A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

works within an expansive network of practices that may travel from other places and times to
share with the digital author some control over textual meaning.
In relation to these claims, emerging discussions of storyboarding have touched upon the
idea that discursive, material, and practical structures developed within other cultural practices
can be integrated into the cultural practice of digital storytelling (Hug, 2007; Roche-Smith,
2004a). Roche-Smith (2004), for example, have discussed storyboarding as an important
practical and discursive structure that organizes the complexity of tasks involved in planning,
rehearsing, and envisioning the execution of a digital story. Implicit in her discussion is the idea
that storyboarding embodies cultural practices conventionally associated with professional
filmmaking. As a stabilized practical structure, storyboarding organizes the complex tasks
involved in planning out the sequence of the story and making decisions about how multiple
layers of semiotic resources interact with each other. In important ways, storyboarding brings
with it a long social history of professional filmmaking and embodies a constellation of
decisions, actions, feelings, beliefs, and processes associated with the work of filmmakers. When
this typified way of doing the “work” is brought into confluence with digital storytelling,
storyboarding takes on new meanings as a pedagogical scaffold, which functions to apprentice
novice digital authors into a range professional practices performed by writers, directors,
producers, cameramen, editors, and technical assistants. In the same vein, storyboarding, when
carried out in a digital storytelling workshop, also organizes the collaborative work of
responding to and analyzing a growing story.
Considered together, the work of the connective pedagogues echoes several concerns I
take up in this dissertation, including their attention to how intersecting activity systems in a
given environment shape and structure participants’ experiences with digital storytelling (H.
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