Exploring the ‘craftedness’ of multimedia narratives: from creation to interpretation

Abstract

This paper emerges from a comparative study of two community-based multimedia storytelling projects in Toronto and Montreal, and the multimedia narratives participants produced in those projects. Following current scholarship in visual methods that acknowledges the significance for research of the medium’s formal qualities, the authors offer the concept of ‘craftedness’ as one which might help researchers grapple with the significance of the processes of both creating and interpreting visual data. Through a study of the visual data produced in these two projects, they examine three qualities of this aesthetic experience captured in the notion of craftedness, which seem to both complicate and enable processes of self-representation and interpretation: aesthetic distance, visual excess and the visualisation of the unrepresentable. Taking seriously the craftedness of multimedia works highlights the complexities of interpreting visual data and the dilemmas of representing ourselves and others.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously funding this research and our research collaborator Paula Salvio (University of New Hampshire) for lending us her editorial support and insight on the themes of this paper.

Notes

1 The digital storytelling model studied here is an adaptation of the model developed by the Center for Digital Storytelling in California and documented by the Center’s founder, Joe Lambert, in his book Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community (2010).

2 All names of participants have been changed to preserve their anonymity.

3 All images included in this article have been used with the permission of the participants who created them.

4 While this was the sentiment in her interview, project facilitators told us that a year later Lina was returning to Rwanda for the first time and bringing her extended interview, for it contained an account of her experience that she has never been able to share with some of her loved ones there. It seems clear that the different genres – digital story and oral history interview – can serve different and yet equally valuable functions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chloë Brushwood Rose

Chloë Brushwood Rose is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto. She studies public art and community-based media practices, with a particular interest in the relationship between aesthetics, self-representation and pedagogy. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled More than I Can Say: Digital Storytelling, Participatory Media and the Challenge of Self-Representation. Find links to her work at http://www.yorku.ca/cbr.

Bronwen Low

Bronwen Low is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education in McGill University’s Faculty of Education. Current research includes community media projects, the multilingual Montreal hip-hop scene and the pedagogical implications of the life stories of human rights violations. Her most recent book is Slam School: Learning through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom (Stanford University Press, 2011). Find links to her work at http://www.bronwenlow.com.