Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community

Listen deeply. Tell stories. This is the mantra of the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkeley California, which, since 1998 has worked with nearly 1,000 organizations around the world and trained more than 15,000 people in the art of digital storytelling.

In this revised and updated edition of the CDS's popular guide to digital storytelling, co-founder Joe Lambert details the history and methods of digital storytelling practices. Using a "7 Steps" approach, Lambert helps storytellers identify the fundamentals of dynamic digital storytelling--from seeing the story, assembling it, and sharing it. As in the last edition, readers of the fourth edition will also find new explorations of the applications of digital storytelling and updated appendices that provide resources for budding digital storytellers, including information about past and present CDS-affiliated projects and place-based storytelling, a narrative-based approach to understanding experience and landscape. A companion website further brings the entire storytelling process to life.

Over the years, the CDS's work has transformed the way that community activists, educators, health and human services agencies, business professionals, and artists think about story, media, culture, and the power of personal voice in creating change. For those who yearn to tell multimedia stories, Digital Storytelling is the place to begin.

Joe Lambert founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (formerly the San Francisco Digital Media Center) in 1994, with his wife Nina Mullen and colleague Dana Atchley. Together they developed a unique computer training and arts program around the Digital Storytelling Workshop. This process grew out of Joe's long running collaboration with Dana on the solo theatrical multimedia work Next Exit. Since then, Joe and his organization have traveled the world to spread the practice of digital storytelling.