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A KEY CHALLENGE WITH DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN SCHOLARLY RESEARCH

In his book, The New Digital Storytelling, Bryan Alexander defines digital storytelling as, “simply put, telling stories with digital technologies” (4). However, he explains that pairing the words “digital” and “storytelling” together proves to be problematic for public audiences, as the two words are often perceived with two separate spheres. Alexander expresses, “Pairing these two words can still elicit surprise or even shock for some, if the listener expects the two domains to be fundamentally separate. ‘Storytelling’ suggests the old storyteller, connected to a bardic or Homeric tradition, a speaker enrapturing an immediate audience” (4) while the word “digital” is associated with “data without meaningful patterns” (4). Alexander further describes how public audiences perceive the contrast between “digital” vs. “storytelling” as he says, “Data are cold, while stories are warm. Data lack intrinsic meaning, while stories are all about meaning” (4). 

 

With this in mind, it is evident that public audiences often classify the digital sphere as fundamentally separate from traditional storytelling. Thus, a problematic aspect of digital storytelling in the humanities is combining both “data” and “narrative” together. So how can we bridge this gap as academic researchers in the humanities? How can we use infographics as a medium for digital storytelling to promote academic research? I argue that an effective way to combine both data and narrative is by creating an animated infographic to visualize and share research to reach a wide audience.

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