Stories tell us? Political narrative, demes, and the transmission of knowledge through culture

Abstract

This paper compares two institutions of storytelling, mainstream national narratives and self-represented digital storytelling. It considers the centenary of World War 1, especially the Gallipoli campaign (1915) and its role in forming Australian ‘national character’. Using the new approach of cultural science, it investigates storytelling as a means by which cultures make and bind groups or ‘demes’. It finds that that demic (group-made) knowledge trumps individual experience, and that self-representation (digital storytelling) tends to copy the national narrative, even when the latter is known not to be true. The paper discusses the importance of culture in the creation of knowledge, arguing that if the radical potential of digital storytelling is to be understood – and realised – then a systems (as opposed to behavioural) approach to communication is necessary. Without a new model of knowledge, it seems we are stuck with repetition of the same old story.

Keywords:

• Gallipoli
• digital storytelling
• cultural science
• demes
• copying
• innovation

Frameworks

This paper extends and applies conceptual models elaborated in previous work (e.g. Hartley, 2011), where I have argued that the study of culture should turn to an evolutionary and complexity science. Arising from that larger context, this paper continues to build the case for arguing the causal primacy of culture and communication over politics and economics. It follows the corollary logic, which is that the behavioural sciences and their methodological individualism should become communication sciences, because communication explains behaviour, not the other way round. Naturally, communication is explained by a systems model, as is culture (Lotman, 1990; Luhmann, 2013).

Such ambitions for disciplinary reform are perhaps not out of place in a new journal, devoted to ‘communication research and practice’. But they are a heavy burden for one short article to bear. Therefore an initial contextualising summary of the larger claim is perhaps in order, before turning to the new research that this paper reports. First, there’s the theoretical and methodological context of ‘cultural science’ (Hartley & Potts, 2014). Second, there’s the context of my involvement in research about digital storytelling (Hartley, 2009; Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Lundby, 2009); and thence an instantiation in the immediate context of the currently unfolding centenaries of events in World War 1 (Hartley, 2014).

First, then, the conceptual and methodological framework is that of the Cultural Science program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). That program, running from 2010 to 2013, sought to ‘build a conceptual frame for analysing culture, creativity and identity by means of an interdisciplinary approach based in evolutionary theory, complexity studies and cultural-media studies’ (CCI Annual Report, 2012, p. 27). The CCI program resulted in the publication of Cultural Science: A Natural History of Stories, Demes, Knowledge and Innovation (Hartley & Potts, 2014).

The subtitle gives the best clue to what the book is trying to achieve. It seeks to explain culture’s role in the growth of knowledge and innovation, and to do that it considers the role of storytelling making cultural groups, which we call ‘demes’. The new concept of ‘demes’ describes culture-made groups. The term combines the bioscience term deme (for an interbreeding subpopulation), with the political science term demos (for an ‘inter-voting’ group, as it were – a political population). Demes are ‘we’-groups that form ‘inter-knowing’ populations.

An important characteristic of demes is that they are ‘universal-adversarial’, a seeming contradiction that describes how insider knowledge is trusted for all purposes, so it is presumed to be universally available and applicable; but outsider knowledge, produced by and belonging to other demes, is untrusted and treated as hostile. It follows that in-group vs. out-group ‘parochial aggressiveness’ (Pagel, 2012) or competition that characterises human cultures – or demes – produces the same effects in knowledge. In such a context, innovation or new ideas may be most intensively generated along the boundaries between competing demes, which may see themselves as incommensurable (e.g. with mutually untranslatable languages, modes of action and choice, and knowledge systems), but which copy, steal, borrow and transform each other’s ideas in an ‘arm’s race’ scenario where hostilities are the spur to innovation.

In order to illustrate this conceptual argument, we discuss the role of storytelling in forming and binding demes, especially stories that ‘constitute the polity’ – stories about ‘our’ tribe, nation or cause (Hartley & Potts, chapter 3). These take their most extreme but also a very familiar form as stories about warfare. Often the burden of such stories is that ‘our’ deme or polity is constituted in the test of war, where annihilation of life (individual life and ‘life as we know it’) is the stake; and thenceforward ‘we’ are identified by that test of national character.

In Australia, in the immediate context of the centenaries of World War 1, all of that can be condensed into one word: Gallipoli. This leads to the second contextual scaffolding for the present paper: my work in relation to digital storytelling, most recently as part of the research team on an ARC Linkage Project, ‘Digital storytelling and co-creative media’ (see Cultural Science Journal, 2013). Digital storytelling in this context refers to an international movement for narrative self-representation using digital media (computers), typically by means of community-based workshops, where ordinary people get to make their own stories with the assistance of professional facilitators (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Lundby, 2009). The digital storytelling movement has been hailed as a participatory and creative (i.e. productive) alternative to mainstream media. Its political potential as ‘self-representation’ is also recognised. In Nancy Thumim’s words:

Self-representation has the potential to support a more radical political view than other forms of participation precisely because the aim is to allow people to represent themselves, rather than to be represented by others (2012, p. 91, 96).

Meanwhile, the prospect of four years of centenaries (2014–18) to mark the events of World War 1 promises plenty of deme-forming stories in the mainstream media (of combatant countries at least), about how that war made or shaped the national character. In the case of Gallipoli, the combatants were the Ottoman Empire, British Empire (UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and Newfoundland) and France. For Australia and Turkey in particular, this campaign proved to be a major milestone in national identity formation. For Turkey it sustained a story of successful leadership (Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk); for the Australians it begat a story of egalitarianism under unsuccessful leadership (i.e. a defeat that was blamed on the officers, not the men) – the leadership on this side being British, and therefore this is also a story of national self-realisation, when the colony’s ‘self’ separated from the ‘motherland’.

With centennial yarn-spinning in the air, a question arose: was a different story being told about Gallipoli in the sphere of self-representation? Would the ‘more radical’ potential of digital storytelling provide any kind of counter-narrative to the national myths being perpetrated by corporate media from the Murdoch press to the BBC? In fact, perhaps illustrating how innovation can emerge along the clashing boundaries between otherwise mutually hostile groups, the BBC and Murdoch concurred on what angle should be taken in telling the story to a new generation – the first with no surviving witnesses. When the BBC’s widely reported plans for four years’ worth of WW1 memorialisation were announced, Rupert Murdoch himself was their headline act:

The BBC has commissioned more than 2,500 hours of programming that will span four years to mark the centenary of World War I. As part of the ambitious undertaking Rupert Murdoch will be interviewed about his father’s role as the whistle-blower who told the world the truth about the botched Gallipoli campaign in Turkey (Tartaglione, 2013, my emphasis).

My own grandfather was present at that ‘botched’ campaign, linking my research interest in cultural science, digital storytelling and Gallipoli to my personal or ‘self-representational’ interest in what might have been ‘the truth’ of the matter.

