I’ve been part of a discussion on a Facebook digital storytelling group this week about people using DS for research communication.

It seems many researchers don’t see it as useful as it will never be able to convey the complexity of their research topic or methodologies but thought this comment from Karen Diaz from Ohio State Uni summed it up nicely:

We tell people that the story is a good way to “start the conversation” of their work, to emphasize the importance and significance of what they are working on. A digital story is not the place to express methodology or research results, but to help people understand why they/society/the audience should care about the work they are engaged in.

In other words as a way of explaining why this research “matters to me and why it should matter to you.”

It’s something that applies to not just research but any area where communicating effectively with people outside the scope of a project. It’s a tool for public engagement.

What might it look like? Here are a couple of Swedish examples (in English with Swedish subtitles) that were posted by Ragnhild Larsson from Konvoj Produktion.

There are also quite a few examples available from Karen Diaz at Ohio State Uni.

I wondered how people taking students out on fieldwork might make use of something like the AR Drone…

For doing remote HD filming/imaging of locations…

…and flips! (rad!)

It’s not cheap, mind. And the range and battery life are limited (although it’s tricky to find out exact numbers from the product’s homepage).

Plus, we should probably have a think about the safety and privacy issues of drones in private hands with cameras in built-up areas!

But if you used it as an additional tool for surveying a location from elevated angles there could be all sorts of useful applications. In a limited sense it could be used to improve accessibility to some difficult-to-reach landscape features.

Definitely need to get one to test in the office!

In my later years I hope to be able to walk around any part of Scotland, point to the horizon and exclaim without hesitation things like, “ah yes, Buachaille Etive Mor. A challenging climb but well worth the effort, my lad.” Or something similar.

Trouble is, at the moment I have very little idea what I’m looking at. Even looking at an OS map and working out what peaks are going to be visible in 3D space is a headache.

Take this pic for example, taken near Crainlarich:

This was the (moonlit) view from a campsite I was at with the family recently. I knew Ben More was out of shot to the left but the other peaks I had only a vague idea.

So this clever website is a real bonus. It’s caled Peakfinder.

You enter in a location using Google Maps or coordinates then it spits out a simple line-drawn panorama showing the names of the visible peaks around you.

Here’s the same horizon as the pic above:

Which is kind of neat.

You can share the exact view you’ve found via Facebook or a URL or download the entire panorama as a PDF.

They do have a mobile app available but only for certain locations (Alps, and parts of USA and Canada).

You could bodge something together using Layar if you wanted an AR version but that has a number of problems like poor coverage in mountainous areas and being able to see markers for peaks that aren’t even visible from your viewpoint. It takes quite some GIS jiggery-pokery to achieve that.

Is it useful?

Certainly from the point of view of helping establish a sense of place and orientation if you’re out in the field, or combining it with a traditional map reading exercise (compare the horizon view with what’s represented on an OS map? Sketch a peak’s prfile from the contours on the map then compare with PeakFinder?).

Perhaps students could try reverse engineering something like it using GIS tools for something a bit more challenging.

Just a quickie (although it took me ages to get Storify to do what I wanted. Grr!)

Digested Read

A welcome return for an event that really should be a regular feature of the calendar. The technology has moved on in the last year and there seems to be more confidence and a sort of academic mischief-making in the air!

The full story… 

I think my favourite event from 2011 was the Enhancing Fieldwork Learning Showcase in Margam, South Wales where I did a brief session on QR codes and fieldwork. More importantly, it was an event that introduced me to a whole new community of people, new ways of working and reconnected me with original discipline of geography.

This year I was invited back to talk about digital storytelling which I summed up here.

Here are some of my highlights and personal reflections from this year.

What was the same as last year? Same broad range of attendees from different disciplines and perspectives. Loads of varied presentations including giving a schools’ viewpoint on geography and fieldwork. There was the same levels of enthusiasm and fun from attendees and the organising group. The feeling of fieldwork being an intergral part of not only people’s subject areas but of their personal identities. Good food.

What was different? A greater sense of adventure, confidence and risk-taking all round. The profile of the types of technology.

Technology? Last year, one or two people had talked about using iPads but most mobile devices had been phones. This year it felt more like iPads were becoming an increasingly essential bit of fieldwork equipment (but not a panacea!).

