presentation for sfuadmedia class on curation and storytelling spring 2016

1. U S I N G O N L I N E T O O L S F O R S T O RY T E L L I N G
CURATION AND
NARRATIVE

2. CURATION
• Curation refers to the act of selecting what is
best/important/most accurate, depending on the needs.
• An art curator chooses pieces that respond to the needs
of a particular exhibit.
• A writer chooses the elements/words/characters that
meet the needs of a story
• Curation as an exercise is a helpful way of filtering what
matters for a particular project—allows the curator to
choose along various different criteria.

3. CRITERIA
• Aesthetic
• Informational
• Narrative
• Importance

4. MEDIA CURATION
• Galvanized by Web 2.0
• Shifted the power dynamics of professional journalists
versus everyone else
• Created more content
• Created more potential for inaccurate content
• Created more content for diverse storytelling

5. STORIFY
• Some, such as the Poynter Institute, have argued that
Storify is best used for five basic types of stories. This
may be true in terms of journalistic intent, but there are
as many ways to use Storify as there are ideas. But let’s
look at some of the top ones.

6. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
“The best fit are those in which the participation of the
users to the storytelling process, and their contribution in
term of multimedia content, is huge.”
—Federico Guerrini
Example: Occupy Wall Street

7. BREAKING NEWS
• Allows for content in real time
• Allows for outreach via social media for multiple voices
• Creates opportunity for more angled stories on a
newsbreaking event

8. GATHERING MEMES
• Using curation to capture cultural moments

9. FOR DIALOGUE
• Many publications will use social media, such as twitter,
to ask people questions about issues, and then use
Storify to capture responses.
• For example, Poynter institute used it to gather
responses on a journalism ethics question.

10. WEATHER
• The Weather channel uses Storify to gather, in sort of the
same manner as breaking news, information and content
about…weather.

11. OTHER POSSIBILITIES
• Event coverage
• Issue or topic story
• How-tos
• Lists
• Narrative
• Anything you think of

12. CURATION AND NARRATIVE
• One of the reasons curation can be useful for writers (in
addition to it being a skill that will be useful in a
publishing environment), is the choices you make about
how to arrange the elements relate to the choices writers
make about how to tell stories. The integration of your
own voice as the narrative authority connecting other
voices translates across genres and platforms.

13. WHAT MATTERS
• Choosing beginning, middle and end
• Organizing: using a traditional arc? By importance?
Where to place certain elements, choosing the best
words (even if written by others). Choosing your own
words to connect pieces of the narrative.
• Consider the idea of the “three brains” from our reading
this week: cognitive, emotional, rhythmic: how can you
use the elements in your stories to tell the story of what
happened, convey why it matters and make narrative
choices that carry those elements across.

14. THE HUMAN ELEMENT
• Stories, fundamentally, are concerned with people, even
when there are issues at stake, those issues don’t matter
if they don’t impact people.
• What are some of the options for using people’s own
words to tell their stories?
• What is described as the most important element of a
person’s story?
• How are some ways to transcend the obvious and find
the transformational narratives of the people you talk to?

15. ALLOWING PEOPLE TO TELL THEIR
OWN STORIES
• Using dialogue for emotion and emphasis, not exposition
and information
• Preserving people’s voices and making active choices
about quotation
• Sometimes letting them speak for themselves.
• Your next Instagram project: human-based, interview
driven

16. STORIFY PROJECT
• Let’s look at how it works.
• Identify your topic
• Pull together your elements
• Consider the story you want to tell and how you want to
organize/structure the pieces
• Work on it this class, finish in time for folks to look at
them before next week’s class. We’ll critique them in
class using the critique sheets handed out and available
on the website.