Digital storytelling and place-attachment: a 'lens' through which to analyse people's values in the Drought Risk and You (DRY) Project
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Digital storytelling is a form of engagement that enables people to share personal stories and to produce new knowledge(s). Digital stories reveal unexpected connections across different communities of interest, places and time periods. They reflect shared and conflicting values, feelings and concerns surrounding a particular place. Place is the background to stories and memories and also the context through which stories emerge (Pile 2002). Therefore we propose ‘sense of place’ (Shamai & Ilatov, 2005 Jones et al 2003) is an important factor in the way that people respond to extreme weather and disruptive events in their communities and ‘local distinctiveness’ might be a reason for different responses and ways of coping/adapting. We ask how might digital storytelling triangulate between personal experience, place attachment and crisis (drought) response. The RCUK funded Drought Risk and You (DRY) Project is adopting digital storytelling as one of the multiple narrative approaches to investigate people’s perceptions and behaviours in relation to their river, water use and water scarcity within and across seven rivers catchments in UK. We are exploring this across a complex patchwork of different communities including business and tourism sectors, agriculture, environmental management and health, to reveal nuances of “sense of place”. Specifically we will explore people’s values in relation to how they frame their stories and what is important to them (Schwartz, S.H. 2006 and Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC) 2011). Comparing digital stories is a way of uncovering conflicts and discovering unexpected common ground in the dialogue between lay and expert narratives due to the authenticity of personal stories and the natural “mess” of storytelling (Wilson, 2014). Through this project we contribute to the field of digital humanities by building an open, online digital storytelling archive, creating a legacy of rich data informing future work on water, water scarcity, personal and social relationships in river catchments in the anthropocene.
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Digital storytelling and place-attachment: a 'lens' through which to analyse people's values in the Drought Risk and You (DRY) Project
- 1. Digital storytelling and place-attachment A 'lens' through which to analyse people's values in the Drought Risk and You (DRY) Project Dr Antonia Liguori Loughborough University
- 2. Digital Storytelling as a form of engagement We think of storytelling as “a means of sharing knowledge, building trust, and cultivating identity” (Cianca et al 2014) a sort of “holistic thinking” (Meadows, 2009) Keywords: authority, authenticity Question: what is ‘unreliable’?
- 3. Place as the background to stories and memories We ask how might digital storytelling triangulate between personal experience, place-attachment and crisis (drought) response. Keywords: local distinctiveness, community of interest Question: is the ‘digital’ element of storytelling only a tool?
- 4. Multiple narrative approaches in DRY Project Keywords: translational tool, experiential knowledge Question: Are we able to to subvert the knowledge hierarchies?
- 5. People’s values to reveal nuances of “sense of place”
- 6. DS as a way of validating a Sentiment Analysis on Social Media Twitter users respond almost instantly to natural disasters (Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012), political unrest (Gaffney, 2010; Tonkin, Pfeiffer & Tourte, 2012), or other breaking news. Keywords: ‘nanostories’, human behaviour Question: how can we inform people about drought? [proactivity vs reactivity]
- 7. Two examples from the Community and the Business sector
- 8. Decision-making tools with an online archive of personal and social memories in 7 river catchments “The earth is a form of writing, a ‘geography’ of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors” (George Perec, 1998) Photo published on Flickr by A. Siegel
- 9. Drought Risk and You is a research funded by Natural and Environment Research Council NERC Economic and Social Research Council ESRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council BBSRC Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC http://dryproject.co.uk/ @ a.liguori@lboro.ac.uk Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- As affirmed by Ahmad & Thompson (cited by Cianca et al 2014), we think of “storytelling as a means of sharing knowledge, building trust, and cultivating identity”. If we add just one word at the beginning of this quote, we do understand how the second part of the sentence becomes more effective and meaningful at the same time. The word I have in mind is obviously ‘digital’. And when Meadows described storytelling as a sort of “holistic thinking” (2009), of course the ‘digital’ was a primary element in his project “Capture Wales”. Stories in general enable people to travel both back in time and in the future (Ciancia et al 2014) and to connect self and other - and this is their natural and fluid dimension. But when we talk about digital storytelling as methodology, we are thinking on the process and the outcomes at the same time. Digital storytelling – as process - is a form of engagement that enables people to share personal stories and to produce new knowledge(s). Digital Stories – as outcome of that process - are not for propaganda or for making a campaign; the process is to engage people, the outcome is to learn from them and to give them the opportunity to choose their decision. When we work with this methodology we have clear in our mind two keywords: authority and authenticity. The authority of lived personal experiences and the authenticity of personal storytelling. A good story always has a human interest. Digital storytelling in DRY Project – the project I’m going to touch on later on - helps us to create / enhance a deeper level of public engagement, to raise people’s awareness, to democratize the debate by listening to excluded voices (excluded from the arena, both for the topics we are talking about – and our main topics are drought and water scarcity - or sometimes because of the use of technologies).
