Storytelling Approach Research Articles

Smart storytelling

ABSTRACT While there are several publications in the field of documentary studies that deal with the digital disruption and innovations, the sub-field of emerging media needs constant re-examination as modes of production, dissemination and exhibition are exposed to significant changes and interact with documentary film in its various established and new facets. Smart Storytelling leverages contemporary digital transformations in Film and Screen Production, Screen and Digital Media and the Creative Arts more generally and synchs these with documentary studies. This special issue also explores creative practice research projects in order to demonstrate novel approaches in documentary storytelling with a focus on online, network and multilinear non-fiction and documentary practice. Particular emphasis is placed on accessible storytelling approaches, illustrating often overlooked creative processes, such as audio in cinematic VR documentary, and exploring current developments and trends such as AI for documentary media.

Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai

Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai

Internalization of Spiritual Values in Early Childhood Using the Prophet's Storytelling Method

Children can grow and develop, both physically and spiritually, from birth. This study aims to discover the absorption of spiritual ideals in early childhood by using the prophet's story approach with the storytelling method. This qualitative research uses interviews, observation, and documentation. The results showed that the first stage in applying the prophet's storytelling method and internalizing spiritual values for early childhood was to analyze the learning process that contained spiritual values in early childhood through the storytelling method. Second, make learning strategies. Third, with a narrative approach to the story of the prophet, learning to instill spiritual principles is carried out in a practical, engaging, and efficient manner. Fourth, evaluation of implementation as feedback for improving the quality of learning. Fifth, applying the prophet's storytelling approach in early infancy provides knowledge and attitudes about worship habits, obedience, and grateful behavior in daily life.

Are we failing female and racialized academics? A Canadian national survey examining the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tenure and tenure-track faculty.

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic caused the abrupt curtailment of on‐campus research activities that amplified impacts experienced by female and racialized faculty. In this mixed‐method study, we systematically and strategically unpack the impact of the shift of academic work environments to remote settings on tenured and tenure‐track faculty in Canada. Our quantitative analysis demonstrated that female and racialized faculty experienced higher levels of stress, social isolation and lower well‐being. Fewer women faculty felt support for health and wellness. Our qualitative data highlighted substantial gender inequities reported by female faculty such as increased caregiving burden that affected their research productivity. The most pronounced impacts were felt among pre‐tenured female faculty. The present study urges university administration to take further action to support female and racialized faculty through substantial organizational change and reform. Given the disproportionate toll that female and racialized faculty experienced, we suggest a novel approach that include three dimensions of change: (1) establishing quantitative metrics to assess and evaluate pandemic‐induced impact on research productivity, health and well‐being, (2) coordinating collaborative responses with faculty unions across the nation to mitigate systemic inequities, and (3) strategically implementing a storytelling approach to amplify the experiences of marginalized populations such as women or racialized faculty and include those experiences as part of recommendations for change.

Island Stories: Mapping the (im)mobility trends of slow onset environmental processes in three island groups of the Philippines

There is an immediate lack of people-centred empirical evidence investigating how slow onset events influence human (im)mobility across the globe. This represents an important knowledge gap that makes it difficult for climate policy to safeguard vulnerable populations (whether on the move or left behind). In this study, 48 qualitative focus group discussions in the Philippines elaborated around people’s (im)mobility pathways in the context of slow onset events. The selected collective storytelling approach effectively mapped out the (im)mobility trends of 12 different origin- and destination locations involving the perceptions of 414 women and men across six provinces on Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao islands. The research findings delicately outlined people’s translocality and its interlinkage with their personal (im)mobility experiences. People described how slow onset events such as longer-term soil and water degradation often contributed to reduced livelihood sustainability that influenced their decisions to move or stay. At the very core of people’s narratives were the ways that the environmental changes and (im)mobility experiences influenced people’s wellbeing. Some people described how temporary migration could increase their social status and boost wellbeing after returning home. Others described adverse impacts on their mental health during their migration experiences due to loss of place, identity, food, and social networks. The research findings show how policy can better support those moving, hosting, or identifying as immobile, as well as where (geographically and socially) more assistance is needed.

A Systematic Review on Oral Interactions in Robot-Assisted Language Learning

Although educational robots are known for their capability to support language learning, how actual interaction processes lead to positive learning outcomes has not been sufficiently examined. To explore the instructional design and the interaction effects of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) on learner performance, this study systematically reviewed twenty-two empirical studies published between 2010 and 2020. Through an inclusion/exclusion procedure, general research characteristics such as the context, target language, and research design were identified. Further analysis on oral interaction design, including language teaching methods, interactive learning tasks, interaction processes, interactive agents, and interaction effects showed that the communicative or storytelling approach served as the dominant methods complemented by total physical response and audiolingual methods in RALL oral interactions. The review provides insights on how educational robots can facilitate oral interactions in language classrooms, as well as how such learning tasks can be designed to effectively utilize robotic affordances to fulfill functions that used to be provided by human teachers alone. Future research directions point to a focus on meaning-based communication and intelligibility in oral production among language learners in RALL.

