The legend of the Potatoe

Following on the post about Burn's night, I am now preparing a story on the legend of the potatoe. I did quite a bit of research and found about 10 websites mostly in Spanish with different legends of the story of the potatoe. Some of the legends take us back to Inca, and Aymara mythology; others, are contemporary stories that show the love that people from Latin America have for this delicious tuber. The story I chose comes from the Andean mythology, but specifically from Bolivia and tells of the way the potatoe was given to their people the Sapallas by their god to help them fight against their enemies, the Caris. The plant is given to Choque, a prince who is defiant of the ruling of the Caris. Choque will eventually become the ruler of the Sapallas and he demonstrates his cunning in his handling the gift that the god Pacha Camac will grant him and his people. There is an interesting twist in the story which makes you become really aware of the edible parts of some plants, and that not all that looks like appetising fruits can be edible by humans! I have translated and adapted the story based on an audio file of the project Todas las Voces. Click on the link to listen to the story of the potatoe in Spanish. This project sponsored by Unesco and the Dutch government is capturing traditional myths and legends from Latin America and making them available in audio files in Spanish. The photograph of this shadowy potatoe was done by Babraindette. The full story translated into English and adapted is now available in the Stories from the Americas. Read and enjoy.

Maps as an organising structure for a story

Well, I am back in the UK after having spent one month in Mexico, and we have started the new session of DigiStory. It was quite hard coming back from the sun into darkness and rain, but the children, and the challenge of preparing materials for 6 new sessions of storytelling soon put back the spring in my step.

Andrea Wollard, my collegue and co-conspirator in DigiStory came up with the brilliant idea of using maps as a natural way to help children structure their story. We soon started researching appropriate maps and got 5 maps of popular characters for the children to chose from. Some of the maps were from well know stories such as Narnia, or Winnie the Pooh and Pokemon. The map of this imaginary world was done by Christing-o. To our amazement the children soon took to the idea of using the maps as a natural way to structure the stories that they are creating. It is early days in our exploration of the use of maps, but this little trial certainly looked promising. I am thinking of making a comparison between storyboarding which has been our tried and tested way of helping the children organise their materials and ideas into an ordered sequence, and maps as an organising structure.

Storytelling for a suncken landscape: Valle de Bravo, Mexico

I have just come back from spending 4 days in Valle de Bravo, in the State of Mexico. This is a wonderful village nestled amongst mountains and pine forests. The village has a beautiful lake, and our house, was just a short walk from the lake, where hundreds of ducks, water hens and several herons  waddled happily. The photograph of the lake was taken by Luck Mendez and he has wonderful images of Valle in his page.

Apparently, the area was flooded over 50 years ago to create a huge hydroelectric reservoir. I wished there had been back the possibility of digital storytelling to record the feelings of the people living back then, when their land was flooded and they were relocated. That area is now lost forever, and although what is now the "new" environment is lovely, I became nostalgic about a heritage of stories and memories that is slowly dying because it was not possible or noteworthy enough to record.

We often think that only important events are worth recording, and yet, this is no longer the case; with a video camera, some pictures and sound, anyone can make a story and publish it on the Internet. We can therefore all become digital storytellers, using our creativity to preserve our memories, our daily impressions and thoughts, and whatever strikes us as magical. On this vein, it is worth noting that there are several manuals available for digital storytelling. A recently updated one and freely available for downloading comes from the KQED Digital Storytelling Initiative.

Christmas is here

Well, here I am in sunny Mexico City thinking about storytelling and about the ways in which the story of Jesus' birth has been translated into different folkloric traditions. Here in my homeland, we celebrate the season with "posadas". The image on the right was taken in Colonia Roma, Villa Gustavo A. Madero, DF, Mexico by Esparta.

This is a party in which people re-enact the birth of Jesus by carrying images or little statues of Mary and Joseph around the street, (see the image on Flickr by the Catholic Sun)and singing specific carols until reaching a designated house. The carols are a dialogue where the people in the street ask the people inside the house for permission to enter, and the people inside come up with excuses, why nobody can come in just yet, just yet.... the signing goes on and on and it is quite ritualized, with set tunes, and questions and answers, until finally, one house, opens the door, everyone gets in and then there is a grand party with the children breaking a pinata...
( a claypot, decorated into traditional images, like stars, or the sun, and filled with fruit and candy). The image of these wonderful star-shaped pinatas was taken by El Sol.

I have gotten quite sentimental thinking about this type of celebrations since I went every year until my 21st, to these parties and loved it. Sometimes I was part of the people singing outside the house, and other times, inside their house, readying everything to welcome the Holy family into our home. Feliz Navidad!

Why do computer games have weak stories?

