Photo Story Research Articles

Trust in God

Photo number: 1 Photo location: Ghana photo description: a powerful rear-view image of a large blue truck carrying 40+ standing people and 10+ sitting people on the top rack. Across...

Steps for integrating a digital story into an EFL lesson using Photo Story 3

This forum paper describes the steps involved in integrating a digital story into an EFL class using a free software application called Photo Story 3. This paper maintains that the sequencing of the often cited phases of pre-production, production, and post-production, and the accompanying steps of digital story production, do not completely satisfy the logistics involved for integrating a digital story into a regular EFL lesson. Therefore, while retaining the three phases of production, an alternative set of steps is proposed. While some of these “alternative” steps appear trivial and axiomatic, the often unique set of circumstances that surround an EFL teaching setting (for example, class time devoted to language study, learner motivation and interest, level of computer literacy), requires a set of steps that are not only in tune with the reality of the teaching setting but whose sequencing also allows for smooth class management of the assigned software. A detailed explanation of the steps involved in each phase is given, including potential pitfalls teachers may encounter using Photo Story 3, and in some cases, possible solutions are offered.

Meaning representation in video outcomes of inquiry project

As student assignments and assessment evolve to keep pace with the technological developments, students have the opportunity to express their knowledge in a wider range of forms. The current study aims to examine the meaning representation in videos produced by secondary school students as part of a non-written inquiry project. The content of the video outcomes in the inquiry project, student interviews, and reflection essays written by the six participating students who were of different academic achievement levels were analyzed to better understand their meaning representation using videos. Five types of literacies used by the students in their video outcomes for meaning representation were identified: text, action, narration, cinematography and acoustics. The findings also showed that there were three types of meaning representations with different characteristics: drama, documentary and photo story. The components identified to be required for meaning representation in video were attitude towards video representation, choice of inquiry topic, organizational skills, and data management. The findings informed us of the possibility of diversified use of literacies for meaning representation in different genres of videos. The findings also alerted us of the need to equip students with necessary attitude and skills for better meaning representation. Nevertheless, the need to support learners to present meanings well with videos is suggested.

Facades of Suffering: Clients' Photo Stories About Mental Illness

In this article, photo stories are examined that were the result of working with photography as a therapeutic instrument dealing with suffering in mental health care settings. The purpose is to describe the role of facades in the process of suffering and acceptance. Clients took photographs, talked about them in group meetings, and exhibited them to a broader audience. Their photo stories were analyzed using a mixed-methods model. Data from two narrative approaches (semiotics and hermeneutics) were compared with information from other informants and official records to find discrepancies between the photo story and the real life context. Although facades are usually perceived as an obstacle for personal growth, the visual narratives revealed that facades can function as an alternative to common acceptance strategies, such as facing one's losses and reconciliation. Facades can create a distance between the person and the suffering. We conclude that visual narratives can reveal and foster agency in clients.

Readers’ interpretations of visual and verbal narratives of a National Geographic story on Saudi Arabia

Using a National Geographic magazine story on Saudi Arabia as a case study, this article examines how pictures and text in a photo story interact to produce meaning for readers. Specifically, it investigates how participants’ perceptions of Saudi Arabia differed when they were exposed only to the text of the article, only to its photographs, or to both text and photographs, using focus group interviews. Participants exposed only to the text saw it as a cohesive narrative. The ‘photos only’ groups tended to jump between photographs without a linear pattern. The ‘text and photos’ groups perceived the photo story as composed of two competing narratives, which made them uncomfortable. In addition, readers exposed to the visual narrative — even when combined with the textual narrative — expressed more stereotypical views of the subjects than those exposed to the text only. The photographs appeared to detract from the text’s ability to generate a more complex understanding of Saudi culture.

Ding Pingjun. Gazing at the cradle of the duststorm: a photo story of humans and the environment in Alxa

This book looks at Alxa, in far western Inner Mongolia, China, through the eyes of farmers and herdsmen. Beautifully presented and very moving, it uses photoelicitation to connect ‘‘place to voice and place to landscape’’ (Beilin 2005, p. 57). The photographers are 23 farmers and Mongolian herders from two places in Alxa. The images they have made are captioned with their stories, recorded through interviews by Ding Pingjun and her Mongolian colleague Meng Gen. The book was developed by the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology (SEE) which was founded in Alxa in 2005 (http://see.sina.com.cn/en/). It had its origins in a participatory project managed by the Development Institute for Tradition and Environment and funded by the Ford Foundation. The aim was to explore local people’s views and understandings of the environment and natural resources, and encourage them in environmental protection and community development. Alxa, or Alashan in Mandarin Chinese, is a significant source area for dust storms that impact densely populated areas of northern China, Korea and Japan, and whose frequency increased markedly around the millenium (Shao and Dong 2006). The lead-up to the Beijing Olympics focused China and the world’s attention on the impact and risk of these storms, prompting restoration efforts including progressively excluding livestock from degraded rangelands. That is one part of the story of rapid environmental change in Alxa. Another belongs to 27 year old ethnic Mongolian Wujimucao:

