http://doi.org/10.5334/csci.78
Introduction: Tomorrow’s stories to be left
Burcu Şimşek
Faculty of Communication, Hacettepe University
Create, Act, Change was the slogan for the 5th International Digital Storytelling
Conference that the Hacettepe University Digital Storytelling Team organised in 2013 in
Ankara, Turkey. Right after the conference, a milestone in the history of Turkey
happened: the Gezi Park Protest created its own stories in the recent history of this
geographical region.
Sometimes in this part of the world – Anatolia – it is not easy to define one’s place. Does
this land belong to Middle East or Europe or is it a part of Asia? Depending on the
intersection of ideologies, all are possible and sometimes impossible. Living in Turkey
means being in between various identities: cultural, religious, ethnic (and variations).
Being ‘in between’ in most cases and being named as a Turk is challenging most of the
time, although many of us have no idea about our ethnic origins, or for long meant not to
know of them. This comes as a package just like in most of the multicultural geographical
regions that are governed by the principles of the nation state. Declining Ottoman
heritage and claiming a secular Turkish identity was what was expected in the context of
post-World War I. On the other hand, that transformation to nation state brought its
own burdens in this part of the world.
Some of the stories got lost; some of the identities went underground. That’s where I
remember the lines of Boori Monty Pryor from his book Maybe Tomorrow. It is one of
those books that found me for sure, in Australia, miles and miles away from the place I
was born and raised. Boori says: “To feel happy about yourself, you must feel happy about
the place you live in. To feel happy about the place you live in, you must get to know that
place” (Pryor 1998:7). This also suits really well my understanding about change and the
connection I found to action through digital storytelling. Here I am talking about two
aspects of change. First, the change through digital storytelling in various political
climates in various geographical regions. Second, the change within digital storytelling
movements around the world. Here I use movement in the plural as I feel there is variety
in the paths in digital storytelling and it would be helpful for different parties to get
involved with digital storytelling once we accept the fact that the oral and written
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traditions of the land really matter in the way the digital storytelling movement
flourishes in different regions.
This is where I find a strong connection to my own roots of storytelling in Anatolia, not
particularly talking about the Ottoman or the connected Muslim heritage but more about
the ancient heritages of Anatolia that have somehow seeped into the cultures of today.
Maybe that’s why Boori’s book led me to think over some of the issues that I was hesitant
to deal with, such as 1915 and its various sights and reflections in 2015. Aydın, in his
article “Çanakkale Spirit 2015” [Çanakkale Ruhu 2015] underlines an important feature of
the reflections of 1915 to 2015. The tragedy in Sarıkamış versus the victory in Çanakkale
(known to English speakers as Gallipoli).1 A nation rising out of the ashes of a ruined
empire… or a land intentionally forgetting some parts of its histories.
Storytelling is about sharing and sharing provides the grounds for connections. The
digital storytelling movement in Turkey, of which Hacettepe University Digital
Storytelling Unit has been the leading driving force, alongside various education sciencebased implementations that are loyal to the understanding of digital storytelling as a
means of developing digital literacy skills, prioritising the use of digital storytelling
workshops and digital stories for the circulation of voices from everyday life. It also
helped us as a team to connect to each other. Whatever the issue was, gender has been at
the core of the discussion through the participation of more women, telling us about their
own concerns with their own words and not necessarily through formulating their digital
stories through written texts, but oral performances of voice-over recordings. This has all
to do with the oral traditions in this land, as well as the issue of multiple languages.
The digital storytelling workshops with women from various non-governmental
organisations that unite their power for women’s political activism under the Women’s
Coalition,2 had helped to make a strong statement before the national elections in Turkey
in May 2015. The stories of the women in Women’s Coalition make us think about the
unspoken pieces of women’s personal histories in this country that are highly political.
The issue about personal engagement in digital storytelling workshops that we facilitate
provides challenging processes for sure. Then transformations within the organisation of
each and every digital storytelling workshop online or offline need care and attention.
