, one-by-one, who all want to eat her but she persuades them to eat her on her return journey when she will be more plump. On the way home she climbs inside a pumpkin and rolls through the forest, past the hungry animals, all the way home.

It started well enough. (I suppose I should add that this was the first time that I’d told a story to children.) Anyway, they seemed to be into it ok. I did the whole, ‘ricky-ticky-tick, ricky-ticky-tat, here I come with my walking stick’ thing which everyone joined in with. I asked them what kind of nice food the old woman ate at her daughter’s house and got lots of suggestions.

The problem began when the old woman climbed inside the pumpkin and left her daughter’s home, rolling along the forest path.

‘And as she rolled she sang–’ I said confidently before pausing. I knew there was a little song to go with the rolling. (‘Here I come, here I come, in my pumpkin here I come.’) I remembered the words but not the tune. My mind was blank. Completely, utterly empty. I looked around helplessly. Lindsey caught my eye and started singing ‘rolling, rolling, rolling’. Robbie joined in, making up the tune with Lindsey on the spot, and soon everyone else joined in too, the tune sounding suspiciously more and more like ‘Rawhide’ as it progressed. I can only imagine that the reference was too out of date for the children. The song occurs three times, as the woman meets the three forest animals one by one again. Each time, ‘rolling, rolling, rolling’ was dutifully sung. And so the story ground its way painfully to the end. I was, well, I was a bit mortified really. But once I’d resumed my seat at the edge of the yurt, I thought how it was actually an incredibly positive experience. If I’d been in a situation like that by myself, as the only teller, I would have panicked even more. It was great to have the support of the group there, especially for an inexperienced teller like myself.

New Media Attributes

Disclaimer: This is lifted almost directly from my draft PhD thesis. It is posted here for interest, but recognise that concepts are explained in detail in the full version of thesis. (I thought I would spare the Web the need to post it in all its 5000 word glory.)
*********
‘New Media’ is a commonly used phrase, along with other apparent synonyms ‘digital media’ and ‘interactive media’. On closer inspection however, new media embodies a whole set of arguments and connotations. It is therefore important to set out clearly what the term means in this context.
Whilst new media understandably embraces a wide range of technologies (for example, the Internet and hypertext, mobile phones and physical computer games like Nintendo’s Wii) there are several defining characteristics which can be drawn out. Although these traits are not necessarily all present in each example of new media, there exists enough of a correlation between media objects to render the attributes meaningful and indeed invaluable for future discussions on the relationship between new media and storytelling.
Synthesising several sets of characteristics results in the following list of new media traits:

1. Digitality: the underlying technological structures which enable new media objects to be easily accessed, manipulated and remoulded.
2. Multimodality: the range of modes in which users can interact, impact and experience new media.
3. Immediacy: the twin goals of new media to provide such an immersive experience that it renders the medium invisible and to make media so pervasive that its incongruity becomes unnoticeable.
4. Dispersal: the distribution of new media objects across networks, accessible media creation tools and the geographical dispersal of increasingly mobile physical devices all enable dispersed production and consumption of new media.
5. Co-creativity: the experience and social dynamics of co-creating new media objects with other users as a bricoleur, contributing to revisions through feedback, interacting within and out-with predefined parameters.
6. Ephemerality: the transient nature of new media objects, as shown by the finite lifespan of their physical existence (e.g. mobile phones superseded by newer models), current accepted formats (e.g. file types/protocols) and the ever changing, mutable content they embody.
   

A final note on interactivity
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, interactivity was not adopted as a characteristic of new media in the definition for this thesis. Interactivity is a fundamental of new media in the same way that digitality is. However, as was mentioned at the start of this section, to explicitly include interactivity as an attribute in its own right is in many ways stating the obvious. Digitality was included because the direct consequences it affords of modularity and replicability were considered to be facets of digitality. The consequences of interactivity are particularly enmeshed in co-creativity and ephemerality but to some degree impact on every attribute. Therefore it was not deemed necessary to forcibly delineate interactivity into a distinct characteristic.

