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Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust

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Abstract

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands.

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Notes

  1. A curated list of tools that facilitate creation of digital storytelling in the wider sense, where digital media can be layered with interactivity to make stories more immersive: https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/9-tools-for-journalists-to-produce-immersive-stories/s2/a554425/ [accessed 01 February 2016].

  2. An example of publically funded project, in this case addressing current and future energy choices across two UK regions http://storytelling.research.southwales.ac.uk/StoriesofChange/.

  3. See Meadows and Kidd (2009) for a detailed description of the BBC ‘Capture Wales’ project, which ran from 2001 to 2008, including the method of training facilitators for community digital storytelling events and the structure put in place to enable deployment of such a large scale documentary of local voice across all regions of Wales, UK.

  4. The case study may be reviewed in detail in Copeland (2014). It is important to note that full ethical consideration was given, where participants signed a consent form and understood they could withdraw at any stage or withhold details of their story from the project.

  5. Two online resources for observing the power of the crafted narrative spoken with authentic voice: http://www.storycenter.org/ http://storiesforchange.net/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Mark Vitullo, Marieke Schoots, Midpoint Brabant, the social innovation case contacts, and the students involved for their willingness and efforts to help create and share the stories. In addition, we thank all participants, co-facilitators and funders for their commitment and contributions to the CDST project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Educational Development, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK

    Sarah Copeland

  2. CommunitySense, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Aldo de Moor

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  1. Sarah Copeland
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  2. Aldo de Moor
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Correspondence to Sarah Copeland.

Additional information

Sarah Copeland: No longer at this institution.

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Copeland, S., de Moor, A. Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust. AI & Soc 33, 101–111 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0744-1

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