We as the facilitators need to keep our own passion about storytelling and develop a sense
of floating. That is a challenge but a lovely way of discovering new storytelling
engagements as well.
http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/explore-turkish-memorials/canakkale-sehitleri.php.
Digital stories from the three digital storytelling workshops with the Women’s Coalition are
available on our website in Turkish, soon in English at: http://www.digitalstoryhub.org/KadinKoalisyonu-DHAA-I-Birlikte-Yurumek, http://www.digitalstoryhub.org/Kadin-KoalisyonuDHAA-II-Inatla-Hep-Birlikte, http://www.digitalstoryhub.org/Kadin-Koalisyonu-DHAA-IIIKadin-Ba-imiza.
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Once storytelling is seen as a good way of connecting to people, it’s also a good way of
connecting to other digital storytelling practitioners and hubs around the world. That has
been the case for us in March 2015, with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving
Image). The public screening of stories from a series of workshops that I facilitated in
Melbourne in September 2014, with women migrants from Turkey living in Australia,
provided us a site for experimentation with digital storytelling capacities in Turkey and
Australia. In the first section of a concurrent event, at ACMI in Melbourne and Hacettepe
University in Ankara, migrant women from Turkey living in Melbourne had the chance
to meet ‘virtually’ with their friends and relatives living in Turkey. “My Life Here While
You are There” was the name of the event. The Consul-General of Turkey in Melbourne,
Mehmet Küçüksakallı, and the Australian Ambassador to Turkey, James Larson, were
among the participants, sharing their own bit of the story of living away from their home
countries. Talking over the digital stories that were created in the “Here and There”
workshops triggered the sharing of other migrant stories, in addition to the expressions of
thankfulness from younger migrant women who have been living the comforts that have
been brought to their lives by the acquisitions of the first generation of migrant women.
In the second half of the event, where the audience was made up exclusively of
participants in the online workshop experience, a story circle was formed through
videoconferencing: a semi-circle in Melbourne completed by a semi-circle in Ankara.
This was a digital storytelling bridge. “My Life Here While You Were There” has built
two bridges: One among the participants of the workshop in Melbourne and Ankara, the
other one among the digital storytelling facilitators and tech people in ACMI and
Hacettepe University. “My Life Here While You Were There” has a strong connection to
my own experience. Being the daughter (not by birth but heart) of an Australian of
Scottish origin living in Turkey has a few things to do with the stories I would like to
leave for tomorrow.
The first personal crack in the mainstream narrative about Gallipoli for me was in 2009
when we attended the service in Robina in Queensland, Australia in memory of the
ANZAC soldiers who fought at Gallipoli. While many Australians travelled to Turkey for
the Dawn Service, I was in Australia, joining the march, trying to understand how my
presence there is perceived.
Storytelling is about us as individuals whether we are facilitators or participants, both in
and out of the workshop. Other forms of narrative are needed for today’s TurkishAustralian connections, challenging the myths, as John Hartley reminds us in his article
in a previous issue of this journal (Hartley 2013).
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There are communities of people from Turkey living in Australia and, through the
activities of ‘Australia Year’ in Turkey,3 we have learned that many Australians live and
work in Turkey. National identities in this digital era are contested as like most others
living elsewhere with multiple cultural citizenships. The stories of survival and struggle
in everyday life have high value and it seems that this is not bound to borders. Here I
remember Hartley’s article again:
Storytelling can be characterised as a carrier of information codes. As such they
are designed for imitation, copying, sharing, emulation. They are a distribution
mechanism for how to think and what to think. As mentioned, they are a
resource for inductive reasoning. Stories also store lessons, allowing social
learning to cross generational, language and geospatial boundaries, reproducing
the sequence of inductive logic that teaches us not only what to fear but what to
do about it: how to outwit duplicitous adversaries, how to test unknown
characters for truthfulness, how to signal prowess to enemies and lovers, how to
behave courageously …and so on. Culture is the ‘survival vehicle’ for groups
(demes); stories are the survival vehicle for culture (Hartley 2013:97).