Comparison between Twitter and real life conversation

Reading Schank's 'Tell Me a Story', got me thinking about interactions on Twitter and how conversations start. To me, Twitter resonates with real-world face-to-face conversations by its fleeting, short time-limit tendency.

Generally, to start a conversation on Twitter requires seeing a tweet in more or less real-time. Tweets are found by either following the person tweeting or through a search for keyword. If too much time passes then the tweet slips down the list of latest postings to be unnoticed. Granted, if it's a particularly obscure keyword then a reply may be some days/weeks after the original tweet was posted, but in the main I would say conversations are instigated within 24 hours of posting.

Schank suggested that intelligence is intimately connected with story knowledge. Conversation is the exchange of stories. The more stories you know, the better you can select an appropriate story to tell next.

Schank says;

We are satisfied, as observers of actions, when the stories we hear match our own stories. When the match is very similar, we tell our version of the story. When the match is hardly a match at all, when we have a contradictory story, we tell it. Actually, the middle cases are the most interesting - when we have no story to tell. What do we do then? We look for one.

How does this translate to Twitter? Well, I'm not sure. But my own experience of Twitter conversations suggests that for the middle cases Schank suggests I simply do not tweet back.

Unlike real-life conversations, which require some form of mutual acknowledgement and interaction to maintain, Tweets are easy to ignore. A reply is not expected from each tweet. And I think this is what happens in the middle cases.

However, for dissimilar or similar matches, I think Twitter conforms quite closely to Schank's observations on conversation.

Storytelling Traits

I've been thinking a lot about how to characterise and define storytelling. I know it's always going to be a contentious issue and a lot depends on what your personal idea of storytelling is, but I've listed what I think below.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree with them. Perhaps I have missed something out, or one of the characteristics shouldn't be there?

N.B. A word of context first - this list was created on the basis of observing storytelling in Scotland (mainly through storytelling clubs). I'm hesitant to use the term 'traditional storytelling' as it is a continuing contemporary art form.

Here goes:

1. Diversity of stories and storytelling styles
2. Collective memory - shared memory of stories throughout storytelling communities
3. Performance - formalised event (different from normal conversation, even if it is impromptu)
4. Liveness - real-time event, not generally recorded
5. Physical presence of teller, eye-contact
6. Voice - as a tool for characters, emotion, suspense etc
7. Gesture and body language
8. Engagement of imagination - of both listener and teller
9. Connection between story, teller and listener - emotional, personal, group
10. Desire by teller and group to share stories

All thoughts welcome!

Hurray for TwitterSheep!

Here's my cloud of Twittersheep followers. (Check out the website if you're confused.)

Twitter tweeple tweet

Seems like everything I hear, read and see now is connected to Twitter. So I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and post my tuppence worth.

It was inspired by The Art of the Tweet and the mixed reactions to that blog posting. Rands describes his seeminlgy painstaking thought process that accompanies each of his tweets. Initial drafts get written on a 'canvas' (not quite a physical painting canvas but not your bog-standard web twitter interface, or any of the multitude of twitter apps). Each tweet is then crafted and edited down into a succinct form as possible.

I was going to say as clear a form as possible, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. Reading some of the comments to his post seems to echo my feelings. By stripping away too much of the descriptive text you run the risk of stripping out all context.

BEFORE: If it’s 4am, I know how stressed I am.
AFTER: Stress is how well I know 4am.

Human communication is all about social context and awareness. Striving for elegance and brevity is admirable but if a story can't be adequated told in 6 words, then consider adding a few more.

Final thought, Ernest Hemingway's short story of 6 words:

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn

Nice video from Microsoft

Just been reading Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences, and then came across this blog on TechCast Network with a video showing Microsoft's future concepts.

It's a perfect example of how sketching or Wizard of Oz style experiences can extend to polished videos as well as more traditional paper prototypes.