Storytelling with Block Coding among College Students at a University in Northern Taiwan

In this study, a storytelling approach was adopted in a college elective course, Game-Based Programming. An ADLR model (Analysis, Design, Leveraging, and Refinement) was adopted for story creation in the course. Along with the process of creation, several research questions were specified for further exploration, including: 1) What were the processes by which students analyzed the story project? 2) How did students design their storylines? 3) How did students leverage the use of media in their stories? 4) How did students refine their stories? and 5) How did students react to their achievement from the process? The study employed a qualitative approach to collect multiple research data. Inductive analysis summarized following research findings. To start their story projects, students searched relevant resources, chose a topic, analyzed the features of the platform, and set their own goals to create story content for a specified audience group. Students explored the design features and functions of the 3D story tool, and leveraged the use of media and block codes to present the content and interactions for their stories. They refined their story content by testing and modification to make the interactions tailored to the audience’s use. It is suggested that the ADLR process might be adopted for future implementation of digital storytelling.

Perfiles de clientes en el ámbito del juego: Retratando estilos de vida

Customer profiling is a tool for lifestyle visualization that combines creative imagination techniques with storytelling and statistical methods to fabricate easily interpretable representations of the consumer’s everyday life. This paper suggests employing the data-driven method allied with the storytelling approach for modeling engaging gamer profiles. Developing a profile is a sensible process that utilizes data and statistics to produce credible results. Therefore, the methodology principally involved the exploratory factor analysis for uncovering latent variables that influence the gaming lifestyle and the non-hierarchical cluster analysis to separate data cases with different characteristics and group members with similar attributes. The analyzed dataset gathered 1.588 participants from 80 countries. The results support the customer profiling methodology as a valid instrument for consumer behavior analysis and lifestyle visualization

Pedagogy for Sustainable Development among Geography Teachers Towards Implementing Sustainable Developmnet Goals (SDGs)

Pedagogy for sustainable development is important towards implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in education including the Geography curriculum in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to measure frequency uses of Pedagogy for Sustainable Development approaches among Geography teachers. This study used a quantitative approach by utilizing a questionnaire involving 252 samples of Geography teachers in Penang, Malaysia. The finding showed a high level of frequency in the use of storytelling approach (M=4.00, SD=0.771), an emphasis on sustainable living (M=4.12, SD=0.683), cultivating a sense of appreciation for living things and nature (M=4.40, SD=0.621) and promoting values (M=4.28, SD=0.680). Teachers like to implement the teacher-oriented learning-based activities through the approach of promoting, nurturing and emphasizing the issues of Sustainable Development (SD). Geography teachers prefer to implement the teacher-oriented learning-based activities compared to student-based learning issues. The findings revealed that the experiential learning technique are at high frequency level of use compared to the real-world learning method and critical problem-solving learning. As a result, the study indicated that the Pedagogical of Sustainable Development approach has not yet received high attention from Geography teachers to be used (to use) in class as a teaching approach as global requirement in educating students about SDGs Agenda.

Storytelling in data visualization: information bias

Storytelling is shown as an effective approach to humanize information perception. However, its potential to build a biased view of the information contents is often neglected. Moreover, narrative understanding and emotion may interfere with data visualization comprehension. In this research, we evaluated how users perceived the information in two different configurations: One with a report with graphs and narrative side notes texts, and the second with a redesigned fully annotated content. The test compared the two groups in both qualitative and quantitative methods. The quantitative results were obtained by a survey and statistically analyzed with a T-Test. This indicated that the condescending storytelling approach augmented the perception of the effect signaled by the presented narrative. Also, the qualitative results collected afterward by interview and focus group have shown that, as the readers of narrative models perceived a higher intensity of the effect, they have also expected an even higher result from the selected data. The final analysis of the experiment helped to indicate that ordering, highlights, and semantics have a strong role in how the narrative influences the perception of the reader.

Fragmented Narratives: Exploring Storytelling approaches for Animation in Spatial Context

Animation is considered a prevalent medium in contemporary moving image culture, which increasingly appears across non-conventional surfaces and spaces. And while storytelling in animation films has been extensively theorized, narrative forms that employ physical space as part of storytelling have been less explored. This paper will examine the narrative aspect of animation works which are screened outside the traditional cinematic venues. It will look at how these animation works tell stories differently - using the full potential of the space, as a narrative device, a tool, and a stage where the narratives unfold. This paper will look at the historical perspective and the state of the art in animation installation today, exploring the relationship between the space and narrative in pre-cinematic, cinematic and post-cinematic conditions. It will examine how narrative structures in animation have changed over time, on their way from the black box of the cinema to the white cube of the gallery and even further, where they became part of any space or architecture. Through case studies of works by Tabaimo, Rose Bond, William Kentridge and other relevant artists, the interdependency of the narrative and the space where it appears will be explored, in order to identify new strategies for storytelling in animation. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the storytelling novelty that animation installations offer, which goes beyond the narrative structures that we are used to see on a single flat surface.

