UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

framework accounts for numerous emerging renarrativisations of the memory of the Yugoslav
pasts.
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Digital Storytelling
The objects of my research on Yugoslav digital afterlife—popular music blogs, digital memorial
videos and historical Facebook profiles—are approached as cases of digital storytelling (DS). Joe
Lambert, the founder and director of the Center for Digital Storytelling defines a digital story as ―a
short, first-person video-narrative created by combining recorded voice, still and moving images,
and music and other sounds.‖ A digital storyteller in his view is ―anyone who has a desire to
document life experience, ideas, or feelings through the use of story and digital media.‖ 86 In the
context of this research I propose to slightly expand Lambert‘s conception and use DS to denote
an activity in DME, which aims to (re)narrate personal, collective, present or historical experience,
and does so by producing media objects; through practicing media archaeology in its most
rudimentary form, i.e. searching for online and offline media sources and unravelling the past as
preserved in the media. 87
The one principle/practice that connects all communication modes across time and space is
storytelling: an all-pervasive human activity which is intrinsically related to identity management
and social interaction, and is crucial for the construction, preservation and transmission of
memory. As the author David Grossman notes, ―I think in all of us there is an instinct to tell
stories [...] it is amazing how quickly we are able to recognise one, or an idea which could be
made into a story...‖ 88 Regardless of the media modality or genre, yet in a highly media specific
way, storytelling is a process and practice of externalising/sharing personal experience, and
consequently of preserving traces of the past. This externalisation is done by the way of
(re)narrativisation. From the extensive work on narrative theory, 89 it may be best to adopt Ryan‘s
medium-free, semantically based definition of narrative according to which:
[N]arrative is a type of meaning, or mental image generated in response to certain stimuli. A
narrative text is an artefact designed to bring this meaning to mind. But the cognitive
86 Joe Lambert, Center for Digital Storytelling, available from http://www.storycenter.org/index1.html, Viewed 8
August 2011.
87 Cf. Nick Couldry, ―Mediatization or mediation?,‖ 374.
88 Branko Soban, ―Rumeni veter, ki odganja mir,‖ Sobotna priloga, available from http://www.delo.si/clanek/105839,
accessed 8 August 2011.
89 See for instance Mieke Bal, Narratology, Introduction to the theory of narrative, Translated by Christine van
Boheemen, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1985; David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison,
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985; Monika Fludernik, An Introduction to narratology, London, New York:
Routledge, 2009; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Cornell University Press, 1980.