Storytelling
Innovation Fellows discuss narratives.
Jonathan Gottschall: We Are Storytelling Animals
Historians are storytellers at heart. Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fisher was one of my favorite books in undergrad because it read like a novel and contained a ton of fascinating stories. I aim to tell stories about ignored or underrepresented people, places, and events in history. It's even in my teaching statement.
Gottschall is right that we will add our own narrative to a collection of facts. This is, in effect, what historical interpretation is.
The article "DATA STORYTELLING AND HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE" by Seth Denbo discusses how "data storytelling uses narrative techniques in conjunction with qualitative and quantitative information to make the point." He argues that historian's sources are data:
"Examples of these sorts of approaches include treating text as data to enable text mining approaches, digging into sources for information about quantifiable phenomena (population expansion, transportation infrastructure, criminal justice patterns, etc.), or transcribing household budgets from family papers into Excel files. Treating them as sources for historical data allows us to interpret and analyze patterns that might otherwise remain invisible."
This helps me expand my view of storytelling possibilities in the history profession/classroom.
"The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?" from Wired
The Wired article made me think of another immersive show: Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix. The series won one Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding motion design in 2019 for its use of graphics. Minhaj was the first Indian American to front a weekly US talk show, wherein he tackled current events, racial identity, and topics in a hybrid stand-up comedy/news show. In this article, he quips, "the medium is the message. I understand that people who use Netflix as a platform will often dive in at any point in time. Sometimes they dive in with great urgency, like, ‘I need to see that thing right now! It just came out!’ Other times, they’ll revisit things a month later because of how great their friends say it was... With the way that I tell stories, I want things to always feel urgent and timeless."
From a writing perspective, technologies have definitely changed the way I tell stories. We all remember card catalogs, right? And boxes of index cards to organize our research papers? Now, when I write, I conduct research almost exclusively online and use the awesome software Scrivener to organize. This is its own version of "deep media" as the Wired article describes.
As much as I love technology and incorporate as many modalities as possible (without frustrating/confusing everyone!) into my teaching (I always request the Active Learning room at the West Houston Institute early!), there's a side of me that needs different stories. I belonged to a Quaker meeting in England for several years and I still uphold much of the spiritual practices of silence and self-direction. This also goes along with my mindfulness practice (although I listen to an app for that, so do with that what you will).
I'm building a digital narrative through my website and Twitter and the stories I choose to publish online.