Applying Storytelling Approach to Analyze Kojima Jeans District Based on Slow Fashion Perspectives

This study conducted a case study of Kojima district in Japan, which underwent a rise and fall through the past booms, disruptive innovation, international politics, and changes in government policy. Today, the district has successfully regenerated, and the regeneration is linked to fashion localism. This study aimed to explore how the Kojima district sustained community-based fashion business and analyzed the factors that contributed to its regeneration from the slow fashion viewpoint. This study employed a case study analysis, using the storytelling approach, and established an analytical framework based on keywords derived from slow fashion, namely localism, quality, and value. The results indicate that the strategies of business leadership, improvement in quality, a willingness to address new challenges, success in authenticating strategies, clustering fashion business, path dependency, and maintaining workers and the fashion business community contributed to promoting a series of industrial structural adjustments in Kojima and sustaining the community-based fashion business.

Elevator Pitch Assessment Model: A Systematization of Dimensions in Technology Entrepreneurship Presentations

Introduction: The creation of a technology venture brings the entrepreneur to interact with different stakeholders and persuade them of the quality of the business idea. In such endeavors, entrepreneurial storytelling and business pitches are crucial to attract stakeholder interest and potential commitment. We focus on longer and structured elevator pitches used by entrepreneurs seeking funds and partners for their startup, and we present an integrative framework of evaluation dimensions, specific items, and key evidence to assess a pitch. Research methodology: We conducted a systematic review of specialized literature on business venturing, entrepreneurship, and business communication, and we selected 40 research articles from which we have extracted concepts related to the quality and effectiveness of an elevator pitch. We analyze and aggregate concepts to derive a taxonomy of evaluation dimensions. Results and discussion: We identify four dimensions of evaluation of an elevator pitch: background and contextual knowledge showed in the presentation, project content and venture information, storytelling approach and style, and entrepreneurial flow or “algorithm” of the pitch. We detail the dimensions by defining 19 evaluation items and associated key evidence to support assessment. We undertake a preliminary application of the framework with three groups: Business investors, potential entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship students. Conclusion and further research: We advance the discussion on venture storytelling and provide practitioners with a useful tool to support the evaluation of an entrepreneurial idea presented through an elevator pitch.

Lost Trust? The Experiences of Teachers and Students during Schooling Disrupted by the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to help understand how relational trust between students and teachers embedded in the teaching-learning process unfolded during the emergency distance and flexible hybrid education in Serbia in 2020. It also identifies niches in student-teacher relationships that hold potential for repairing and building trust. For the student-teacher relationship to be trust-based and thus conducive to students’ learning and wellbeing, a consensus about role expectations must be achieved. As the Covid-19 crisis interrupted schooling and education, participants faced uncertainties and ambiguities in role enactment, and the cornerstones of relational trust were disrupted. In an effort to understand 1) the context in which trust was challenged, 2) the ways in which trust was disrupted, and 3) the opportunities for its restoration, we relied on a multi-genre dynamic storytelling approach to data collection and values analysis for data processing. A total of 136 students and 117 teachers from 22 schools wrote 581 narratives in three genres: stories, letters and requests. The analysis yielded 22 codes that allowed further understanding of how changes in structural and institutional conditions affected both students’ and teachers’ expectations of each other, and how incongruence of these expectations fed into feelings of helplessness for both students and teachers, disengagement from learning for students, and heavy workload and poor performance for teachers. In addition, the narratives account for positive outcomes when these expectations were met, and for opportunities for trust-building if students’ and teachers’ perspectives are brought to each other’s attention and negotiated locally. Finally, recommendations for restoring trust are given.

Digital storytelling as an educational tool for scientific, environmental and sustainable development literacy on marine litter in informal education environments (Case study: Hellenic Center for Marine Research)

The modern era is characterized by the explosion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their multiple applications both in the school community and in the extracurricular activities. ICT enables the school community to be engaged in new educational storytelling approaches with educational and learning content, using multimedia applications. This article describes a study that took place at the headquarters of the Hellenic Center for Marine Research and involved a convenience sampling of 153 high school students (ages 13 to 15 years old). The study is aimed to investigate the use of digital storytelling in developing environmental and sustainability awareness and enhancing the scientific literacy of high school students when it is used as an instructional tool in informal learning, for marine litter, a serious environmental and sub-regional issue of our days. A didactic intervention was applied focusing on digital storytelling and experiential hands-on activities covering concepts of marine pollution, to establish the acquisition of new knowledge and the strengthening of optimal behavior towards the environment and sustainable development of attitudes towards the global problem of plastic marine pollution. The results of the study confirm the importance of digital storytelling for the cultivation of students' Scientific and Environmental Literacy for oceans.