- We are now only at an early stage of our research project, but we are already aware of the ‘power’ of digital stories to reveal unexpected connections across different communities of interest, places and time periods; especially if these stories are published online and spread on the Internet through Social Media. They reflect shared and conflicting values, feelings and concerns surrounding a particular place. Place is the background to stories and memories and also the context through which stories emerge (Pile 2002). Therefore we propose ‘sense of place’ (Shamai & Ilatov, 2005 Jones et al 2003) is an important factor in the way that people respond to extreme weather and disruptive events in their communities and ‘local distinctiveness’ might be a reason for different responses and ways of coping/adapting. Our main focus is on how might digital storytelling triangulate between personal experience, place attachment and crisis (drought) response. In our first digital storytelling workshops, the ‘digital’ element of storytelling revealed to be (for some people) just a tool to engage (in the ‘individual’ making process), but always more than a tool in the research process and also in making a multi-author storytelling across different catchments within the same domains/sectors.
- We are working across seven different domains or sectors, such as agriculture, built environment, business, ecosystem services, health and wellbeing, water supply and communities. What we understood by talking with farmers or general public is that people don’t easily engage with science, so digital storytelling and narratives in general are for us a sort of “translational tool”. We believe that through personal stories we are able to analyse a complex patchwork across these seven different domains: different reactions to the same events, if we have a focus on something specific that matters. The RCUK funded Drought Risk and You (DRY) Project is adopting digital storytelling as one of the multiple narrative approaches to investigate people’s perceptions and behaviours in relation to their river, water use and water scarcity within and across seven rivers catchments in UK. We are exploring this across a complex patchwork of different communities to reveal nuances of “sense of place”. One of the aims of DRY Project is to subvert the knowledge hierarchies by using the digital storytelling. And the co-production of knowledge is crucial to encourage active citizenship and increase democratic participation. Again process and outcomes… Digital storytelling represents a subjective experience and show an experiential knowledge, whereas science produces objective data. However we understand that there is a diffuse form of scepticism of people about science. When we talk about climate change, sometimes public is confused because scientists/experts disagree. And people have the perception that there are other interests underneath: is the main aim of experts to have a social impact and to improve the common world? Is it true that communities are thinking mostly of their own world?