Some years ago, I began to read that parents were really scared that children would spend all their time playing computer games and would lose out on the fun things of childhood, like playing in a park, doing sports, mucking about with paints and mud, or, yes, you guessed it... reading a book or listening/inventing to a story. As it turns out, research has pointed out that out children are in fact quite actively pursuing what interest them, and that on average, they are not spending an inordinate amount of time playing computer games. In fact, most very young children spend quite a bit of their time engaged in fantasy play where they are, yes, indeed, inventing and acting out stories.

It must be a sign of ageism, because I love computers and digital technology but fail to get totally captivated by computer games. Probably because the plots are mostly predictable and in many cases violent. Jesper Julles at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference in Norway in 1998 made a direct comparison between computer games and stories. I am quoting verbatim from his full presentation which you can read here. He came up with this neat comparison table..

"This leads us to a final comparison of the relationship between narratives and computer games:

Narratives	Computer games
Fixed sequence	Flexible sequence
Variable speed (usually compressed)	Fixed speed
Story/discourse	Program/material
Past	Present
Needs human or anthropomorphic actors	Can be abstract
Narrative desire	Desire for understanding & performance
Consume once	Play many times

• Narratives are fixed sequences, games are flexible sequences.
• Narratives vary in the speed with which they are told; uninteresting periods of time are skipped; the movie 48 hours doesn't last 48 hours. Computer games, especially the action game, are fixed speed, real time.
• A narrative has a dualism between the story and the discourse, the computer game is divided between the formal program and the material.
• A narrative is basically something past, a computer game something present.
• A narrative needs human or anthropomorphic actors, a game can be abstract. You can’t imagine a narrative as abstract as Tetris.
• In a narrative, the reader desires to know the ending. In a game, the player wants to understand the structure of the game and to acquire the skills to use this knowledge.
• A narrative is something you consume once, a game is something you play many times.

To sum it up. Computer games and narratives are very different phenomena. Two phenomena that fight each other. Two phenomena that you basically cannot have at the same time. Any interactive narrative or attempt at interactive storytelling is a zigzag between these two columns".

I liked his comparison table very much and mostly agree with his premises, but I do not think that a narrative is always something in the past. In storytelling, the teller is indeed recounting a past event, but everytime the story is told, even by the same person, the story metamorphoses a little and it is never the same. In this case, the story is always present and never in the past. Even narratives recorded in books, are not quite static because the reader absorbs different elements of the narrative and therefore transforms it in his or her own mind. whenever I read, I never absorb everything; my mind takes what I can absorb, disregards what I cannot comprehend and discards what is trivial to my state of mind although, maybe what I have discarded is curcially important to the author. This happened to me once, when I was giving a lecture in Colombia and a person waited until coffee time to discuss line by line one of my papers. He had read into my work, much more depth than what I had originally intended. The text is there, immobile and fixed, but the mind of the reader assigns depth and meaning completely out of the control of the author of the text. This is why I beleive firmly that a printed narrative is as fluid as a story germinating in the imagination of a listener.

Storytelling as an organisational medium for information

I was a former librarian. Perhaps it is therefore not surprising that something about storytelling immediately captivated my imagination. It was not just the plots, and the characters and the voices and the acting, there is something deeply satisfying in identifying the key characteristics of a story and organising them in your mind without the need to commit each element of the story to our minds. The skeleton of the story is what should be remembered, we can then clothe the story with different minutiae as we go along... in this case, each time we tell a story it is fresh, and slightly different, because our, audiences, our voices, our imagination and our feelings will be different each time. There is real beauty in this, because, in a sense, each storyteller is a little bit like a virtuoso improviser, with an outline to guide the heart and the voice. Dr. Sturm from the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill has researched some of the organisational principles behind storytelling as a mechanism to store and retrieve information to memory and I find his presentation in YouTube fascinating. Dr Sturm is also researching the trance-like state hat people experience when listening to stories. I am particularly interested in this because sometimes, some of the children in the audience can be really captivated and attentive to the sotry unfolding in their imagination, through my voice and actions. His article on trance and storytelling is really fascinating.

Comic Life

I have been trying to work on Comic Life to show everyone how easy it is to create a comic out of a series of photographs. I spent a bit of time choosing the layout but after that it was relatively simple stuff. I will show it to the children since they are the main characters in the comic about the rise and shine of DigiStory. I could only upload the comic as a film for the blog but within the comi Life software it is possible to print it directly.

DigiStory presentation for local teachers

Last month we were invited to give a presentation on the concept of DigiStory to teachers within Falkirk Council. We were very excited by this opportunity to work with teachers within our area. I did an hour of presentations and then tackled some questions. We were fortunate to be able to count with the cooperation of the Educational Services in Falkirk. Hopefully we will be able to run storytelling sessions in schools in the near future.