Out-of-school girls’ lives in Zimbabwe: what can we learn from a storytelling research approach?

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the experiences of out-of-school girls in Zimbabwe. It draws on a research strand of SAGE (Supporting Adolescent Girls’ Education), a UKAid programme funded through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) initiative. Using a digital storytelling approach the research highlights critical events that have changed girls’ lives and impacted on how they see their futures. The paper explores insights made possible by this alternative methodology. Crucially, it challenges the often-static representation of ‘marginalised’ and ‘out-of-school’ girls in Sub-Saharan Africa by illustrating the unpredictability of individual circumstances and girls’ perceptions of these, within broader contexts of persistent vulnerability factors. Drawing on the capability approach the paper also offers new insights into the perceived value and purpose of school for out-of-school girls. The findings have implications for conceptualising more creative, contextually appropriate policies and practices for young people who miss out on formal school.

Dialogue Generation in Character-Based Interactive Storytelling

In recent years, there has been significant progress in developing Interactive Storytelling systems, in particular in terms of the underlying AI techniques. There has been an emerging consensus on the AI approach, in particular the use of planning systems. However, these have concentrated on the generation of a sequence of narrative actions, staged through the behaviour of virtual actors. In order to achieve the long-term objective of implementing interactive media that would reproduce the aesthetic qualities of traditional films, most interactive storytelling systems are still missing the ability to generate dialogues between characters. We describe an extension of our Interactive Storytelling approach which integrates dialogue generation within narrative situations. Our unit of generation is the dialogue act (pair of utterances) and one main objective is to reproduce realistic dialogue phenomena based on implicit forms of expression. The emphasis is also on adopting a unified approach relating narrative representations to the linguistic form of the generated utterances. From a representation of active narrative goals and the emotional affinity between characters, our system is able to derive a set of parameters governing various aspects of the linguistic form to be generated. We illustrate this approach on several implemented examples.

VR-Electricians: Immersive storytelling for attracting students to the electrical construction industry

Although it is projected to have significant employment growth in the electrical construction industry, there are not enough young people to join the workforce. It is indispensable for the future of work in construction to explore emerging technologies and effectively attract the younger generation to the construction industry. This paper explores the innovative use of 360-degree immersive environments powered by virtual electricians to tell success stories of the electrical construction trades on the field (VR-Electricians) and understand how such an immersive storytelling approach can attract young people to join the industry. A pretest-posttest design was used for the VR-Electricians assessment. VR-Electricians was found to significantly enhance several aspects of students’ attitude towards the electrical construction industry. VR-Electricians was also rated as a highly usable and easy-to-use system. The outcomes of this study provide construction researchers and practitioners an understanding of how immersive storytelling can be used as a powerful technology-mediated method for attracting students to their field.

Communicating Drivers of Environmental Change Through Transdisciplinary Human‐Environment Modeling

AbstractA scientific storytelling approach is used to communicate results from a transdisciplinary model of human‐environment estuarine systems for the purpose of developing system understanding and improving transdisciplinary communication. Questionnaires and a media analysis are used to collate public perceptions of observed environmental change in estuarine systems, with an agent‐based model developed to investigate the effects of these environmental changes and the complex network of interactions that lead to them. Five scenarios that correspond to the main public interests identified during questionnaire analyses are presented and described using a narrative textual approach; flow diagrams are used to explain model processes and interactions. We test whether the earth science storytelling approach of Phillips (2012), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2012.09.005 can be applied more broadly to transdisciplinary models of complex human‐environment systems. Results indicate that all eight storytelling plots of Phillips (2012), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2012.09.005 are applicable to describing pathways within human‐environment systems and are useful in succinctly explaining complex interactions within such systems; the crucial initial step is determining what needs to be communicated and subsequently deciding on appropriate plot or plots to convey the story.

Doing Storywork: Lessons Learned from Adopting a Storytelling Approach to Research in a Settler-Colonial State

Storytelling has been identified as a powerful tool for articulating experience, generating understanding across barriers, and contributing to advocacy. Furthermore, storytelling is a topic with a rich tradition of analysis within Western and Indigenous scholarly traditions. This article shares conclusions about the use of storytelling as a research method developed during an in-depth study into the school experiences of Indigenous young adults in living in the inner city. These conclusions offer insights on preparing for storytelling research, story listening, and story interpretation. They draw on a synthesis of the principles of Indigenous storywork with the growing field of storytelling research.