Digital storytelling may be just the right technique here, because Granddad’s would have been a very different story. Josiah A. Barnes served with the Brits rather than the ANZACs. He was a quartermaster in the Army Service Corps, having been a Post Office worker in civilian life. In other words he would not have been a frontline soldier but involved in logistics, most likely delivering the mails or issuing ordnance. My family has no surviving memory of his experience, although we do have some mementoes without meanings. His Gallipoli story is that there is no story. Perhaps that is the digital story I should have made on his behalf (Hartley, 2014).

With all these prior or situational issues, the question that motivates this paper is about the possibilities for alternative story systems. It may be possible to tell a ‘more radical’ story from a position of self-representation, but does that actually happen? Or, do self-made stories, like iron filings, line up with the general direction of nationally mediated versions, which attain the status of ‘the truth’ even when there is evidence to the contrary? There is an everyday question here, about the efficacy of digital storytelling as a radical alternative: does it do what it says on the box? If not, does that simply point to the failure of a rather clunky technological fix; or does it point instead to a more profound explanation: about the ‘selfness of the self’, if I can put it that way? If self-making is in fact demic, then personal identity may not be the authentic source of action, behaviour, belief and knowledge. On the contrary, these phenomena may emerge from culture-made groups, making identity an output of culture, not an input. The selfness of the self is an effect not a cause of culture.

Is the national story demic? Its demic function is to hold a ‘we’-group together so strongly that individual truth ceases to count, such that the experience of those who were there does not enter the category of knowledge unless their experience conforms to the mythic or deme-perpetuating story. That story may not be true, but in its name people continue to have fought and died for – as of 2015 – 100 years.

Fictions

What follows is an extension of these themes, in order to develop an alternative account of how demes, storytelling and self-representation work in practice, and what the implications might be for an adequate theory of the relations among culture, knowledge and politics in the matter of ‘constituting the polity’.

Yuval Noah Harari (2014) has recently argued that the secret of human evolutionary success was ‘probably the appearance of fiction’ among an otherwise insignificant primate species when it evolved speech and communicable cognition. He lists the big ‘fictions’ as religion, nations, the economy, the law, money, and firms (like Peugeot), and argues that none of them:

exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings (Harari, 2014).

This ‘common imagination’ is powerful enough to send the youth of the day to their death in millions, as in World War 1, and even now at smaller scale, as can be readily observed in the nightly news from hotspots in the Middle East, Africa and Europe (e.g. Ukraine). This is why it is important to understand the role of stories in forming human groups, the nature of the knowledge that they circulate, and the political force of fictions that hold large demic groups together.

One of the distinctive features of demes is that they are culture-made groups, which have proven evolutionarily advantageous because they allow knowledge and technology to survive at group level, even though these cannot survive at individual level (only genes can do that). Thus, culture, groups, knowledge (including language and its institutions) and technology (including know-how) can all survive across generations. In the process, they too become subject to evolution. Cultural evolution has proven to be both cumulative (novelties are created out of existing components: Arthur, 2009) and expanding. Growth occurs in both scale and complexity, and at an accelerating rate over the very long term (since what Harari (2014) calls the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ of 70,000 years ago). A good example is writing. Once invented (about 3000 BCE) it has evolved beyond recognition, but has never been expunged, despite local ‘Dark Ages’ in periods when one civilisation (say, Rome) transforms into different successors (European, Arabic, Ottoman, etc.). Hartley and Potts (2014) contend that since the evolution of the first ‘communication technology’ of speech, there have been several evolutionary ‘step changes’ in these with transformational consequences:

1. Speech (70K years ago) – hunter-gatherer economy;

2. Writing/counting (5K years ago) – agricultural economy;

3. Printing (600 years ago) – industrial economy;

4. Electronic communication (120 years ago) – information economy;

5. Internet at (40-odd years ago) – creative economy.

In terms of knowledge, then, there are periods of growth and fluctuation punctuated (at accelerating frequency) with step changes in rate of expansion and complexity.

Fighting fit

All of this is part of a wider conversation in evolutionary studies about the relative causal force of cooperation versus competition, or altruistic vs. selfish behaviour and choices (not to mention genes). The concept of demes re-situates cooperation at system level (not individual-behavioural), where it turns out that ‘cooperation’ is far from cosy, and where it can have destructive aspects. Cultures – knowledge-making and sharing groups – require cooperation among people who are not related (don’t share genes). That’s how they work: a culture can survive where individuals cannot, if knowledge can be transmitted through time.

But this doesn’t preclude individual competition within a culture or demic competition between them, where there are winners and losers. Within a culture, the motivations and choices of individuals can be scaled up to enterprise or even to system level (e.g. via firms or monarchs), which in turn scales up and embeds competitive effects (economic inequality; political asymmetry; cultural renown), making it harder for new entrants and increasing up-front investment costs while favouring those with inherited or embedded capital (Piketty, 2014). Between cultures, entire civilisations can be out-competed by others, either directly in hostilities or indirectly by adapting better to changing circumstances.

Hartley and Potts call this competitive aspect of cooperation ‘Malvoisine’ – ‘Bad Neighbour’ (it’s a reference to medieval siege engines). But how can pounding your neighbour’s castle to smithereens be counted as ‘cooperation’? The answer is that what survives is a system of competitive knowledge systems. Even conquest and incorporation by others of entire cultures and their knowledge can bee seen as cooperation at species level, because knowledge has survived and grown and has consolidated over the long term. Knowledge is lost too, certainly, either because it is no longer adequate to the facts on the ground, or because surviving demes value a different system. Local fluctuations entail that some knowledge, cultures, demes and individuals will indeed be destroyed. This is Schumpeter’s (2003, first published 1942) incessant ‘creative destruction’, which is not confined to Capitalism (i.e. it characterises long-term historical process, not just recent ones). Schumpeter himself is clear about the destructive nature of ‘creative destruction’: ‘many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm’ (1942, p. 90). Schumpeter recognises what he calls ‘functionless losses’ and ‘avoidable unemployment’ in the processes of creative destruction. Newness, in short, causes collateral damage and casualties.

However, at system level, newness is vital to deal with incessant change and uncertainty. Thus, knowledge persists at system level, despite local casualties. It seems that tolerance for collateral damage is built into the structure of group-making culture. Large-scale demes are held together by the meaningful mutuality of interconnected selves and institutions, and this structure survives attack, perhaps even gaining strength from the experience, while individuals continue to ‘believe’ in their deme’s identity-fictions even when faced with personal or material losses. Cultural knowledge is also ‘universal-adversarial’: ‘we’-groups trust their own internal knowledge, which is understood to be universally available to all deme-members, and adequate to explain all possible problems. But equally, ‘we’ are adversarial towards ‘they’-groups and distrust their knowledge.