On the eve of the 2015 Dawn Service, at the cafeteria of the university, the menu was a
so-called Turkish Soldier’s Menu in Gallipoli. A blogger on Çanakkale Wars, Seyit Ahmed
Sılay, suggests that there was never such a menu, in his blog called Çanakkale Müzesi
[Çanakkale Museum].4 It is most probably one of the sentimental tools of nationalist
discourse. Here I recall Aydın’s thoughts about two dominant discourses about
Çanakkale: one is the Kemalist nationalist discourse of the war of independence that
constructed the nation state; the other one is the neo-conservative Islamist discourse of
recent years, of the so-called New Turkey. What about the contestation of similar
discourses in Australia? Discussion may be opened by the ABC’s “The G Word”.5
However, more everyday-life perspectives are needed for the tomorrow of TurkeyAustralia connections. In this context, digital storytelling workshops that we plan in
cooperation with Curtin University’s Centre for Culture and Technology, with
Australians living in Turkey and Turkish-Australians who migrated back to Turkey, may
contribute to the discussions, broadening our understanding about histories and their
survival in cultures.
https://www.facebook.com/AustraliaInTurkey?fref=ts
http://www.canakkalemuzesi.com/defaultmain.asp?inc=readme&intTextID=35&intPoetID=3
5 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/the-g-word-gallipoli/6295464
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My made in China enamel ANZAC’s history lunch cup
from South Australia, sitting on my kitchen bench.
The papers in this volume clearly show that digital storytelling movements go beyond
national borders and tribal in their own ways. This volume has come together mainly as a
result of the 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference (Ankara 2013) and the
Digital Storytelling in Times of Crisis Conference (Athens 2014). Some of the articles
joined along the journey of gathering the papers. The authors in this volume contributed
to each other’s work with their comments and suggestions in the peer-review process.
Most of the authors in this special issue are either PhD candidates or have completed that
phase of their academic life very recently. Not all of them have focused on digital
storytelling as a component for their thesis, but digital storytelling has been an important
aspect in their lives during the PhD period. Sengül İnce , Gökçe Zeybek Kabakçı and
Hatice Şule Oğuz from Hacettepe University Digital Storytelling Team have been
involved in the facilitation of several digital storytelling workshops and have been keen
on relating their own personal academic interests to workshop agendas.
Şengül İnce in her paper talks about one of our joint workshops, “I have food on the
stove”, where eight women get together to tell their stories about their life with
dissertation. Ordinary kitchen objects and the narratives that the participants share,
getting their inspiration from the object that they end up having in their hands provides a
special collection of digital stories. İnce questions whether digital storytelling workshops
can be a tactic to cope with the everyday life struggles for academic women.
Hatice Şule Oğuz, on the other hand, picks up another important component of everyday
life especially for the women engaged with fieldwork in Social Sciences and discusses the
potential of digital storytelling as an additional qualitative research methodology. Her
discussion is mainly based on a workshop that we co-facilitated during her PhD years,
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where her quest in her fieldwork with refugees and asylum seekers living in Gaziantep (a
southeastern city in Turkey) was very fresh.
For Gökçe Zeybek Kabakcı, emotions are at the heart of storytelling. In her paper she
points to the significance of self-reflection in the process of facilitation and maintenance
of the storytelling workshop. She tracks the common points between digital storytelling
and the sociology of emotions.
A participatory media practitioner for 30 years and a new PhD candidate, Tricia Jenkins
gives an overview of her recent work with digital storytelling and ageing. Tricia puts selfreflection into the core of her paper that highlights the significance of the workshops
with older people in Silver Stories. She raises some very important issues that we all face
in our struggles to provide the necessary funds for the digital storytelling workshops with
“disadvantaged” groups. Tricia underlines the fact that the definitions used by funding
bodies such as the EU should be challenged. Terms such as “marginalised” or “groups at
risk” are too linear. She also shows how digital storytelling can go beyond borders:
organisations with similar interests joining forces for story sharing with older people and
the people who support them as professionals, volunteers and carers.