The bigger picture

A photo essay on care of older people that depicted the delivery of intimate care caused furore when it was published in a New Zealand nursing journal. The authors describe the aftermath of publication and what they have learned from the episode.

Digital storytelling: a meaningful technology-integrated approach for engaged student learning

Although research emphasizes the importance of integrating technology into the curriculum, the use of technology can only be effective if teachers themselves possess the expertise to use technology in a meaningful way in the classroom. The aim of this study was to assist Egyptian teachers in developing teaching and learning through the application of a particular digital technology. Students were encouraged to work through the process of producing their own digital stories using MS Photo Story, while being introduced to desktop production and editing tools. They also presented, published and shared their own stories with other students in the class. Quantitative and qualitative instruments, including digital story evaluation rubric, integration of technology observation instruments and interviews for evaluating the effectiveness of digital storytelling into learning were implemented to examine the extent to which students were engaged in authentic learning tasks using digital storytelling. The findings from the analysis of students-produced stories revealed that overall, students did well in their projects and their stories met many of the pedagogical and technical attributes of digital stories. The findings from classroom observations and interviews revealed that despite problems observed and reported by teachers, they believed that the digital storytelling projects could increase students' understanding of curricular content and they were willing to transform their pedagogy and curriculum to include digital storytelling.

2007 Leadership Academy for Educators

2007 Leadership Academy for Educators

Titanstraße: a bridge between cultures: a text photo story

This project aimed to engage secondary-school pupils in an experimental open-learning situation. They had to structure the learning process themselves and identify their own artistic strategies and research methods so as to arrive at personal artistic statements. In the intensive, difficult and painful process of becoming exposed to a strange place, pupils were initially disturbed and/or alienated. This internal and external confrontation triggered exploratory processes in which forgotten places that had been experienced differently were associated with a new place and a new self open to, contingent upon and increasingly dominated by personal questions and actions. In artistic research it is possible to achieve multiple results through intensive self-reflection, external observation, investigation, documentation and associations. The results are affected by individual choices in an artistic exploration strategy where methods and knowledge anchored in the pupil's prior understanding are acquired inductively during the process of exploration in a way that resembles scientific research.

ENGAGING OUR AUDIENCE THROUGH PHOTO STORIES

In trying to shape product development at Microsoft®, a fast‐moving American technology corporation, we ethnographers continually attempt to engage product team colleagues in new and distinctive ways. To this end, we recently utilized Photo Story, a new method of data delivery. Although not without its potential pitfalls, this method is useful for developing design ideas together with our product team. It also foregrounds the visual in applied anthropology. We completed a month of ethnographic research in Brazil in July 2003, spending time with four families and four university students in Sao Paulo and Brasilia. While there, we collected data on their daily lives and on the role of technology in their lives. Through Photo Story, we brought our colleagues as close to this field experience as possible short of actually taking them along with us. By stringing together narrative and images, we reflexively shared our experiences and impressions of Brazil and the daily experiences of our participants with all of our “viewers”. Photo Story forced us to cede some, although not all, of our authoritative control over interpretation, which ultimately opened the way for us to develop a novel approach of making sense of the data together with our colleagues.