Poised systems

Demes are bonded in language, knowledge, and semiotic webs of meaningfulness and mutuality. Demes make ‘knowing subjects’ in their own image, as it were. It is not the case that individuals use pre-given rationality, choice, or action to make culture. It’s the other way round. Groups as a whole learn and change in competition and conflict with other groups. Learning can be experienced as conquest or colonisation, piracy or plagiarism, the ‘end of the world as we know it’, perhaps, but still constitute cooperation at a higher level of integration of knowledge.

New knowledge is essential for survival under uncertainty, and cultures or demes that commit themselves to staying the same, protecting their past and regulating their actions, are less able to adapt to historical or environmental change. At the same time, rushing after every novelty is equally dangerous. Long-term system survival seems to depend on cultures arriving at a sweet spot, or what Stuart Kauffman (1991, p. 83) calls a ‘liquid’ zone of transition between ordered and chaotic organisation in computer and biological networks alike. This state is crucial for the survival of such systems, because successful networks ‘converge toward the boundary between order and chaos’. Kauffman writes:

Networks on the boundary between order and chaos may have the flexibility to adapt rapidly and successfully through the accumulation of useful variations. … Poised systems will … typically adapt to a changing environment gradually, but if necessary, they can occasionally change rapidly. These properties are observed in organisms (1991, p. 82).

As for computer networks and biological organisms, so for demes: self-organisation (autopoiesis: Luhmann, 2013) in complex systems requires neither total chaos nor total order, but a ‘poised system’ in which newness combines with sameness along an always uncertain boundary.

Copying and innovation

This is where stories (including song, drama, ceremony, dance etc.) come into the picture. They are always novel (each new story is unique); always the same (plots, characters and take-out lessons are formulaic, stereotypical, generic etc.); and always concerned about the uncertain boundary between ‘we’ and ‘they’, between order and chaos. Stories are organised around conflict, journeys, and marriageability, which are all personalisations of demic survival, whether that is seen as ‘action’ (heroes die; cities survive), ‘foundation myths’ (journeys end in self-discovery and the establishment of ‘our’ deme); or ‘romance’ (differences are resolved in marriageability). In stories, perpetuation of the deme is comedy, whereas attempts to perpetuate the individual are tragedy. Further, narrative itself is a mode of thought or embedded code for inductive reasoning (Beinhocker, 2006). Stories are very subtle and flexible when it comes to novelty – originality and familiarity are both valued; emulation and innovation need to be co-present. Thus innovation cannot thrive where there is no copying.

An interesting source for this insight is in the coupling of anthropology with marketing. R. Alex Bentley (evolutionary anthropologist: Bentley, 2009) and Mark Earls (marketing professional: Earls, 2007) argue that, with humans, ‘copying is almost everything’:

The simple truth is that humans, being first and foremost social creatures, rather than independent agents, rely on copying to learn and to negotiate the rich and sophisticated social reality they inhabit. Copying is our species’ number one learning and adaptive strategy (Bentley & Earls, 2008, p. 20).

Copying is not individualistic (except in the special case of the legal fiction of intellectual property, which converts ideas to assets that cannot be circulated freely – thereby converting the whole of humanity into pirates). It is demic. In other words, copying is a means by which systems are organised, coordinated and stabilised through time. Children are the most intense copiers as they integrate themselves into the various overlapping groups, from family to fashion, where they will find their identity. Copying is common, while originality is rare. Copying marks and coheres groups, allowing identity to be externalised in things, symbols, or actions that may originate anywhere in (or beyond) the system. In turn, this means that independent originality is not confined to rare or special individuals (geniuses, artists, entrepreneurs, leaders). On the contrary, originators of new ideas are replaceable, randomly spread throughout (and beyond) the groups for which their ideas are new. This is because networks themselves are fluid and dynamic, not fixed structures, and so copying (with few random variations that may result in new ideas) reproduces the system but also allows newness to be propagated. Copying is ‘originated’ in the actions and goals of the agent doing the copying. It is a ‘pull’ not ‘push’ mechanism, which means that it does not follow the familiar model of intentional ‘influence’ or ‘persuasion’ by others – there’s no central control ‘hub’ (as imagined by Barabási (2003) in his model of networks), but instead an essentially random process. Copying is goal-directed in the sense that individuals do it for a purpose – identification with a deme, emulation of status-based others, basing choices on already-sanctioned choices by others etc. Copying is also not complicated: it doesn’t require everyone in a deme to be attentive to everyone else, but only to be alert to a ‘small world’ network of significant others (real, as in family and friends; virtual, as in online networks, or fantasy, as in celebrity culture, religion etc.). Like starlings, which can coordinate the flight patterns of half a million individuals into a single movement, copying only needs to be propagated among (say) seven individuals to be the coordinating mechanism for demes of whatever scale is technologically feasible (it is a ‘scale free’ or fractal phenomenon).

How do you coordinate demic copying among a ‘small world’ of individuals, especially children, who are keen to know what’s happening, who’s up or down, who’s in or out, who’s hot and who’s not, and how to behave/dress/talk/move and what to know to come across as an insider in their chosen/aspirational deme? Storytelling is one answer to that question. Stories contain in themselves features, characters, scenarios, conundrums, vicissitudes, and outcomes that are copied from elsewhere, often posed as original when they may be hundreds or even thousands of years old. Storytelling as a practice doesn’t make any sense at all without the twinned pair of someone ‘copying’ a story to someone else. The teller is an agent of narrative (i.e. their psychological motivations are irrelevant), and the hearer/reader is an agent of demic identity (their individuality is lost in the experiential here-and-now of the narrative). The relationship is one where trust is established in a familiar format so that knowledge can be propagated, either intact or randomly varied.

All of this can be manipulated, of course, or professionalised to increase some aspect or other (some stories are instructive, others designed for more visceral response), and the bond of trust can be broken though deceit or duplicitousness. There seems to be an inbuilt mechanism for dealing with this likelihood, however. Narrative pleasure is to be had by achieving levels of sophistication where deceit, duplicity and manipulation can be discerned and overturned, to reveal the ‘real’ story at the end. We learn to distinguish stories for the naïve or gullible from those which require reflexive, wily, or cunning responses, making narrative itself the ‘subject’ of stories where a ‘knowing’ subject can ‘tell a hawk from a handsaw, as Hamlet put it. All of this suggests that stories serve as both demic mechanisms, pulling together a ‘we’-group (family, ‘tribe’, nation, species) by personalising the conflicts and connections required to maintain it, and trust mechanisms, teaching how the very means we use to tell ourselves the truth about who we are and how to act can be used to tell us lies that may result in our own or our hero’s destruction. Such lessons, such mechanisms, must be copied for demic survival, but copying itself must be self-organising and cooperative at demic level, notwithstanding the machinations of Malvoisine.

