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History Inspiration Cultural democracy and community arts, and popular education movements in the United States inspired the development of the Center’s range of digital storytelling practices. During the latter part of the 20th century, artists and arts educators across disciplines expanded their definitions of creative endeavor. They challenged the impermeable aesthetic borders that had arisen between notions of the gifted and the mediocre, the professional and the amateur, the master and the novice, the expert and the lay practitioner. While they believed these ideas were useful in defining the criteria forcriticism in arts practice, they also recognized that doctrinal definitions of "quality" served to silence people, people who were making enormous creative contributions. Corresponding directly to the extension of civil, economic, and political rights in the larger society, the community artists saw the extension of technical and aesthetic training in the arts as a civil right. They focused their efforts on providing arts access to this training to all sectors of the population who were underserved by traditional education and vocational training systems. The work that these pioneering artists created alongside previously marginalized communities synthesized a vision of the cultural animator surfacing the unique gifts, voices, and ideas of project collaborators. At times the emphasis of such projects was on personal voice and the development of identity, esteem, and resilience in the individual; at other times the art making specifically addressed social conflicts and broader political issues. This legacy is at the core of our work.
In the early 1990's, a group of media artists, designers, and practitioners came together in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, to explore how personal narrative and storytelling could inform the emergence of a new set of digital media tools. The Center for Digital Storytelling partnership grew out of the numerous collaborations and shared dialogues that occurred during this period. Dana Atchley, a media producer and an artist in many disciplines, had developed NEXT EXIT, a multimedia autobiography. Among many supporters, he attracted local theater producer/dramatic consultant Joe Lambert as a collaborator in producing the piece. As they worked together, the rich potential for using multimedia software to assist people with little to no prior storytelling or production experience in turning personal stories into media mementos became clear. In 1994, Joe and Dana were joined by Nina Mullen, and together they founded the San Francisco Digital Media Center. Over the next several years, the curriculum for the Standard Digital Storytelling Workshop was refined and adapted to a variety of contexts. In 1998, the San Francisco Center for Digital Media moved to Berkeley (first to offices at the University of California, School of Education, then to its current location on Martin Luther King Jr. Way) and became the Center for Digital Storytelling. Since then, the Center has worked with nearly 1,000 organizations around the world and trained more than 15,000 people, in hundreds of workshops to share stories from their lives. Along with numerous collaborators, the Center has inspired an international interest in the many applications for the methods and principles used in its trainings. Our practices have transformed the way that community activists, educators, health and human services agencies, business professionals, and artists think about story, media, culture, and the power of personal voice in creating change. The
Evolution of Digital Storytelling
Dana Atchley's pioneering work as a media artist, video producer, and performer was the principle inspiration for the Center’s work in digital storytelling. Executive Director Joe Lambert worked with Dana for several years on the development of NEXT EXIT. As Joe points out, "Dana brought a mix of talents to his obsession with collecting memories in the form of media archives. An Ivy League-trained print and graphic designer, a musician, a writer, and a storyteller with three decades of video production experience, Dana really captured the renaissance personality, a perfect fit for the age of new media. Dana and NEXT EXIT will surely be remembered as the original spark of what has become a digital storytelling movement." Listen to Dana tell a story, Home Movies (2.4 MB QuickTime), a piece about his grandfather's own efforts to capture family memory. Excerpted from nextexit.com, Dana's website. Dana passed away December 13, 2000 due to complications following a bone marrow transplant. A number of his friends and family created stories in his honor for this online memorial. |
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