Museums and Digital Storytelling Reunion

FAIN: GA-256338-17

Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Inc. (New York, NY 10002-3102)
Annie Polland (Project Director: January 2017 to December 2017)

In May 2016, the LESTM hosted a Digital Storytelling Workshop in New York City with 20 museum professionals. Evaluator Dr. Kate Haley Goldman’s summative report found that participants learned the following: 1) A more purposeful practice and language around digital storytelling that they’ve since used at their respective institutions; 2) Working on Digital Storytelling projects helped them focus on their role as storytellers, and in turn helped them to conceive of more audience-focused projects; 3) Access to exemplars of digital storytelling that they could bring back to their board and staff and provide a better appreciation for the infrastructure needed to support the projects. The evaluation also demonstrated that participants identified five main  attributes of conveying humanities content that can be enhanced through the use of digital storytelling: 1) A sense of presence or immersion; 2) Multiple voices and diversity; 3) Telling more complex stories; 4) Moving from listener to participant; 5) The ability to investigate several monuments in time. In turn, these elements helped participants better describe their own project goals.
Despite the conference’s impact, a refrain emerged that participants lacked the opportunity to work on their individual projects. We’ve thus developed the plan for a conference reunion dedicated to workshopping participants’ projects. We will construct sessions to not only shepherd along the individual practitioner’s progress, but yield best practices for the museum community, to be shared on the Weebly dedicated to museums and digital storytelling.