Digital Storytelling

There are many forms that your digital story may take: video, audio, StoryMap, timeline, art, and any combination you can imagine. 

Many of the tabs on this guide will help you work through the process of building your story with a tool, but no matter how you're putting it together, you will need to start the old-fashioned way: by thinking and outlining the story you're going to tell. There are a ton of resources that can help you through this process, and your librarian has a few worksheets and templates to help you along the way. 

Like most projects, it is important to start by defining the questions you are asking and topics you will cover in your story. This is more than just having an idea - you also need to articulate your purpose and develop a proposal that can guide your research, writing, and media creation along the way.

Your topic will guide your research and help you craft a proposal for your digital story. Once you've got your topic in mind, use the Digital Storytelling Planning Worksheet to create your story plan.

Now that you have a plan, it's time to get to work on your information search. While you conduct your research be sure to keep track of the sources you find that will shape your story: articles, primary sources, images, media - anything that you will cite or consider including in any portion of the project.

You can manage the sources and assets you find by keeping a list of citations and permalinks in your own document or with a citation management tool like Zotero. We recommend using what works best for you - and remember, if you write your citations now you will save a lot of time in the next phases of your project.

The Resource & Asset Inventory spreadsheet below is set up to help you manage your resources for a project with ID tags that will be useful in the next phase of your work.

When you write a paper, it can be very helpful to start with an outline. It helps you create a timeline for your ideas, to determine the key points that will become the body sections with detailed information, and to frame it so that the information and points flow cohesively.

Digital storytelling relies on planning and outlining - even more than a research paper. Since digital stories incorporate narrative that you write (and sometimes speak) with media objects. it is important to put effort into planning your story using a storyboard method.

The worksheet below is a template that you can fill out to create your own storyboard. It will guide you through defining the key point(s) of each 'scene' in your story and help you associate the assets and resources you have to each point so you can understand how it will flow - and identify places where you need more or different resources.

What do recording a video, narrating a slideshow, building a Storymap, and launching a webpage all have in common? They use text that you have to write. In all of these cases, you will need to write a script or write web content - and it's best to do this in a format you're comfortable with.

The Storyboard template guides you through planning your content by section or scene. You can follow this same flow as you write the text you will use in your project, making it easy to see what fits where. 

Stuck somewhere in the process? The library is here to help!