I’ve stressed copying as a system requirement because I want to explore where innovation comes from. Copying, it seems, is best understood in evolutionary terms: random copying; a small proportion of variation; and selective uptake of such mutations across the storytelling system. Systems may be expected to prosper when newness (tending to chaos) is ‘poised’ in relation to the opposing tendency of authority maintenance (sameness; order). One way of testing the model is to look at where innovation comes from in the stories discussed above. Is it more likely to arise within mainstream (scaled, professional, deme-wide) storytelling institutions, or may it emerge more readily from marginal, alternative, adversarial sources? Is ‘radical’ potential the same as ‘innovation’, and can oppositional stories be sources of renewal?

Where is the emergence of newness to be looked for? Is it in the context of digital storytelling? Here, it is not my intention to look for an adversarial (Malvoisine) model of digital storytelling: one that seeks to storm the citadel of mediation and take it over, supplanting ‘their’ truths, national character or mode of mass communication with ‘our’ opposing versions. Instead, I am looking for ways that digital storytelling may provide ‘random variations’ to the accepted form of story. If so, are such mutant forms subsequently adopted by a whole storytelling population (deme)? Is it possible to track storytelling changes across populations through digital media?

World war one stories: copying, or innovation?

These questions can be asked of DIY stories about or associated with Gallipoli. With the research assistance of Julie Lunn (Curtin University), I undertook a search of Australian sites to see what we could find. We searched over 100 websites across all states and territories. The websites belonged to different categories of agency, with public and cultural institutions well to the fore, followed by community organisations. We did not find commercial websites devoted to this purpose, other than one news media outlet:

Websites searched (total = 115)

• Victoria – 19

• Queensland – 18

• Western Australia – 14

• New South Wales – 13

• Miscellaneous – 13

• ACT – 11

• Northern Territory – 8

• South Australia – 7

• Tasmania – 7

• Media – 5

Categories of websites:

• Organisations – 20

• Museums – 17

• Art galleries/centres/community arts – 15

• Government – 13

• Digital storytelling/sharing stories/community stories – 9

• Historical societies/historians/history centres – 9

• RSL – 8

• Libraries – 8

• Archives – 5

• Media – 5

• Universities – 2

• Indigenous Communities – 2

Of these, we isolated nine websites with World War I (WW1) materials (see Appendix Table A1):

• Museum Victoria – Making History

• Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet

• Mudgeeraba Light Horse Museum

• ABC Open

• ABC North Coast NSW

• Culture Victoria

• Anzac Centenary Victoria

• Sydney Morning Herald

• State Library of Queensland

We found a total of 22 digital stories, most on just three websites:

• Culture Victoria – 9

• Museum Victoria – 4

• ABC Open – 4

• The rest all have one each

They cover the following topics:

• A soldier and his faith

• War, Migration and Mobility

• Returning home a changed man

• How one man went to war and died a pauper

• The story of a WW1 Nurse

• The story of Bundoora Homestead which was home to returned servicemen

• Ballarat’s miners who went to WW1

• Stories of facial surgery as a result of WW1 wounds

• Chinese Australians and World War One

• A family history of serving in multiple wars

• Life of one soldier who was at Gallipoli

• A woman’s recollection of her parents – her mother was a nurse and her father was at Gallipoli

• Barton and his bugle

• The story of man from Hay and the town’s commitment to the war effort

• Four brothers from SA who never came home.

• A story about at WA man who enlisted and the slice of wedding cake his wife sent to him.

We were interested to discover if there were any digital stories concerning Indigenous Australians (see Appendix Table A2). We found only two:

Indigenous WW1

• Only two digital stories were found on Indigenous Australians in WW1.

• ACMI: John talks about his father’s experience of fighting in World War I in the 15th Machine Gun Battalion in 1917 and his bitter experience of not being honoured upon his return to Australia.

• Vic Government Dept of Premier and Cabinet with ACMI: Ken Saunders talks about his brother Harry who was killed in WW2 – also briefly mentions their father who was on the Western Front in WW1

We looked for websites with DIY or ‘share your story’ capabilities, for people to upload their own photos, text and videos. Most want users to submit a photo and short text, usually around 500 words. Of 11 websites, only three have the option for uploading to YouTube. Five of the organisations ask for objects, items and documents in addition to stories. Perhaps more of this type of website can be predicted as centenary ‘fever’ grows from 2014 onwards.

DIY websites

• State libraries – 2

• Museums – 3

• Government (local and state) – 4

• Corporate – 1

• Historical group – 1

In relation to digital storytelling, we looked at those websites that offer digital storytelling services, have digital stories (some with multiple stories) on their websites, or refer to past projects that are no longer available on the web (See Appendix Table A3). In total 45 websites were found:

• Organisations, comprising a mixture of corporate, aged-care, healthcare, Oxfam, environment, film/broadcasting companies and the Aids Federation – 12

• Art Centres/Galleries – 8

• Digital storytelling organisations – 9

• Media – 4

• Historians/Historical Centres – 4

• Indigenous communities – 2

• Universities – 2

• Libraries – 2

• Museums – 1

• Government – 1

The subjects of the digital stories sampled were, in no particular order:

• Elders in the wheatbelt of WA

• A day in the life at school

• Indigenous life – language, art, customs, heritage, song cycles, women (mainly in remote areas)

• Vietnamese in Cabramatta

• Children’s books

• Young Iraqi women in Western Sydney

• Western Sydney’s Muslim Community

• Penrith City Council – community

• Youth in rural Australia

• Youth – exam tips, challengers in life, helping friends,

• Neighbourhood stories in St Marys, Sydney

• Newman (WA) Stories – youth, schools and indigenous

• As an alternative to oral histories

• Point Pearce – Indigenous elders and youth on racism; life in Pt Pearce

• Life for HIV positive people

• Gay marriage

• What it’s like to be queer – exploring your identity

• Disability – life with Down Syndrome

• Disaster recovery after the Queensland floods in the Somerset region

• Rockhampton areas of interest

• People with disabilities and the aged

• Aboriginal health workers and the work they do

• Immigration and settlement in Victoria by the Lebanese

• Victoria’s Rivers

• School children and museums – the children use the items in the museums to learn about history

• State Library of Queensland has 93 stories on topics including boating, famous people, music, beaches, Ekka (Agricultural Show), Anzac Day march, 1974 floods and indigenous people

• Indigenous responses to the official apology to Australia by Kevin Rudd, PM

• Queensland’s 150 anniversary – stories about Qld’s distinct identity, including stories from South Sea Islanders

• Communities in Northern Qld

• Connecting young people in rural and remote areas

• Retirees remembering their lives

• School children making stories about the State Library of NSW

• Migrants and refugees

Several websites offered digital storytelling services but don’t host digital stories. These include sites that offer other services such as oral histories (Way Back When), community mapping and databases (Feral Arts), or have tools for creating digital stories (Place Stories). The most popular topics were:

• Communities (non-Indigenous) – 14

• Indigenous Australians – 13

• Schoolchildren – 6

• Youth – 4

• Migrants/refugees – 3

• Elderly – 3

• Sexuality – 2

• Historical – 2

• Disability – 2

Not all of these stories meet the criteria of a digital story. Some are around the 10-minute mark. Others have people talking directly to camera as well as showing still photos and objects. In other words, the ideal type of digital story (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Lundby, 2009) is very uncommon on websites.

