Storytelling in Storify: I Have a Secret

This week in ds106 we are returning to something we have not done since the Spring of 2011, the idea of telling stories within the web – you can find more information in this week’s assignment.

While we have been publishing stories on the web, in our blogs, these assignments are meant to get you thinking how you can have stories exist in the spaces of other web sites, or reshaping web sites to tell a snew story. It is stories not ON the web, but within it, tangled with it:

Over the next week we’ll be playing with storytelling within the web. What does this mean? Well, Martha Burtis lays out the idea nicely in this post here about the idea behind this assignment (read it!), but to briefly summarize: you will be intervening in the code and design of a website of your choice to tell a story. You are not to photoshop the design of the site (if you can), but rather intervene in the actual html and CSS of the site””though you can photoshop particular images on the site.

Thus we have a small set of Web Assignments with the required one we want students to do is Storytelling Within the Web. IN this go around, we are having our students use the new Mozilla Hackasaurus tool, which is very elegant about using the browser as means to alter the content of existing web pages. The harder part is getting students to save the HTML as text, but as Martha discovered, the HTML can be direct uploaded yo WordPress, making it easy to link to it from a blog post.

But woah, I am straying from the topic. We’ve been trying to add a few more assignments to the mix. I’ve been liking Storify as a nice tool for aggregating content from various social media sites- it allows you to search in flickr, twitter, youtube, soundcloud, or just grab a URL, and drag and drop it into a timeline. You can re-order items, and even add text in between the segments. I really like the way Audrey Watters has been using this to take notes and mix in other media from conferences she attends.

Given the use of Story in Storify, I thought, we cannot we just make narrative out of the bits and clips and stuff of these spaces? Hence the Storify It assignment.

Storify is a tool that allows you to pick and chose content from multiple social media sites- flickr, facebook, youtube, soundcloud, instagram, or just from a URL — and to assemble it in a narrative. Often it is used to capture the highlights of an event, but there is no reason you could not use it to create a story constructed of bits that exist elsewhere on the net.

See if you can tell an original story (or re-tell a known one) in the Storify site, and then embed the results in your own web site.

So here is the second one I did.

It really started with just a title. I wanted to see if I can get most of the dialogue from tweets- it is kind of hit and miss, but after some stabs I got a lot fo the lines I wanted, but then some of them led to a YouTube clip that a 12 year old did as a trailer for a book! (Bigger than a Breadbox) — it pretty much evolved as I went. Maybe I will see if you can figure it out- Here it is embedded:

I kind of enjoyed doing this organically and not sure which way it would go. I wanted it to not be literal.

The first time around I played with this, well, I was stuck. So I thought of seeing if I could retell something that was already a story. SO I searched on “parables” and ended up on a list of Aesop’s Fables and after clicking through a few, decided to take on Lion in Love– it is short, lends itself to media, and definitely has a moral at the end.

I am not sure if this is any more interesting to doa literal story. The fun part is seeing what you can find to represent the story elements. I used the text to insert the story in between.

Yes, Love can tame the wildest — or only a cat would be dumb enough to give up its attributes for a chick? Who knows.

Anyhow, there we go. Two examples in one post

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