Thats good, right? Yes. Well, sort of. There was no doubt that there’s a fantastic range of possibilities that the iPad brings from the functional to the creative and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do my session without it. But there’s a distinct lack of alternatives out there. This left a lot of questions buzzing in my head about increasing consolidation of one ecosystem (even if it’s a good one) and the reliance on computing as consumption. All being well, in the next 5 years students arriving at universities and colleges will have benefitted from a ICT curriculum which builds skills in coding and computing as construction and creation. How can fieldwork incorporate this? Is there a place in fieldwork for Arduino or Raspberry Pi?

Who was participating? A powerful aspect of the showcase was it’s multi-discipline audience. We had Alan Parkinson from Mission:Explore encouraging us to look at fieldwork in a new and irreverent way. David Rogers of the Priory School in Portsmouth showed how a school with very limited access to outdoor space can make the most of its environment and why being a “troublemaker” can be a lot of fun AND have a measurable impact on results. Sarah Taylor from Keele University showed off the use of the Vertex IV in her research and teaching. Rick Stafford from Bedfordhsire Uni talked about using mobile devices in a citizen science project to collect biodiversity data. Judith Lock talked about the ecology work she had done based on what she had learned at last year’s event which gave a nice feeling of continuity. And Brian Whalley showed off the potential of iPads as field notebooks (with honourable mentions going to Skitch and Notability). That’s not the half of it but no doubt there will be more information on the project site shortly.

Any other ideas rattling around your head? We did a bit of horizon scanning and thought about these…

• Fieldwork as hacking. Lots of talk about the recent FSC hack day. Maybe field trips could be something similar. Identify a question or problem at a location, then have students working on how they would answer or solve the question and deciding on or designing the tools to do it.
• Multi-discipline multi-age fieldwork. Field activities tend to happen in subject areas. I remember from my time at Uni that the geographers went to Turkey and the geologists went to Norway. Why not mix it up? What happens when a geopgrapher, a geologist, a computer scientist and an artist do fieldwork together?

Sounds like the start of a really bad joke. Fair enough. But also, David’s presentation on Priory made me think that his students are geographers too, all part of the same apprenticeship continuum. Why can’t fieldwork involve a range of ages and backgrounds? Students working with professors working with local communities etc etc.

• 3D Printing. One of the FSC guys talked about the possibility of using Rep-Rap with survey data to create 3D models of landscapes, transects and the like. Imagine modelling the flow of water over a hillside you just surveyed that day and printed out.
• Technology and fieldcraft
• What will we be talking a out next year? There wasn’t much discussion of augmented reality which was interesting. Maybe that’s to do with connectivity in the field, that its readability is less than perfect or that creating AR materials can be so darn complicated. With Google Glasses and other HUD devices on the horizon what might fieldwork look like in a efw years’ time.
• Access to open data stream could be a powerful addition to fieldwork. We had a demonstration of how this might work with live river discharge data from a gauging station being displayed on an iPad as we stood on the bank of the Severn.
• Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tablet dock for hooking up environmental sensors. Something like the Alesis I/O dock but for these bad boys instead of audio.

Anything else? There was loads of stuff going on but I’d suggest following Enhancing Fieldwork Learning on Twitter and Pinterest to keep up with further reports from the event and future development.

In the meantime, as well as some of the activity from the event I took a couple of pics of the rather lovely surroundings. I’m off for a cup of tea.

I had obviously behaved well enough at last year’s showcase in Wales to be invited back for another event from the HEA funded Enhancing Fieldwork Learning Team. This year was at the rather lovely Preston Montford FSC just outside Shrewsbury.

I had mixed feelings about going. Last year’s event had been brilliant but last time I was in Shrewsbury there was an earthquake. Thankfully, this year was fascinating educationally and boring seismically.

The event brings together geographers, geologists, biologists, environmental scientists and the like to share their experiences of enhacing fieldwork through the use of technology.

Now, I don’t do fieldwork (although I do like to get out and about) so my session was mostly about seeding ideas and experimenting. 

