Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community

In this revised and updated edition of the StoryCenter's popular guide to digital storytelling, StoryCenter founder Joe Lambert offers budding storytellers the skills and tools they need to craft compelling digital stories. Using a "Seven Steps" approach, Lambert helps storytellers identify the fundamentals of dynamic digital storytelling – from conceiving a story, to seeing, assembling, and sharing it. Readers will also find new explorations of the global applications of digital storytelling in education and other fields, as well as additional information about copyright, ethics, and distribution. The book is filled with resources about past and present projects on the grassroots and institutional level, including new chapters specifically for students and a discussion of the latest tools and projects in mobile device-based media. This accessible guide’s meaningful examples and inviting tone makes this an essential for any student learning the steps toward digital storytelling.

Joe Lambert founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (now StoryCenter) in 1994. He and his colleagues developed a computer training and arts program known as the digital storytelling workshop. Joe and his staff have traveled the world to spread the practice of digital storytelling, to all 50 U.S. states and some 48 countries. Lambert is author of Seven Stages: Story and the Human Experience (Digital Diner Press). In 2017, he celebrated his 34th year as an Executive Director of StoryCentre, having evolved his work in the 1980s in the performing arts to work in digital storytelling and media education in the 1990s.

Brooke Hessler is Director of Learning Resources at California College of the Arts, where she teaches multimodal inquiry and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Community Literacy Journal, Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, and Digital Storytelling in Higher Education: International Perspectives, among other journals and collections. An award-winning instructor of media arts-integrated courses, her digital story work has included long-term collaborations with K-16 educators, community arts activists, museums, and survivors of natural disasters and domestic terrorism.