- What are we learning from the first workshops? Digital storytelling gives us a chance of investigating people behaviours and the connections between feelings/concerns and places. To define the context that we are trying to study I like to use a quote from Leyshon & Bull (2011) when they write about ‘the bricolage of the here’: we are re-building ‘the bricolage of the here’ through people’s lens. When the water is scarce, we have a hierarchy in public need – where do the farmers fit in that hierarchy? This question left me surprised at our first LAG meeting down in Cornwall. But is absolutely crucial to understand different ways of emphasizing specific priorities (I mean specific for each domain across different catchments and also specific for each place across different domains). And again, as water consumers, how to communicate with recreational customers? Specific questions guided by different motivations. This is why we thought to use this map of values as a sort of tag cloud to identify those values temporarily ‘engaged’ in people’s memories / digital stories - those values that still tend to affect their attitudes and behaviours. Perhaps will be clearer understanding how to attribute values to a story by having a look at a couple of examples later on. Anyway – if you have a specific interest in this approach - this is a link to read how values work http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/2-how-values-work
- Also we are trying to understand if there is a connection between values (identified in each digital story) and sentiments (expressed on Social Media when people tweet about the same topics: drought, water scarcity, rainfall…). What I mean is that we are trying to use the digital storytelling also as a tool to validate a Sentiment Analysis on Social Media. Many academic articles explore the effectiveness of a topic-based sentiment analysis for the social web (Thelwall & Buckley, 2013) as a way to track reactions to events by collecting public texts – such as tweets – and analysing how positive or negative feelings change over time. That is a common way to see the different nuances of human behaviour (Gruzd, Doiron, & Mai, 2011; Kramer, 2010). In a recent publication, Weller (2014) has been able to demonstrate how Twitter users respond almost instantly to natural disasters (Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012), political unrest (Gaffney, 2010; Tonkin, Pfeiffer & Tourte, 2012), or other breaking news. Considering that, from our perspective, a research aimed at integrating drought science and narrative enquiry, when is approaching in analysing social media, needs to be aware about a specific implication on human behaviuor: whilst the urgency to plan an early warning about drought, people generally are more reactive than proactive and this could influence the frequency distributions of contents drought related on the social media.
- Comparing digital stories is a way of uncovering conflicts and discovering unexpected common ground in the dialogue between lay and expert narratives due to the authenticity of personal stories and what Wilson defined as the natural “mess” of storytelling (2014). “The idea that the embodiment of a location is what construct a ‘place’ obviously refers to Michel de Certeau’s famous statement that ‘Space is a practiced place’, where the embodiment of a place is crucial to its space-ness. He clearly distinguishes between experiencing the world (the inside view) and looking from a distance at a person experiencing (the outside view). [Lone Koefoed Hansen, 2014]. Now I’d like to share with you two examples: the first one is an “inside view”; the second one an “outside view” (even if from inside, somehow). Comparing these two digital stories is a way of measuring the place-attachment: business (and here we have the second example from the business domain) can move away if it is no more convenient; local communities generally adapt their behaviours, but are reluctant to leave (so we have families’ traditions vs economic interests). Let’s try to watch these 2 videos with a specific focus on the difference between place attachment (sense of insiderness / identity / active place making - participation) and place dependency (functional attachment / self-efficacy). Alfie’s story Water saving at The Royal Oak
- We are still defining how the outcomes of DRY project will be – it’s part of our approach to co-produce our research with different stakeholders, but of course we know why we are going to produce these tools. The first objective is to encourage new levels of cross-domains knowledge exchanges. To translate knowing into telling and vice-versa we are thinking to use maps where experiences of places as well as memories are narrated (Ozkul & Gauntlett 2014). We’d like to understand how storytelling might impact policy and influence the decision making process. Or perhaps not actually the decision-making but supporting information to enable decisions and to turn evidence into advice, taking in consideration the power of digital media as a chance to reach so many people at a time. Reflecting on the opportunity to create an online database of stories, we have to consider that - as Jarvenpaa and Leng noted, referencing Martin Hidegger – “technology destroys distance by destroying closeness, creating a condition in which everyone simultaneously is close and far, independent of geographical distance”. On the other hand, we underline that the experience associated with a certain place is not only spatial. “There are may other factors that construct a sense of place, such us our memories associated with a place, our social circles, family and friends with whom we have been to a place, or under which circumstances we can call a place home” (Ozkul & Gauntlett 2014). A sense of place that remains “tangible” even if we spread our stories on the web. And of course digital stories when are published on the Internet enable an open debate between lay and expert. And the Internet is the ‘place’ where different languages become closer if we use and share messages with the same media. The idea is to make “polyphonic narratives” (Mark C. Marino 2014) where no voices are dominants over other voices, because they are all relevant and they have all “equal status”.