At one level, our survey reveals what can only be described in Joseph Schumpeter‘s immortal words, commenting on his own analysis of creative destruction (1942, p. 91): ‘All this is of course nothing but the tritest common sense’. It’s not surprising to find that digital storytelling is rare on the net; nor that self-told stories about World War 1 are rare too. We discover without surprise that the stories we did find reveal that individual experience is varied and unique to the individual.

But there is nevertheless an interesting tension within and among the stories. Some (for example the Indigenous stories in Appendix Table A2) are completely at odds with the ‘official’ line (mythical, bardic, or mainstream media). Others, simply by their variety, reveal that the mediated meaning of the events is very tightly defined and des not encompass individual experience. Still others reveal that some ‘granddad’ stories begin to resemble the mediated version, as communities and families seek to place their kin into a story that they have no reason (or evidence) to challenge (e.g. Appendix Table A1 under ‘Department of Premier and Cabinet’).

When looked at systemically, not behaviourally, our survey of digital storytelling begins to address the question of copying and innovation, but only at one interpretative remove: at systems level, not that of individual motivation and action. Do ‘ordinary citizens’ tell a different story, resulting in innovation at the margins; or do they copy the versions made familiar in media and cultural institutions? The answer turns out to be affirmative in both cases! A further step of analysis and interpretation is necessary to isolate which is which. The pathway to a particular outcome may have been prepared by the organisation responsible for gathering, commissioning or making the story, whose agenda may itself be decisive, if their institutional purpose is to ‘illustrate’ an already scripted history, or to challenge it. Thus, none of the stories gets to ‘speak for itself’. The evidence in this particular survey is simply too sparse, varied, and ‘contaminated’ by institutional and interpretative bias to tell a compelling truth one way or the other. However, it remains as evidence of how storytelling itself is propagated across large-scale social networks. There is plenty of copying, but also examples of variation and innovation.

Stories tell us

The thing that does not seem to be present is self-propagation from such examples of new ideas or new versions of familiar stories to transform the rest of the network. Instead of a live, dialogic, participatory dynamism among the stories, the ‘genre’ of self-represented war stories seems to be stuck in an individualist or even consumerist framework of expectation. People ‘consume’ the experience of telling a story, in the sense that once the story is told their agency ceases. There’s no expectation of continuing civic action among storytellers – their agency as citizens is not invoked. Despite its presence online, the story itself is not used for direct, peer-to-peer communication across the citizenry. Instead, it remains as a memorial or commemorative monument. It only sparks back into communicative life if a viewer, researcher, government agency or media company comes across it and re-uses it for their own purposes, for instance as part of centennial ceremonies. The BBC (2014) has done this, for instance, using actors to voice soldiers’ letters from the trenches, in order to give ‘a sense of life as a soldier… Their words offer an insight into the noise, terror, friendship and loss witnessed by many’. In Australia, the ABC’s Fact Check unit has gone a step further, not content to use individual experience merely as ‘witness’. They have ‘put to the test’ five common ‘Anzac myths’. Their ‘verdict’ (as the ‘national broadcaster’) is interestingly ambivalent, concluding that although truth had been helped along by myth, that’s OK, because fiction serves the national interest:

There is no doubt that the Gallipoli campaign was a major military defeat for Australia and its allies, and it came at a tremendous human cost for a fledgling nation. Similarly, there is no doubt there were acts of bravery, sacrifice and mateship that are worth commemorating. It is also understandable that contemporary chroniclers such as Charles Bean, subsequent historians and even governments have sought to put the best possible spin on it, sometimes at the expense of the truth. While modern historians work to set the record straight, it’s still worth appreciating how myths can provide an insight into the way Australians have tried to find meaning and redemption from such terrible loss of life (ABC, 2014a).

Preserving the myth is construed as a national duty by Dr Brendan Nelson, a former federal Education and Defence Minister who is now the director of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. At the re-opening of the AWM’s World War 1 galleries, after a $32 m refurbishment ‘in time for the centenary of the Gallipoli landings’, he said: ‘Those Australians who are able have not only an opportunity but a responsibility to see the First World War galleries. Every nation has its story – this is our story’ (ABC, 2014b).

In other words, it seems to be the meso-level institutional agencies¹ that have the strongest voice in representing the meaning of individual war stories. They are tolerant of ‘myth’ and ‘spin’ (acknowledged untruth), if it is done in the service of finding ‘meaning and redemption’ in ‘our story’. They are respectful of individual soldiers and others who had direct experience of the war, but the eyewitness account is heavily processed in the service of the larger, demic imperative. In short, deme trumps self. Fiction (Harari-style) trumps truth (mere lumpen-reality).

In such a context, we can understand why digital storytelling as self-representation by citizens makes little impact on the national political narrative, although it may spark off new lines of meaningfulness at local or sectional level, depending on the organisational setting in which it is made, archived or exploited. If digital storytelling is to make a difference as a ‘movement’, it needs to get organised at meso- and macro- as well as micro-level. It needs to grow institutions as well as stories, and to propagate across networks, not to remain content with ‘self-expression’.

A new disciplinary story?

Finally, what might this rather sparse and patchy example of political narrative tell us about our scholarly settings and methodological procedures? Quite a lot, I’d say. It suggests that the study of communication needs a shake up. We need to turn the study of culture into an evolutionary and systems science; and to turn the behavioural sciences into sciences of communication. Only then will it be possible to analyse the role of demic interactions in the reproduction of group identity, thus to explain the meaningfulness of polities and the potency of stories which, despite casualties in the millions, are still said to characterise ‘us’. Such phenomena don’t necessarily amount to a hill of beans in the context of behavioural individualism, with its investments in such notions as influence and persuasion. But in the context of complex dynamic meaning-making systems – culture, media, communication – the career of stories can tell us about the growth of knowledge and its reproduction across generations.

If media and communication scholarship is going to do justice to its object of study, it needs to reverse the direction of micro-level causation; the one that accepts individual choice as the origin of social, cultural and political action. At the same time it needs to reverse the direction of causation in macro-level systems; the one that places economics first, then politics, then culture. What if causation runs in the opposite direction at both micro-level (action) and macro-level (systems)? What if they are determined by culture, which precedes, both historically and causally, both politics (organised group-settlement) and economics (productivity)? This is not culture as art or custom, but culture as the whole-of-population capacity that enables humans to live in associated productivity (demic, meaningful, relational) in the first place, using group-making, group-binding, and group-differentiating mechanisms whose output, as it were, is not only identity but also knowledge. Such possibilities have barely begun to be investigated in communication and media studies, perhaps because they still have their analytical heads in the nineteenth-century disciplinary clouds.