This year I chose to focus on “Footloose Digital Storytelling”. I had a morning session to talk about what digital storytelling was and then embarked on a rash plan to get the entire group to film, edit and publish their own digital story using iPads and iPhones (one person used an iPod Touch).

We used the free version of Splice which, although doesn’t have the most features of mobile editing apps, is one of the simplest and suited our purposes really well.

It’s not without its bugs and quirks but in the end the group had created 16 movies and given that they’d only really had an hour to make it I was pretty bowled over.

For the record, I’d never suggest squeezing an actual storytelling session into on hour. It needs time to do it right. This was a bit hit and run and the attendees did really well to cope. One said it had simultaneously been a good experience and hell on earth, which sounds about right.

Originally I’d thought of setting them the task of creating a movie with a specified title but in the end I thought I’d surrender that side of things to them and just asked them to tell their own story of the event. Let many flowers bloom. You can see most of them here but here’s a couple showing the varied approaches.

Mobile devices are not ideal as tools for this sort of thing but it’s still pretty amazing what that you can shoot, edit and share a movie using your phone or tablet. YOUR PHONE!

FOR FREE!!

Pip Hardy likened this to criticising a talking dog. Do you quibble over its accent and vocabulary?

As part of the experiment we discovered that Splice works quite happily without any wifi or 3G connectivity. A couple of the attendees are now considering getting their students to do digital storytelling whilst on field work abroad – I’m eagerly awaiting the results of those.

Coming shortly – my reflections on the rest of the event…

Still catching up on blogging stuff I should have done months ago.

Back in April and May some of us at Netskills and our colleagues at JISC Infonet took part in 4 days of digital storytelling workshops with Alex Henry of Curiosity Creative.

Alex has a wealth of experience in the field of DS having project managed Cultureshock, one of the UK’s biggest digital storytelling projects, on behalf of Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums. Following on from a conference Andy Stewart and I attended last September we asked Alex to come in and help us develop our skills and approaches.

It was a great few days.

This is the story that I created. It’s quite a personal, reflective one. We made it with iMovie HD and it mostly uses some of my pics, creative commons images and sound effects which are credited at the end. My favoured Flickr CC search tool is this one. The sounds came from the excellent Freesound.The pic of the sandwich is mine as evidenced by Steve Boneham!

A few weeks after producing this Alex interviewed me for a segment on basic.fm, asking me to reflect on the process. Over the 18 mins or so we talk about the process of creating the story but also a couple of points about balancing subjectivity with authenticity.

Hopefully it gives a bit of an insight into all the stuff that happens around digital storytelling but doesn’t appear on screen.

It includes the audio from the story at from about 13:30-15:20.

By the way, my wife still hasn’t seen it. I just never seem to remember. Hopeless, really.

Here are some of the other stories created by us on the day

Steve Boneham

Jacquie Kelly

Marianne Sheppard

The summary

WeVideo is an online video editor that allows cloud storage of assets and finished videos. It’s got a good feature set and nice links to social media tools. But it won’t do everything.

Pros

• Free
• Sign in with Google, Facebook or Yahoo
• Good links to YouTube, Vimeo
• Very broad music and sounds library
• Multi track video and audio
• Cloud-based storage means potential for collaborative projects and cableless mobile uploads (Android).

Cons

• Limited media storage
• Free accounts limited to exporting at 360p with watermark. Max 480p for $2.99 a pop.
• Only 15 export minutes/month 
• Some effects are limited (e.g. Ken Burns zooming on images)

The detail

I’ve been struggling to come up with a decent video editing tool to use on the Netskills storytelling workshop recently. Photostory 3 is showing it’s age, MovieMaker has had it’s feature list decimated and using iMovie would mean both a massive outlay on shiny Mac kit and learning a whole new, unintuitive workflow for editing. 

Part of the solution will probably be to turn it into a BYOD event so people can use the software they are most familiar with (and it opens up the option of using iOS for storytelling too) but there needs to be a fallback for those that either have no device or software.

Online tools seem to be the best way forward in theory. We do training in numerous venues so there’s always a chance that when I turn up some aspect of installed software won’t work or I don’t have enough priveleges to sort problems. This happened with Phot Story 3 at the last venue where the mics I’d brought along didn’t work with the sound cards so attendees needed to yell their narration into the built-in webcam mics – not great.

