Digital storytelling

My article in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, “Bodies That Tell: Embodying Teen Pregnancy through Digital Storytelling,” co-authored with Aline Gubrium, uses digital storytelling as a participatory research strategy.

Like other forms of visual research, digital stories can be analyzed by focusing on both process and outcome. Researchers can focus simultaneously on what participants say in their stories (textuality), the process of making the stories (production), and how storytellers and audiences respond to the presentation of finished stories (performance).

In “Bodies That Tell,” we analyze digital stories using a multi-modal transcription strategy. This method combines still images from the digital stories along with transcription of the voiceover recording, notes on affect, features of visual objects, text on screen, music, and special effects to “begin to understand how people make meaning across the different modalities of visual, chronological, aural and oral, emotional, gestural, and textual elements found in a digital story” (Gubrium and Turner 2011). Below is an example excerpt of a transcript from a digital story I made in 2014.