For those interested in innovation and newness, policy implications follow from the adoption of an ‘adaptive complex system’ view of culture, where culture makes groups, groups make knowledge, and stories transmit that knowledge through time and across populations. To understand innovation, policy needs to move from a ‘mechanical’ approach (engineered innovation in professional/expert labs) to a ‘probabilistic’ approach (population-wide random variation, speeded up by institutionalised ‘search’ and processing functions across demes and knowledge domains). Everyone, everywhere, across all of the economy and culture, via technologically enabled networks, is a participant, part of the overall productivity of the system. Policy settings need to shift from central control, ‘picking winners’ and high investment in firms, to distributed control (self-organising systems), trial and error and experimentation, and investment in populations (education, connectivity, nurturing associations) to produce variation (experiment).

Such microproductive activity needs further processing, a discovery that has already been made by corporate media and marketing organisations, whose investments in ‘big data’ and ‘data-mining’ are an example of just such a recognition of the potential of microproductivity and DIY creativity. However, the same lesson has not been learned at the political level, i.e. at the level where the polity is constituted (in story, among other ways). There is very little associational or civic agency devoted to processing – scaling up – citizens’ own self-made meanings, in order to use them to tell a different story about what sort of polity ‘we’ have, or want.

This isn’t just a failure of political activism: it’s a consequence of knowledge systems devoted to individualism and its aggregation into party-politics, which naturally have nothing to say about self-representation. Problems of knowledge are proper to academic inquiry, and ‘we’ (scholars) should be wondering why stories are more powerful than truth but challenging and changing them seems such a marginal activity. Media, communication and cultural studies need to reform their own story, if they are going to understand what’s going on.

The proposition of the cultural science approach adopted here is that ‘stories tell us’. Stories survive where individuals don’t. Stories are reprocessed by institutions, linking micro- and meso-level productivity, which in turn are networked and scaled to macro-level or systems complexity. In that context, stories can and do change; and as they change, new stories create new demes. New stories about who ‘we’ are create new political narrative and thence a new polity. There’s not much sign that this is being done ‘from below’, without further (meso- and macro-level) processing. In the era of war memorialisation, the big guns of storytelling remain in the hands of national and partisan media and cultural institutions. They tell us who we are; and they continue to do it with the equivalent of ‘Malvoisine’ – story-engines that narrate how we discovered our national character by battering the walls of our neighbours. If that situation is to change, knowledge itself needs to be understood differently.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP11010027: ‘Digital storytelling and co-creative media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice’ (2012–14). I would like to thank Julie Lunn, Curtin University, for research assistance.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Hartley

John Hartley, AM, PhD, DLitt, FAHA, ICA Fellow, is John Curtin Distinguished Professor and Professor of Cultural Science at Curtin University, Australia, and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. His present research interests include cultural science (complex systems and evolutionary theory in the study of culture), creative economy and culture, and the representation of identities in popular entertainment. He is author of many books and articles, most recently: Digital Futures for Media and Cultural Studies (Wiley-Blackwell 2012), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, co-edited), Key Concepts in Creative Industries (Sage, 2013, co-authored), Cultural Science (Bloomsbury, 21014, with Jason Potts) and Creative Economy and Culture (Sage, 2015, with Wen Wen and Henry Siling Li). He is currently working on a team-based project on ‘Publishing-Knowledge-Citizenship’ and a book called DIY Girls for Palgrave Macmillan’s Entertainment Industries series, with Rhiannon Hartley. He is Editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage) and Publisher-Editor of Cultural Science Journal (Online).

Notes

1. ‘Meso-level’ refers to a three-level categorisation of economic analysis proposed by Kurt Dopfer and colleagues to improve the standard distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Mesoeconomics is concerned with the institutional level between agents and systems (Dopfer, Foster, & Potts, 2004). The micro-meso-macro model can be extended beyond formal economics to other adaptive systems, to study the ‘rules’ that constitute social and cultural institutions as populations, structures and processes of rules.

Appendices

Table A1. World War 1 digital stories.

