Born out of pioneer Joe Lambert’s Texas heritage and passion for activism and the arts, incubated amid the 1990s Californian tech boom and the famed halls of the American Film Institute (Lambert, 2013, pp. 25-32), Digital Storytelling is, at its simplest, story “told with all the tools of technology” (Barry, 2018). The form is short, with narratives mediated by individuals with the support of a community; tales have multimodal meanings comprised of voiceover, photo/video, sound, and movement (Hakanurmi, 2021). It has continued to evolve. Though Lambert’s Center for Digital Storytelling still serves as the nexus and learning lab for digital storytelling, the form has morphed from simple individual narratives developed in story circles with what would now be considered quaint technology to complex stories told with emergent technology, utilized for education, social work, therapy, military strategy, gaming, corporate training, marketing, and more (Miller, 2020, p. 67). Its applications are infinite, limited only by the creativity and imagination of human authors.
Enjoy Disneyland Paris’s 2021 holiday commercial, The Mistake, a delightful Christmas eve family scene.
From Joe Lambert’s Storycenter, “Preservation” by Maureen Mullinax, a tale of “cooking from scratch, the passing of a food maker, and a family left behind.”
Kimberly Bryant, MA 