Re the future vision though, I can't quite tell if I'm excited or scared. Microsoft's video seems to epitomise ubiquity - the 'screens' are everywhere. (And I want to try them out!)

So on the one hand, fantastic! You need never be out of reach or be unable to identify a plant. But yet everything seems technologically mediated and all the interfaces look the same. Obviously it's just a vision and no doubt future technology will not resemble the video in many ways, yet it seems another step towards homogeneity.

Perhaps more attention needs to be spent on devices such as LadyAda's Design Noir prototypes...

writing a thesis is a painful process

Writing a thesis, I have discovered, is a painful process, so to inspire me in my writing and to let me see an overview of my research topics, thought I'd make use of Wordle and create image clouds of each chapter as it progresses.
Here's chapter 1:

Finally, although it's not writing a novel, I can take some comfort from the words of one of my favourite authors, George Orwell, who said that;

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.- Why I Write

May the illness end soon.

Writing update

Well, I've been using Buzzword on and off for the past few weeks. I've been switching between Word and Buzzword (and the archaic use of pencil and paper too) in a random and sporadic manner. In actual fact I've been tending to use Word to draft some rough paragraphs and then copy them into Buzzword to compile it.

Still very happy with Buzzword, although there was one rather frustrating day when it was being upgraded or offline for some reason. So, I reverted to my mac's trusty TextEdit for the day instead!

I've just shared two files with my supervisors for comments, so we'll see what happens and how Buzzword, and my supervisors, cope with that.

As an aside, I'm currently half considering the use of InDesign at the end to format all the copy and convert to pdf (I hope to turn my thesis into a set of Lulu books). Only trouble is I don't know how to use InDesign yet, but that seems like a minor point!

Buzzword - Am I being as stupid as I think I may be?

So the title says it all really. I've decided to take what I think may be a somewhat unusual step on my road to PhD thesis writing. I'm using Adobe's Buzzword.

Yes, I know it's pretty simplistic, but if I'm honest that what appeals. An online, accessible-from-anywhere, intuitive, and, frankly, elegant design for creating documents just screams 'use me'.

It could be dangerous (it's still in Beta afterall). What if I lose files, want to add TOC (table of contents), and other exciting MS Word features? Hmmm, well I've thought about it and my concession is this - I don't think it's going to be completely realistic for me to use Buzzword as my one and only word processor and I'm going to be printing off lots of draft versions as back up (which I do when using Word anyway). So I'll be switching between Buzzword for creating drafts and Word for 'fine-tuning' the drafts.

I feel like I can write quicker and create smaller (read as 'concise'!), more modular documents in Buzzword's simple, uncluttered interface (with half a mind somehow aware of the hellish task awaiting me in collating these multitude of docs with only Word).

Yet it seems appropriate to use an online tool to tell my thesis story - after all my research is all about how technology is changing the way we communicate. Why not extend that to the way we create and distribute?

Any comments from anyone who has used Buzzword would be welcome...

GuiMags

So it's been a while since my last blog (understatement of the year) but I just came across this website and felt compelled to blog about it.

I'm becoming increasingly technophobic whilst still maintaining an aspect of geekiness (it takes skill I tell you) so when I found this suggestion on a website I was thrilled:

"Could designing software without a computer save you roughly 80% of your time...?" - GuiMags

They've created GuiMags - magnets of, you've guessed it, GUI elements like drop-down menus, radio buttons, labels etc, designed for use on a whiteboard. Much quicker than the use of paper prototyping and, I think, would offer a much more collaborative, interactive workflow.

is it wrong that I skim read an article on literacy?

Is Google making us stupid?

Nicholas Carr writes;

"My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

The Importance of Being er, Truthful?

Well, like many I've been following the We Tell Stories Penguin 6 week special (for those of you who haven't heard of it it's well worth a look).

So, I haven't found any of it mind-blowing literature but I did find one story thought-provoking, although it's the medium rather than the text.