WW1 Digital Stories
Organisation	Description	Link	Date	Theatre of Battle
Museum Victoria – Making History	Gavin Yates – A Soldier’s Rosary	http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/websites/making-history/student-uploads/gavin-yates – a-soldiers-rosary/	No date	Western Front
	The story of a WWI soldier and his faith.
Museum Victoria – Making History	Kellie Youngs – Fred’s Story: War, Migration and Mobility	http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/websites/making-history/student-uploads/kellie-youngs – freds-story-war-migration-and-mobility/	No date	Gallipoli – (British soldier)
	The story of a WWI soldier who utilised his war experience and his migration to Australia to improve his career and social standing.
Museum Victoria – Making History	William Stephen – Forgotten Heroes	http://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/websites/making-history/student-uploads/william-stephen – forgotten-heroes/	No date	Gallipoli
	Follows the story of Ernest Thomas King, an Australian soldier in the First World War who returned home a changed man.
Museum Victoria – Making History	A Soldier’s Diary Uploaded by Alicia Booth	http://museumvictoria.com.au/portals/makinghistory/view.aspx?id = 25221&epslanguage = en	No date	Western Front
	The question of how far Arthur Bertie Chorlton Aldred’s diary of the First World War can illuminate his subsequent behaviour after the war will be examined in the three minute digital history. The unveiling of the diary has broken Arthur’s self-imposed silence after the war, and has generated information that familial relations are able to add to his life narrative. Arthur’s silences after the war speak as loudly as words when viewed in light of his memory enshrined in the diary, familial remembrance and historical remembrance. The result is a deeper understanding of the experience of a signaller, in the trenches, in the first world war.
Department of Premier and Cabinet	Veterans’ digital stories	http://www.dpc.vic.gov.au/index.php/veterans/victorian-veterans-virtual-museum/digital-stories-in-our-words	No date	Peace keepers and peace making; Homefront; Women; Indigenous; Korea; WW2; Europe; POW; Vietnam; Mediterranean, Middle East; Pacific, New Guinea
	In Our Words is a Digital Storytelling Project which recorded the wartime experiences of Victorian veterans. The project was being run by the Victorian Government in partnership with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and the Shrine of Remembrance.
	Since 2009, nearly 200 veterans from Melbourne, Bendigo, Swan Hill, Sale, St Arnaud, Morwell, Wodonga and Warrnambool participated in the project, with the involvement of local schools. Students worked side by side with the veterans and ACMI staff to create ‘mini movies’ that record and share a small part of each veterans’ rich experience and reflections.
	This is in conjunction with ACMI and there is a large number of stories online.
Mudgeeraba Light Horse Museum	Digital Storytelling excursions are an exciting new feature of the Mudgeeraba Light Horse Museum. These days are provided for year 9 and 10, for a full day at the museum. Students bring tablet devices and spend the day creating a movie to tell the story of ANZACs and conflicts that Australia has been involved in.	http://mlhmuseum.com.au/digital-storytelling-excursions/	23 January 2014	WW1
ABC Open	Remembering Billy – By Open Producer Dan Battley from Tropical North QLD: Ivan tells Dan about Billy who was a sniper in WW1 and how he died a pauper.	https://open.abc.net.au/openregions/qld-tropical-north-93gv1ap/posts/remembering-billy-26wn8wx	Monday 22 April 2013	WW1
ABC North Coast NSW	Giza to Gallipoli: The story of a WWI nurse by Margaret Burin: Nurses have been performing bloody and exhausting work at war for Australia for more than 100 years. Matron Bessie Pocock left behind diaries and photos, documenting both heartbreaking experiences and exotic adventures.	http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2014/04/16/3986710.htm	16 April 2014	WW1
Culture Victoria	This is story of the Bundoora Homestead, which was home to hundreds of returned servicemen for over 70 years. It is the story of the hidden cost of war. For some men, Bundoora was a respite, a break from a world that didn’t understand the horrors of war they had experienced. For others, Bundoora was a place from which they would never leave. This film has been made to honour long term resident Wilfred Collinson and men like him, whose service to their country left indelible scars.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/world-war-one-coming-home/14266/coming-home-bundoora-repatriation-hospital/	No date	WW1 – Gallipoli
Culture Victoria	One hundred years since the First World War, local collecting organisation Victorian Interpretive Projects, in conjunction with Ballarat Ranges Military Museum, is asking local residents and relatives of former Ballarat miners to share their photographs, objects and stories.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/ballarat-underground/14476/ballarat-underground/	No date	WW1
	This is the story of the miners who left Ballarat to fight in the First World War. It is also the story of the people seeking to commemorate them through research and family history, enabling an ongoing legacy through contributions to the public record.
Culture Victoria	The Sidcup Collection, held by the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Museum, tells the story of how modern facial reconstructive surgery was born.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/in-the-face-of-uncertainty/	No date	WW1
	In the Face of Uncertainty illuminates the surgeons who pioneered these new techniques after the mechanical warfare of the First World War. It tells of the men who left Australian shores to serve their country and how their resulting facial wounds were treated.
	This film is a tribute to the men and women who rebuilt the faces of these men as best they could and a tribute to the men who underwent multiple painful surgical procedures and suffered terribly. These are the faces that are never seen in photographs of early ANZAC Day parades, hauntingly sad yet a marvel of scientific innovation. These are the faces of uncertainty.
Culture Victoria	Dr Edmond Chiu, researcher on the Chinese ANZACs exhibition speaks about the importance of connecting Chinese Australians to their World War One heritage.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/chinese-anzacs/14483/chinese-anzacs-making-connections/	No date	WW1
	Emily Cheah Ah-Qune, curator of the Chinese ANZACs exhibition speaks about the process of researching and finding stories of Chinese-Australian soldiers during World War One.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/chinese-anzacs/14485/searching-for-chinese-anzacs/
	Interview with Serena Cheung, a relative of Chinese ANZAC Benjamin Moy Ling, and her husband Christopher Shai-Hee. Serena and Christopher speak about family memories of Benjamin, his connection with Melbourne, duties while serving in the armed forces and his life after serving in World War One.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/chinese-anzacs/14478/benjamin-ben-moy-ling/
	Military historian David Holloway speaks about his research on the Langtip brothers, a group of Chinese-Australians who served during World War One.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/chinese-anzacs/14481/the-langtip-brothers/
Culture Victoria	Bill Rowe’s Red Cliffs family – his father, brothers & brothers-in-law – all served in the World Wars, his father in both of them. In this interview Bill recalls his family history, and his own, in terms of the service to Country they all performed.	http://www.cv.vic.gov.au/stories/memories-of-a-soldier-settlement/11153/bill-rowe-a-military-family/	No date	WW1 & WW2
Culture Victoria	In this interview Jeff Blore discusses his family’s involvement in the First and Second World Wars and describes his involvement as an affiliate member of Caulfield RSL.	http://cv.vic.gov.au/stories/among-mates-caulfield-rsl/11163/affiliate-member-jeff-blore/	No date	WW1 & WW2
Anzac Centenary Victoria	Photos of soldiers, places or diary entries accompanied by short text – no videos.	http://anzaccentenary.vic.gov.au/get-involved/read-wwi-stories/	No date	WW1
Sydney Morning Herald	As the nation pauses to remember those who fell in war, we take a look at the life of one soldier, Raymond Baldock, who landed at Gallipoli with the Anzacs. By Tim Young, Photo Journalist.	http://www.smh.com.au/national/one-soldiers-gallipoli-story-20120424-1xj0z.html	25 April 2012	WW1
	This is more of a reading of his diary with video footage of his diary and war photographs.
State Library of Queensland	Recording made in Cardwell, North Queensland with Margaret Thorsborne whose parents served right through the First World War. Margaret’s mother, Constance Keys, served with the Australian Army Nursing Service, and cared for the wounded from Gallipoli and in England, France and Flanders. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross Second Class, the Royal Red Cross First Class, was twice mentioned in dispatches, and was awarded the Medaille d’honneur des Epidemies (en vermeil). Margaret’s father Lionel Pennefather served through the war with the 7th Battalion. He took part in the landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, then to Cape Helles in the attempts to take Krithia, back to Anzac, then to action in France. Constance Keys and Lionel Pennefather did not meet until 1920, in Australia. They married in 1921.	http://vimeo.com/channels/slqcollections/90180836	No date	WW1
ABC Open	Remembering Barton’s Bugle by Anthony Scully: Barton and his bugle had an important role at Gallipoli, Lone Pine and in the defence of the Suez Canal. His job was to use the bugle to communicate orders of his superiors to the men in his battalion. As kids growing up in the Newcastle suburb of The Junction, Reg and Ian Barton remember their father Walter using his bugle to call them back home at dinner time.	https://open.abc.net.au/explore/59677	11 November 2013	WW1
	Frank Butterworth’s Dead Man’s Penny by Hay War Memorial High School Museum: For Lou Gardam from the school’s museum, this commemorative bronze medallion helps to tell the story of a special young man from Hay with a gift for writing who never made it home. It also is part of a bigger story about the town’s commitment to the war effort in World War One.	https://open.abc.net.au/explore/64982	5 March 2014	WW1
	The Watherston’s Dead Man’s Pennies by Geoffrey Lee Clayton: Before World War One, the Watherston family lived on Boston Island, out from Port Lincoln in South Australia. There were four brothers, Cyril, Edward, Frank and James, who along with their cousin Sidney all found their way to fighting for Australia in the Great War. The saddest part of the story, is that none of them returned home. All four brothers and their cousin died in the war. As far as I can ascertain, this is the only case where a whole family lost all four sons in the Great War (not to mention a cousin as well). To commemorate the death of every solider, their families received a Dead Man’s Penny, or the Supreme Sacrifice Plaque as they’re officially known, along with a letter from Buckingham Palace, signed by King George V.	https://open.abc.net.au/explore/60849	2 December 2013	WW1
	Wedding cake survives World War 1 by Christopher Lewis: The story of a West Australian man who enlisted in WW1 and the piece of wedding cake his wife sent him while he was at the front.	https://open.abc.net.au/explore/67698	22 April 2014	WW1

Table A2. Indigenous World War 1.

