Networked Narratives: Collaborative Storytelling

I’ve been talking with Maren Deepwell about digital technologies, identifying the subjects I’m most passionate about, and sharing my experiences as a lifelong learner. Read her thoughts on our collaboration and subscribe to her newsletter! I want to increase my participation in third spaces and grow my network of like-minded storytellers. I'm a retired glassblower and Maren also began as a maker; a sculptor, and a stone mason, so we started a conversation about people transitioning from making to writing. With my tendency to get lost in all the words, and now with machines that generate even more words, it's a real challenge.

I was trying to imagine how we could collaborate on a short blog post in an interesting way. We had text from our asynchronous conversation on the transition from making to writing, and I came up with the idea that we would select short pieces of what we had written and ‘braid’ them into a single narrative. Inspired by the Surrealist “Exquisite Corpse” method, we changed the text color to white so the other person wouldn't react to what was added. Changing the text color to black revealed our networked narrative, or, braided story:

Learning and teaching are continuous and iterative. Reflection leads to insight and the repetition helps integrate your learning into memory. Applying your knowledge and experience to new situations is improvisation and leads to new discoveries.

I try to keep a sense of playful experimentation in my work. It’s less important to get it right, let alone perfect, than it is for me to do it in the first place.

I struggle with reducing ideas to simple linear text. I’m working out how hypertexts, graphing, microblogging, and mixed media posts can express and share my discoveries, learning and reflections. I use the internets, complexity and connectivist theories to inform my improvisations and grow my personal networks

I trained as a sculptor before working in education. Similar to you, I started out making things before I turned to writing.

Whatever I do, a primary concern is with the quality of my work. Glassblowing and writing both have long traditions. How do we honor these traditions and continue to explore new possibilities while producing quality work as we transition from makers to writers?

I think of everything I do in terms of practice. For me, it’s helpful to conceptualize what I do as a continuous process of learning, reflecting and sharing.

We then discussed what we had created and reflected on our experiences. I think this simple playful method can be used in many different situations and I plan to collaborate on creating content with more people in my personal learning network.

I recently watched the 1978 BBC film, "Europe after the Rain: Dadaism and Surrealism", with a friend. We discussed how Surrealism emerged after the First World War and how we are in a somewhat similar situation more than a century later.

That got me thinking about Andre Codrescu, the Romanian-American poet and commentator who appeared on National Public Radio for decades. His "Exquisite Corpse" started as a literary journal before moving online and was titled after a method the Surrealists invented to surface the unconscious and explore randomness in their work. They would take a piece of paper and fold it into as many sections as there were people present to either create a group drawing or a group poem or text. Each person adds to a section of the paper without seeing anybody else's contribution. They would then unfold the paper to view this ‘exquisite corpse’ and reflect on what they had created.

I was reminded of the Narrative Matters conference I stumbled into after my first summer at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. I took a workshop called Narrative Métissage, a French word originally meaning mixing of races, but which the Canadian facilitators had transformed into mixing, or braiding, stories. At the beginning of the workshop, each person wrote a short personal narrative. In the second half of the workshop, we contributed a short piece of our narrative and it was amazing to see the serendipity and synchronicity that emerged from juxtaposing these separate narratives.

I was also reminded of participating with Alan Levine and Mia Zamora in Networked Narratives; courses that Mia taught at Keene University with Alan collaborating remotely. I participated as an open learner, or, a student auditor, and we posted our assignments online and fed them into the course website.

It's been a few months since I started setting up Talking with machines, using open source and federated technologies. I’ve gotten lost in all the technology, and I always get lost in words. I've spent most of my life making things which doesn't require many words. Often there were drawings, but most conversations are a distraction in production environments.

I know I’m not the only one who finds being concise in communicating ideas difficult. As many writers have observed; if they had more time, they would write a shorter piece. I also see everything as networked or holistic, each idea connected to others. In my talks with Maren about blogging, networking, higher education, and education technologies, we decided to create this short blog post to help me jumpstart a habit of posting short pieces on my new site. Now for the microblogging and social promotion in this new federated and multi-nodal world.