{"id":289,"date":"2023-05-02T16:01:05","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T16:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iris.siue.edu\/stldigitalhumanities\/?p=289"},"modified":"2025-11-21T17:02:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T17:02:22","slug":"digital-storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iris.siue.edu\/stldigitalhumanities\/2023\/05\/02\/digital-storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Contributed by Geremy Carnes, Lindenwood University<\/strong>
Written for the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholars in the humanities know that narratives are powerful. We spend much of our work in the classroom guiding students in examining, interrogating, and dissecting narratives. Yet outside of courses with an explicit \u201ccreative\u201d or \u201capplication\u201d focus like creative writing, it\u2019s uncommon for students to spend much time developing<\/em> narratives in their coursework. This general absence in course curricula is a major missed opportunity, as one of the best ways to help students grasp how narratives work\u2014whether as literary artifacts or as historical or social constructs\u2014is to have them create one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spotlight Tool: Twine<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The ways in which instructors can introduce narrative-based assignments into their courses are numerous, but one particularly valuable way to do so is via Twine<\/mark><\/a>. Twine is a free online tool for creating interactive narratives and games that can be run in any commonly used web browser. A basic Twine game consists of a number of \u201cpassages\u201d (i.e., pages of the story) connected to each other by links. Any passage with links to more than one other passage will introduce a branch in the narrative. A passage can link to any other passage in the story, so it is also possible for branches in the narrative to rejoin. Each branch eventually arrives at an ending (the nature of which depends on the kind of story you are telling). The result is something akin to a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book in digital form. While the tool has the depth to create quite sophisticated<\/a> and technically complex games<\/a>, its most basic feature\u2014the ability to create branching-path narratives\u2014can be learned in a few minutes with no prior experience with markup languages or coding.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Twine interface for a work-in-progress. Each box represents a passage. Arrows indicate links between passages.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Learning Outcomes<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Assigning students to create a narrative in Twine based on their coursework provides valuable learning experiences that would support learning outcomes in many upper-level courses in the humanities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n