Course Overview
In this course, you will learn how to craft short, substantive personal experience narratives with digital media and how to circulate these narratives for organizational and community-building purposes. Much of our work will be oriented around two major creative production projects: you will make a video digital story grounded in your own experience and craft a story concept for an organization based on an interview you conduct. Along with this creative work, we will also watch, listen to, and read stories created in projects sponsored by organizations and movements, plus engage with ideas about digital storytelling from scholars and practitioners. Overall, the work of WRD 531 will enable you to better conceptualize and execute digital storytelling projects in both personal and professional contexts.
learning outcomes
By the end of this course, you should be able to
- Create personally meaningful digital stories, drawing on knowledge about how to write and revise narrative scripts, source media, and edit video
- Conduct interviews for story projects, drawing on knowledge about how to conduct good interviews and ethically represent others
- Talk with academic and professional peers about the possibilities and perils of telling and sharing stories, informed by the perspectives of scholars and practitioners
- Imagine possible personal, professional, or community-based storytelling projects and understand how to deploy these projects
Readings & Materials
Dush, L. (2017). Nonprofit collections of digital personal experience narratives: An exploratory study. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(2), 188-221.
Ganz, M. (2011). Public narrative, collective action, and power. In S. Odugbemi & T. Lee (Eds.), Accountability through public opinion: From inertia to public action (pp. 273–289). Washington, DC: The World Bank.
Henrickson, L. (2025). Everyday digital storytelling. In L. Henrickson, Digital storytelling: An introduction (pp. 179–202). Polity.
Hidden Brain Podcast. (2023, Oct. 30). Healing 2.0: Change your story, change your life.
Higgins, L., & Brush, L. (2006). Personal experience narrative and public debate: Writing the wrongs of welfare. College Composition and Communication, 57(4), 694–729.
Kalra, N., Farfan, C. B., Robles, L., & Stachowiak, S. (2021). Measuring narrative change: Understanding progress and navigating complexity. ORS Impact.
Koch, S. (2003). Excerpts from The Modern Library writer’s workshop: A guide to the craft of fiction. Modern Library.
Lambert, J., & Hessler, B. (2018). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community (5th edition). Routledge.
McAdams, D. P., & Jennings, S. C. (2024). Narrative identity in the digital age. Psychological Inquiry, 35(2), 124–130.
Trevisan, F., Bello, B., Vaughan, M., & Vromen, A. (2020). Mobilizing personal narratives: The rise of digital “story banking” in U.S. grassroots advocacy. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 17(2), 146–160.
Trevisan, F., Vaughan, M., & Vromen, A. (2025). Datafied digital storytelling’s double-edged sword in marriage equality campaigning. In Story Tech: Power, storytelling, and social change advocacy (pp. 146–167). University of Michigan Press.
Yow, V. R. (2014). Recording oral history: A guide for the humanities and social sciences, 3rd ed. (chs. 4 & 7 (pp. 194-206). Rowman & Littlefield.
Assignments
Your Digital Story: Using the digital storytelling method devised by StoryCenter, you will craft your own 3-4-minute digital story on a personally meaningful topic of your choice.
Organizational Stories Pitch: This project asks you to conceive of and pitch to an organization a new type of digital personal story that the organization might repeatedly produce and share. To make your pitch concrete, you will create a prototype story based on an interview you conduct and write a concept memo addressed to a decision-maker within the organization explaining the stories you propose, the organizational goals they will support, how the stories will be produced and circulated, any ethical concerns that must be navigated, and how the stories’ effectiveness will be measured.
Landscape Analysis and Presentation: This project asks you to produce a ‘landscape analysis’ that summarizes your research into digital storytelling practice in a particular sector (e.g., higher ed, health care, religious orgs), of a certain genre (e.g., visual essays, digital literacy narratives), or in the service of a particular advocacy cause (e.g., immigration reform, environmental justice). You will synthesize your findings in an online article for practitioners on Medium.com and share these findings in an in-class presentation.
Class Engagement: Class engagement includes participation in class discussions and activities, as well as on-time and thorough completion of assignments to prepare for class. These preparatory assignments include annotating readings and writing short responses.