I'm talking about Slice.
Slice is told through two fictitious blogs by the main character (Slice) and Slice's parents. Now these are real blogs (whatever 'real' may mean in this context) hosted on recognised blogging sites and, as would be expected, the entries have attracted followers and so comments. Some of the commenters (is that a word?) are other fictitious friends of Slice from home but some of them are avid readers of the blog.

Now my question (hypothetical I hope) is, what if someone stumbled across these blogs through the ether and was unaware of the Penguin Six Stories connection? Would they fear for this girl's life? In essence, would it matter to them if the girl was real or not for all the difference they could make?

Truth and authenticity is a subject much debated in the realm of traditional oral storytelling but I fear it is less contentious an issue there than in the virtual world. I firmly believe that all stories contain truth, whether it be a true tale, or culturally accurate, or resonates with the human soul. (To clarify, my definition of 'truth' in this context is similar to 'believability' - if the story doesn't ring true on some level then it simply cannot function as a story.)

And I suppose that this blurring of reality/fantasy or fiction/non-fiction can occur on many other planes (e.g.'The Man Who Planted Trees') but is 'truth' (as in the events actual occurring) important here? If you can identify with or be inspired by a character in fiction (or popular media culture) then is the emotional reaction less valid for its fictitious underpinning? If so, try telling that to the thousands of girls who broke their hearts crying over the break up of Take That. (Which btw I wasn't one of.:-))

wii-fit

Came across this video a while back but with the recent launch of wii-fit in the UK I am reminded of this every time I see an ad for it.

Is this the new storytelling?

'Traditional Tales with a triple twist' - sounds a bit like an alcopop to me... Is this the future of storytelling?

"Incorporating Greek myths and Russian folktales this unique fusion of a capella harmonies, poetic storytelling and an interactive physical style guarantees a spine-tingling energy through sound and song." Annamation

Well, I don't know anything about this production but I would be slightly wary of the claim of 'storytelling'. I don't doubt that traditional tales are used but, at the risk of sounding like a decrepit stuck-in-the-mud, it strikes me that it's more like a show, a theatre production.
I saw Xanthe perform Aphrodite and the Real Red Shoes a few months ago, and whilst fascinating and sometime engaging I would never have thought to label it 'storytelling'.

To me (and I'm well aware that this is just a personal definition) there are some qualities that characterise a storytelling experience. Time, location and atmosphere are key.

1. Time - by that I mean pace. Because the audience listeners are seeing the story in their mind, the storyteller can afford to take time. Pauses are natural in traditional storytelling, they allow the listener to savour the moment and build or release tension.
   
2. Location - the most effective storytelling I've been privileged to hear haven't been near a stage. Part of the charm of storytelling is the lack of stage and the small intimate settings of a pub or cafe. The listener is drawn into the storyteller's world, as the storyteller is physically sharing the same space. Boundaries between teller and listener are blurred.
3. Atmosphere - goes hand in hand with some of the location comments. A participative, collaborative atmosphere is conducive to story sharing.
   

So, to sum up, I think it's a lot more than the stories which characterise oral 'storytelling'. I suppose Annamation are claiming to be something different than traditional storytelling but there is a lot of emphasis on 'storytelling' in their website.

Finally, if there was a performance near me I would be going to see the show!

Storytelling & Authenticity - Overview

So last month (18-19 March) I attended a symposium on Storytelling and Authenticity at the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling at the University of Glamorgan hosted by Mike Wilson and Hamish Fyfe (co-directors of the Centre).
The belated notes below are selective and naturally are skewed towards my own research interests, so apologies to any speakers who feel I haven't reflected their work adequately.
(In case of inaccuracies please let me know.)

• Tale-enders: Gathering the Narrative Heritage of Welsh Cricket
  This presentation was the launch of the Tale-enders project to produce narrative reminiscence content to form part of the Museum of Welsh Cricket. Read more...
  
