The Course

Digital storytelling permeates our media and regularly mediates our experiences of the social. Through it, we seek representation and memorialization, experience capitalism, engage in politics, and entertain ourselves and each other. This class exposes students to the tools and techniques of digital storytelling and their uses in society.

Digital storytelling courses can tend to focus on the technology: This course is rooted in storytelling as a cultural practice and begins with the storyteller as a site of knowledge and memory production and transmission, before considering the craft of character and narrative development, including in the realms of non-fiction and research data.

Then the course turns to the technologies of digital storytelling, surveying and encouraging engagement with online print production, podcasting, timeline tools, mapping and geographic information systems, digital photography, photo essays and online exhibition curation, games as stories, video, and augmented and virtual reality.

Through this course, students have the opportunity to study and practice storytelling as an art with applications across disciplines. Through individual project work, students are building confidence in their abilities to select tools appropriate to the narratives or data being communicated, and their intended publics.

The People

James Lowry

James Lowry (he/him) is an Associate Professor and current Chair and Director of Information Studies, Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the Ellen Libretto and Adam Conrad Endowed Chair in Information Studies and the founder and director of the Archival Technologies Lab. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London and the University of Liverpool, where he was co-director of the Centre for Archive Studies, following a ten year career in archives. His recent publications include Disputed Archival Heritage, an edited collection published by Routledge in 2022 and, with Riley Linebaugh, the award-winning article “The Archival Colour Line: Race, Records and Post-Colonial Custody.” His writing has been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese. James is convenor of Archival Discourses, an international research network that fosters critical enquiry into the intellectual history of archives, and he is editor of the Routledge Studies in Archives book series.

A Virtual Lisa

A Virtual Lisa is a writer, producer, marketing and media consultant. 

Brianna Caszatt

Brianna Caszatt (she/her) is earning an MA degree in Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a editor and a lapsed poet and loves playing with language. Her academic interests include memory studies, mapping, infrastructure, and cemeteries.

Carson Snow

Carson Snow is an MS DataVis student at The Graduate Center.

Elliot

Elliot is a first-year Digital Humanities student at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Kristy Leonardatos

As a Digital Humanities graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kristy is enthusiastic about leveraging innovative digital tools to explore everyday situations. 

Maria Baker

Maria Baker is a writer, performer, digital storyteller and investigator of niche linguistic phenomena. She’s working on her MA in Digital Humanities at CUNY and holds am MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute. 

Polaris Tang

Polaris Tang is a master’s student specializing in data visualization, hailing from Hong Kong.

RC

RC is currently a Digital Humanities graduate student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a also visual artist and a data scientist. 

YW

YW is currently pursuing an MS in Data Analysis and Visualization at the CUNY Graduate Center while working as a Data and Survey Analyst at CUNY New York City College of Technology.