The main focus of the paper by Daniela Gachago, Eunice Ivala, Agnes Chigona and Janey
Condy is digital storytelling’s emotional engagement with and for the Other “without
falling into the trap of sentimentality”, in the South African higher education scene.
Applying “critical emotional reflexivity” as an analytical framework, they come up with a
strong statement for digital storytelling to make something that all practitioners should
think of: there is a strong potential for digital stories to lead to sentimentality where the
privileged observer characterises it by pity and the storyteller with resentment. Part of
the solution for sentimentality, for Gachago and colleagues, is to include a historicalpolitical analysis of the previous stories told and through the process helping students to
deconstruct positions and create opportunities to reflect emotions.
With the Yesteryear Jobs project, Eftalia Mouchtari, Michalis Meimaris and Dimitris
Gouscos carry the “story circle” aspect of a digital storytelling workshop into the whole
course of their research project, where primary school children learn from older
generations about their everyday life from the past. Integrating the first person
experience sharing into the learning environment, Mouchtari and colleagues invited the
older members of the local community to the 15th Primary School of Piraeus in Athens,
where they interacted with children. Creating digital stories was among the activities
where intergenerational interactions were enhanced.
In her paper, Angelina Thas attracts our attention to the positioning of “I” in the stories,
as well as the role of “mediators” in digital storytelling workshops, deriving her
qualitative data from her fieldwork with facilitators of digital storytelling for human
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rights advocacy around the world and in Malaysia in particular. She mentions that with
the judgmental interferences of the mediators, the stories may lose the storyteller’s
meaning to the positioning of “I”. Thas asks that once the stories are packaged to be more
palatable to specific audiences and consumption needs, then “what change then are selfrepresentational digital stories meant to bring about?”
Manolis Spanoudakis, Alexandra Nakou, Eni Meliadou, Dimitris Gouscos and Michalis
Meimaris, in their paper about their online platform for Digital Storytelling, tell us about
the idea of developing an online storytelling platform that they called Milia- Apple Tree,
where the components of a digital story can be put together. Spanoudakis and her friends
give an overview about the similar online storytelling websites and then provide the
discussion about Milia’s educational usages.
Similarly, Sasha Mackay and Elizabeth Heck in their paper discuss how the Australian
public broadcaster, the ABC, is responding to the changing practices in media
consumption through its online platforms, Heywire and ABC Open, that aim to engage
audience storytelling. They point out that although these platforms have significant
advantages to engage rural communities especially the young members, the personal
content management can be tricky for participants whereas for the media institutions
keeping the involvement of the participants could be challenging.
The papers in this volume will inspire new connections and help to broaden digital
storytelling horizons. More digital storytelling workshops will be planned ahead, creating
their own rituals, transforming practices, connecting people and reconnecting the ones
who haven’t known each other personally.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Keith Tidswell (Keith Baba – as we call him) for his support for the
native-editor check of this piece and some others in this volume and most importantly for
his presence in our lives as a mentor, father and grandfather. His grandfather’s story of
being a prisoner of war in Gülek, Adana during WWI connected him to us and it seems
that the stories in our merged family in Adelaide and Ankara will be left for tomorrow. I
also wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor John Hartley for his valuable
guidance, encouragement and friendship. Studying with him broadened my vision and
connected me to digital storytelling. Now I am glad to be contributing to broadening the
digital storytelling horizons.
References
Aydın, S. (2015) “Çanakkale Ruhu 2015”. Birikim. Nisan. p. 45-58.
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Hartley, J. (2013) “A Trojan Horse in the Citadel of Stories? Storytelling and the Creation
of the Polity- From Göbekli Tepe to Gallipoli”. Journal of Cultural Science. Vol.6, No.1,
p.71-105.
Pryor, B. (1998) Maybe Tomorrow. with Meme McDonald. Ringwood: Penguin.
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