Digital storytelling, as we know it today, began as a movement in the 1990s within a group of artists and media producers in Berkeley, California. The group’s initial idea was to combine traditional oral storytelling techniques with contemporary digital technology. The term storytelling was used, for the first time, by Dana Atchley and his collaborator Joe Lambert in the 1990s. They used it to describe a complex (especially for the time) interactive system that incorporated digital multimedia into theatre-based storytelling performances – on stage a large screen positioned behind the performers showed a variety of personal pre-recorded stories.

Since then, digital storytelling has become an integral part of our everyday lives and has radically changed the way in which we tell stories. Nowadays, this process is mainly executed through the use and support of contemporary technologies in an almost automatic way. Operations such as reading newspapers online, watching video platforms, mixing and remixing digital content and production of audio-visual content for social media are very familiar to a wide part of the global population. However, digital storytelling as a wider concept is not only a multimedia product but it is a well-defined process of making, reflecting, learning and distributing. 

In the context of National Storytelling Week, what we do at the International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling (IRIS), at Leeds Trinity University, is to explore a large variety of storytelling forms from an interdisciplinary point of view, often relating more traditional forms with contemporary digital, interactive, immersive and non-linear narratives. 

One of the main focuses of IRIS, besides developing new knowledge and research in the broader field of storytelling with a focus on media and the ‘digital’, is to bring our findings into the lecture hall and continue the discussion with our students, thereby engaging them with the latest developments in the field (e.g., immersion, multi-perspectival thinking and decolonising the media).

The aim of this is to develop a holistic teaching approach that uses digital storytelling not just as a tool, but also as an educational method to enable student learning (such as using alternative ways of sharing experiences and alternative assessments).

We believe that the importance of digital storytelling in class is key in, among others, developing communicative abilities and skill, consolidating digital competences, enhancing cooperation and collaboration, and developing new ways of telling stories. Digital storytelling, through the use of multiple narrative forms (such as historical, linear and non-linear), is fundamental for the construction and distribution of knowledge, consequently increasing several other opportunities. For example, making content more accessible and improving reflective processes in a collective and collaborative environment.

Ultimately, storytelling is a cognitive, emotional, educational and socialising instrument of knowledge, capable of getting close to the interests of students and giving adequate answers and tools to the current complex emerging learning needs. Furthermore, the digital environment, which is composed of social media, forums, chats and such – all immediate communicative platforms – has the capacity to enable a sense of collaboration within a multi-perspectival environment that can help the students to respect and reflect on the differences of each one through multiple perspectives, voices and ideas.

Dr Stefano Odorico is a Reader in Contemporary Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University. Find out more about the International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling (IRIS).