Web tools are always going to be a compromise. In the past Jaycut would probably have sufficed but that was bought out by RIM a while back.

WeVideo appeared last year and looks very promising.

It comes in a 2 flavours, a stripped down editor as part of YouTube’s Create range of services, or a I’m not recommending WeVideo for day to day editing. It doesn’t have the flexibility. But as a tool for workshops and to get people started on the path of using non-linear editing tools it works very well.

You can see from the summary above that there are some limitations for the free version of the site but that’s fair enough. These sites have to make money somehow.

For our digital storyteling projects we need to ability to import images,video, audio over a number of tracks, add text and simple effects such as pan & zoom on still images. WeVideo allows all that.

The Ken Burns effect is quite important for image-based digital storytelling. Although this has it and give the ability to centre a zoom on a focal point it only allows a zoom out which over a few minutes becomes very repetitive. I’ve raised this with them but it doesn’t look like it’ll change any time soon.

The final output is low quality on the free account and it has a permanent but discrete watermark, but as I said. Fair enough, it’s a free tool. The ease of exporting directly to YouTube or Vimeo is a real bonus.

This is what I put together from some HD footage and images this morning. Music is “Pipeline” by Rho )

Despite the compromises on quality, it does the job nicely.

A word on using online tools

Using online tools isn’t always the best option. The availability and feature set of these sort of tools are subject to change with little notice. For indiviual uses it’s possible to weather those storms. When you’re putting together resources and planning workshop activities a sudden change can really screw things up. There have been a number of times when tools I’ve relied on have suddenly vanished (see sadly departed Fliggo).

The only way round this is to keep an eye on developments through following the official twitter account, talk to the developers and always have a fall back plan.

I’ve been reading a lot about narrative for my dissertation recently and came across 2 examples this morning that illustrate some of the ideas I’ve come across.

Oatmeal on Game of Thrones

The first simple example is from the Oatmeal. It says it’s about Game of Thrones but is actually about media companies completely misunderstanding the web.

One way of looking at storytelling is that it’s a way of framing complex, abstract concepts in a way that is both engaging, memorable and helps understanding. Some authors say that story is the primary way we understand the world.

So, with the Oatmeal example we have a simple depiction of an individual trying to do the right thin, being thwarted and finding, as the author sees it, a reasonable solution to the problem.

So, it takes some abstract points about the piracy debate, uses narrative to contextualise them, keep our interest, create an emotional response and hopefully make it more “sticky“.

Why is being in the digital domain important? As a static image it could have been published in a magazine or on a notice board. By being digital it give an audience a way of interacting and responding. At the most basic level it had over 6k likes and 2.5k shares on Facebook as well as 18.4k retweets. This helps the people that come across it incorporate it into their own personal and social narratives about piracy, IPR, SOPA, ACTA or whatever.

The Tale of the Invention of the Incredible Folding Plug

This is more of a distributed bunch of content telling a story.

Now the invention is plainly awesome in a why-has-this-not-been-done-before-it-could-transform-my-life way so I can immediately relate to it.

But what you also have around it through Rory Cellan Jones’ interview, the business’s website, the product demo (embedded above), and all the other mentions in the media (traditional and social) is a story about the product.

We have a cast of characters, a macguffin (the invention), a plot, setting, triumphs, hurdles to be overcome, quite a clear timeline and perhaps the possibility of a sequel.

Somehow, just watching the product demo (embedded above), although it contains some elements of story, doesn’t quite have enough of the human content to make it properly engaging.

My own reaction is that I’m thinking about the product in a much broader way, seeing how it would fit into my own life but also having it humanised by the story of its inventor and his business partner and how it fits into the wider narrative of startups and innovation in the UK.

Just saw this on the Neiman Journalism Lab blog…

A collaboration between Condition One and The Guardian it’s a slightly more interactive approach to video where you have an element of control over where the camera is looking.

Is it more than just interesting? It would make some intriguing digital stories where the viewer is more actively selecting what elements of the story to view.  

Is it a flavour of AR where the “reality” can be displayed independent of location (picture it with points of interest embedded into the video)? 

Could this be what Google Streetview looks like in a few years’ time?