Indigenous WW1
Organisation	Description	Link	Conflict
Victorian Government Department of Premier and Cabinet with ACMI	Ken Saunders talks about his brother Harry who was killed in WW2 – also briefly mentions their father who was on the Western Front in WW1	http://video.dpc.vic.gov.au/vets-videos/indigenous/	WW2 & WW1
ACMI	John talks about his father’s experience of fighting in World War I in the 15th Machine Gun Battalion in 1917 and his bitter experience of not being honoured upon his return to Australia.	http://generator.acmi.net.au/education-themes/conflict-australians-war/world-war-i/back-being-black	WW1

Table A3. DIY or ‘share your stories’ websites.

Share your stories websites
Organisation	Description	Link	Conflict
Victorian Government – Share Your Story: http://anzaccentenary.vic.gov.au/get-involved/share-story/	In the lead up to the centenary of the First World War (1914–1918), the Victorian Government encourages all Victorians to share their own personal stories. These stories will serve as a reminder of the service of our forebears and to ensure their legacy lives on. The form has options to add you tube links as well as photos and text.	http://anzaccentenary.vic.gov.au/share-story-form/	WW1
Shrine of Remembrance – Stories of Remembrance	You are welcome to share your story of Remembrance with us. The form has options to add you tube links as well as photos and text.	http://www.shrine.org.au/Remembrance/Share-Your-Story	Doesn’t specify
VB 2014 Raise a Glass Appeal	People have uploaded a single photo and written about their family or friends (dead and alive) who have served in various conflicts from WW1 to more recent times.	https://www.raiseaglass.com.au/	Doesn’t specify
	There is an online form where people can upload an image and text.
Gallipoli Dead from Western Australia – Sponsored by the Western Australian Genealogical Society Inc. (WAGS) http://gallipoli.wags.org.au/	This collaborative Project, proposed and coordinated by Shannon Lovelady, is to identify the Western Australians who died as a result of the Gallipoli campaign.	http://gallipoli.wags.org.au/tributes/	Gallipoli
	Under the Tributes tab are short stories accompanied by photos of seven of the men. People are encouraged to research a group of men. They would also like people to send a photograph of a memorial from their local community or school, or provide information and a photograph of a family member who may have died during, or as a result of the Gallipoli Campaign.
Albany Anzac	Submit Personal Accounts & Images	http://www.anzacalbany.com.au/participate4/images-personal-story-submission/	WW1
http://www.anzacalbany.com.au/ Albany was the curtain raiser for the program of activities marking the Anzac Centenary (1 November 2014). This date marks the departure of the first convoy to carry troops to Gallipoli and the Western Front.	There are many personal Anzac connections to Albany and the Great Southern. The Albany Public Library has collected many of these oral histories, and also houses the Albany History Collection. Some of these personal histories will be featured on this website during the Anzac Centenary. The story of the Anzacs and First World War affected every home, in every community across Australia. These individual accounts, images and memorabilia are important, and to record and share these personal histories, several channels are available for submitting your own story. At the Albany Public Library, submissions can be made in person to the Albany Historical Collection, otherwise please complete this form, and we will contact you for further information.
State Library of Queensland	If you would like to submit your research and family stories of WWI for consideration, we encourage you to visit State Library’s World War I Centenary blog. The blog provides Queenslanders with the opportunity to discover and share stories about Queensland’s WWI and Anzac experiences. As a general guideline the recommended length for a blog story is 300–600 words: Stories can be found at: http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/ww1/?s = share+YOUR+STORY	http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/whats-on/programs/q-anzac-100-memories-for-a-new-generation/share-your-story	WW1
History SA	Anzac Day in South Australia	http://history.sa.gov.au/research/callouts/anzac-day-south-australia	WW1
	What does Anzac Day mean to you? History SA is currently researching the impact of Anzac Day in South Australia. If you have something to contribute, a story to share, or memories, photographs or documents from your ancestors we would love to hear from you. Please contact us at [e-mail]
State Library of South Australia	You can help add to the State Library’s collection of First World War material by providing information about the existing photos in our South Australians of World War 1 group on flickr, by uploading your own photographs, donating material to our archives or recording an oral history for us. Instructions on how to participate in the flickr group can be found on the flickr tab.	http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/slsaww1	WW1
Anzac Centenary Victoria	The HMAT Orvieto was one of Victoria’s earliest and largest troopship vessels to depart Melbourne prior to World War I. On board were 1,457 service men and women who went on to serve in Gallipoli.	http://anzaccentenary.vic.gov.au/remembrance/hmat-orvieto-embarkation/share-story-orvieto/	WW1
	Sadly, many never returned.
	In the lead up to the centenary of the First World War (1914–1918), the Victorian Government has published the Orvieto embarkation list to help tell the untold stories of war from a uniquely Victorian perspective.
	Those with a direct link to the Orvieto are invited to share their personal stories to ensure the legacy of their forebears lives on.
	The form has options to load video to You Tube as well as photos and text.
Freshwater Bay Museum	Between 2014 and 2018 Australia will commemorate the Anzac Centenary. Claremont and its surrounding suburbs have an important story to tell. The commemoration will enable us to harness the voices of those of our ancestors who lived through the World War. We want to explore, conserve and share those stories, letters, photographs and objects you have that tell us about what the War means to you, your family and your community. Please contact us with your stories and ideas for our commemoration program. Tell us about your ancestors, those who enlisted as well as those who were left behind.	http://www.freshwaterbaymuseum.com.au/freshwater-bay-museum-calls-for-your-stories-of-world-war-1/	WW1
City of Perth	Heritage Perth in conjunction with St George’s Cathedral will be presenting an exhibition during the sixth annual Perth Heritage Days called, “Perth on the Verge of War”.	http://visitperthcity.com.au/news/share-your-familys-wwi-story	WW1
	In an endeavour to make this exhibition a true representation of the community at that time, Heritage Perth is inviting the people of Western Australia to participate. They are looking for the stories, the soldiers’ memories and the items that have become family heirlooms as a result of a world changing time in our history. There are certain to be some remarkable pieces with equally remarkable stories attached to them, resting quietly in homes around Perth. Heritage Perth would like to know about them. If you are interested to participate and would be willing to loan your items to the safe hands of Heritage Perth, they would like to hear from you. Please send an email detailing the item and the story behind it to [e-mail] by 31 August 2014.