• Capture Wales - Lisa Heledd
  Lisa defined a digital story as a 'short personal multimedia film'. For me, the key word here is 'personal' (i.e. autobiographical) in so much that it differs from traditional tale telling. Read more...
• Susie Pratt - digital stories and social media
  Susie gave a history of the background to Digital Stories and the current context of social media. Read more...
  
• Joseph Sobol - The Razor's Edge: The American Storytelling Movement in 2008
  Joseph's reference to the razor in the title was multi-layered, talking about the edge as that between amateur and professional. Read more...
  
• Richard Bauman - The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound Recording. Read more...
  
• Dick Leith - 'Authenticity' & 'Ownership: How to Shut People Up'. Read more...
  
• Neil Lanham - In the oral tradition, the singer is more important than the song. Read more...
  
  

Storytelling & Authenticity VII - Neil Lanham

Neil Lanham - 'Who is the truly educated man: The one who can grow onions or the man who can spell them?' (George Ewart Evans - The Horse in the Furrow)

In the oral tradition, the singer is more important than the song. Similarly, the story was important - the music was only an instrument or medium. Neil gave a fascinating insight into the last remaining remnants of oral tradition in Suffolk, through personal anecdotes and audio clips.

Neil referred to Walter Ong's Literacy and Orality heavily and produced the following list defining the differences between literate cultures and oral cultures.

Orality

1. Spoken word
   
2. Freedom of thought & language
   
3. Learning by oral transmission observation and experience
   
4. Traditional history seeking mindset
   
5. Metaphorical truth
   
6. Illustrative language of wit
   
7. Seeking principles of understanding
   
8. Seeking wisdom
   
9. Social status through character largely created by the ability to handle everyday narrative
   
10. Personal identity, community identity, locating self in community, time and place
    
11. A love of home
    
12. Inherited traditional oral culture in song, story, formulaic sayings
    
13. An internal perception

Literacy

1. Written word
   
2. Language restricted by the parameters of standard english
   
3. Learning by academic study mainly from dominance of print
   
4. Belief in modernism - 'the now'
   
5. Romantic movement influence
   
6. Contrived language
   
7. Seeking information
   
8. Seeking entertainment
   
9. Social status through academic awards in the world of the written word
   
10. Techno-literate mindset strong
    
11. Media influences
    
12. Delusions of grandeur in relocation and travel
    
13. 'Colonial/civilsed' misconception of indigenous culture
    
14. External perception

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My thoughts
Well I don't really agree 100% with everything Neil said, but his enthusiasm for the singers and genuine affection for the agricultural tradition cannot be doubted. As Dick Leith commented, the divide between literate and oral doesn't have to be seen as a divide or opposition. They can be viewed as a continuum.
Is this mirrored through traditional storytelling and digital storytelling or is it all part of the same continuum?
What evidence is there of a new oral tradition? How are texts moving from oral-written-spoken again? Most stories tellers learn are from written sources, will this be the case in the future or do the texts remain in oral memory? Or, as is possibly more likely, will they be transmitted digitally (and so not neccessarily through text or visual media)?
Final note, a lovely phrase during the discussion afterwards:
"Tales do not recognise boundaries" - this reminded me of diffusionism and the power that stories have to transcend cultural lenses.

Storytelling & Authenticity VI - Dick Leith

Dick Leith - 'Authenticity' and 'Ownership: How to Shut People Up'

Dick sees storytelling as enjoyment (as a teller) and connects authenticity with struggle and suffering. That is, experience with folk tales illustrates own life. Famous singers like Jeanie Robertson & Harry Cox epitomise struggle and, consequently, authenticity. And so, Dick didn't feel entitled to sing songs by people like Jeanie and Harry.

Scottish travellers embody continuity in folkmusic and storytelling. How much/to what extent is authenticity imposed on by outside world/forces? Can we talk about authenticity as the relationship between the performer and their material?

I think this comes back to making the story or song your own, and only choosing material that

1. speaks to you, and
2. suits your style of performance

As Jess Smith told me, it's all about believability, if you don't believe in your characters then no-one else will.