The 1998 Denny C. Plattner Appalachian Heritage Awards

The 1998 Denny C. Plattner Appalachian Heritage Awards This is the third year that I have chaired the committee selecting the Denny C. Plattner Appalachian Heritage award winners, and each year I have become more aware of the excellence of the writing about Appalachia that is published in this magazine and the importance ofAppalachian Heritage to the region. Richard B. Drake assesses the impact ofAppalachian Heritage on the region in an essay in this current volume: "Unlike other Appalachian journals, Berea's Appalachian Heritage has solicited reviews and articles that have often gone contrary to the prevailing fads of scholarship that have dominated historical and social science over the past several decades. During her editorship, Sidney Farr has guided Appalachian Heritage to a unique and wide-ranging regional role." The Denny C. Plattner Awards were established in 1993 by Kenneth and Elissa May Plattner in honor of their deceased son, who had a deep appreciation (as do his parents) of writers and writing. The Plattners are grateful to be associated with the best and brightest new-and established-writers of the Appalachian region. The judges for the contest this year were: Sandra Ballard, Bruce Lawson, Danny Miller, Steve Mooney, and Dorothy Schnare. Ours was a difficult but rewarding job. In the memory of Denny C. Plattner, we congratulate the winners of these awards for their excellence in writing. We would also like to acknowledge the beautiful photography in all the issues (including the photo story by Randy Ball "Looking for Signs"). -Danny Miller, Committee Chairperson Articles/Essays Michael McFee: "Back Home"-Spring Richard B. Drake: "Berea's Appalachian Commitment"-Summer Bill Best: "Heirloom Tomatoes"-Fall Fiction Karin Vingle: "Missing Millie"-Spring Silas Dwane House: "An Unsent Letter"-Winter Richard Sears: "A Quarter's Worth of Dusf'-Winter Poetry Mary Jo Thomas: "Partial Paralysis"-Summer Rebecca Bailey: "How I Find the Sun"-Winter Walter Lane: "Attitude Adjustment"-Fall ...

Automatic association of news items

A new media for news delivery has emerged in which print, photographs, video, and audio can be integrated into personalized multimedia news presentations. An electronic news delivery system produces personal ‘editions’ by selecting news items from various sources in a variety of media types and ordering and/or grouping these items for presentation. Clearly, if personalized and dynamic ‘editions’ of news are to be a reality then algorithms are needed that select and group items with minimal human intervention. In this paper we will examine only one of the problems involved in the automatic generation of electronic editions: the association of related items of different media type, specifically photos and stories. The goal of this research is to be able to determine to what degree any two news items refer to the same news event. This metric has several uses. First, it can be used to link multimedia items that can be shown together, such as a video, photo, and text story related to a shipwreck or state visit. Second, it can be used to form clusters of very similar items from a variety of sources so that one or two can be chosen to represent that event in an edition. In this paper we discuss the specific association of text and photo news items although our approach to the problem of defining relationships between photos and stories applies to a larger domain of news items including scripted news video clips and scripted radio broadcasts.

John Berger and Jean Mohr

Abstract Photo narrative is usually defined as a visual narrative that uses photographic images arranged in sequence and mounted on a page. Thus the difference between photography and photo narrative is clearly of a technical nature particularly as regards framing and out-of-frame: in photography, the edges of the image signify an absolute break, whereas in photographic narration that same break is only relative since each fragment of a photo story is always preceded, surrounded or followed by other fragments. More importantly, the difference is also an ideological, if not an ethical one, since photographic narration actively rejects the tenets of traditional photography, as symbolized by Henri Cartier-Bresson, in that it welcomes the use of artifice; it does not strive to capture the unique moment but deals specifically with the contrived image and relies on a sequential format. Finally, the photo story views its hostmedium, whose specific characteristics arc ignored by photographers, in a completely different way; Bresson's art lends itself to any form of presentation (book, magazine, exhibition, and so on), whereas the photo story is conceived and produced with a very particular host-medium in mind, i.e. the page.

Duane Michals' real dreams

Abstract The roman-photo, a kitsch, devitalized genre, is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the more experimental, analytical genre of the photo narrative. While the former targets a huge popular audience -like pop music or commercial cinema- the latter is intended for a select circle of intellectuals interested in fringe movements and the creative impact of mass-market publications on art. On the one hand, there is the roman-photo, a medium for outmoded mythology, trapped within a fixed framework and, on the other, there is the slick, self-referential experimental photo narrative, which systematically explores the genre's specificity and encourages the reader to play an active role in the formulation of meaning. Bringing about a genuine renewal of the photo story, however, is by no means an easy task: merely throwing oneself into a scholarly critique of the genre could lead to a dead end, while a continually ironic treatment, serving as a reference to the forms adopted by the romance photo story,1 r...

Danny Lyon's family album

Abstract The modest appearance of I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt: A Child's Journey Back in Space and Time (1989), by Danny Lyon belies its true portent.1 As an experimental photo story, developed from purely photographic models, this book opens up whole new horizons.

“A Home Town Photo Story in Iwaizumi” by Popular Tradition Study Society in Iwaizumi Town (Book Review)

“A Home Town Photo Story in Iwaizumi” by Popular Tradition Study Society in Iwaizumi Town (Book Review)