Storytelling Mapping

Today's guest speaker is Joseph Erb, MFA, Assistant Professor of Digital Storytelling, University of Missouri. He is a computer animator, film producer, educator, language technologist and artist enrolled in the Cherokee Nation. He earned his MFA degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Erb created the first Cherokee animation in the Cherokee language, “The Beginning They Told”. 

You can find more of his work at:

https://www.josepherb.com/ 

https://visualstudies.missouri.edu/people/erb

https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalNativeMaker/videos 

https://mizzoumag.missouri.edu/2016/08/storyteller-nation-builder/index.html

https://cherokeerobot.com/ 

https://sites.google.com/view/tr-ip/storytelling-mapping  

Structure of a Story

If we want to map a story in a meaningful way, we must pay attention to the structure of the story and make sure that it makes sense to have the story play out over the landscape. If a story is too generalized, as in stories about "every man" or stories that occur "in a land far away," the place in which they occur is not relevant to the structure of the story. We can see this in the 3 beats style of modern Western storytelling;

Beat one: Introduce the main character

Beat two: The journey/crisis of the main character

Beat three: The resolution of the crisis of the main character

This form of storytelling is sometimes described as "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back." There are lots of variations on this theme, but Hollywood typically goes for a three beat structure.

Stories may, however, include the land as an important element in the development of the plot: this is common in some storytelling traditions, especially in Indigenous and Traditional Communities. These types of stories are used for intergenerational knowledge transmission, to contextualize knowledge, to integrate values and perceptions in knowledge systems, and to provide insights into relationships between events, characters, places, culture and society. Places are important in these stories, and that is what allows us to create meaningful maps that can be used in storytelling.

Indigenous Storytelling* has been characterized as having 5 beats:

Beat one:  Set up the theme or the journey you are going on, and what land and cultural framework you will use in the story

Beat two: Introduce the main character

Beat three: The journey/crisis of the main character

Beat four: The resolution of the crisis of the main character

Beat five: The message and resolution of the theme where the character and land are once again in balance with one another

The first and fifth beats explicitly involve the relationship between the character, the land and the cultural/social context of the story. By creating a balance between land and character, the story provides a deeper role for place in our story as compared to a simple three beat story structure.

If we use this five beat structure to situate our stories in a landscape of meaning, place has a role in the story that is central to the story. A story written in the three beat structure can be transferred to different places, different times, and different social settings without changing the structure or meaning of the story; in contrast, the five beat structure situates the story in a specific place and a specific social/cultural context and it can't be moved to a different place without changing the meaning of the story.  In the three beat structure, place is often simply a stage upon which the action occurs; in the five beat structure, changing the location of the story changes the story in a fundamental way.

Often times "story maps" are created by marking locations named in a story without incorporating the land into the story itself. If we use the five beat structure, using a map in storytelling means that we forefront the land and provide a geospatial context for the story, moving through the landscape in specific ways. Using the five beat structure we can tell the story while walking the land, and that sets us up for storytelling using Google Earth Web or Google Earth Pro to virtually move on a path through the 3D landscape in an immersive fashion.

*Clague, Pauline. "The five beats of Indigenous Storytelling." Lumina: Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business 11 (2013). You can read the article and a discussion CLICK HERE

Part 1: Constructing a story

We will expand on the maps we created earlier this semester using the 5 Beats method of Indigenous Storytelling and Google Earth Web. This will allow us to explore the importance of situating stories in places of meaning, connecting stories to your family cultural traditions and incorporating your worldview explicitly into the way you tell your story. This style of Indigenous storytelling was central to our discussions with the guest speakers we have met throughout the semester and the readings (especially On Behalf of Wolf and the First Peoples).

We will contrast this Indigenous Storytelling to the way in which modern Western storytelling universalizes narratives. In the modern Western storytelling style, changing the location, time and even fundamental aspects of the characters, do not fundamentally change the arc of the story. Think of movies and stories you have seen where using the 3 Beats method discussed in the overview below allowed for changes that would not be possible using the 5 Beats method.

If the story uses the 5 Beats method and explicitly incorporates the land, we can tell the story while "walking" the land - that is, we can move through Google Earth while telling the story and use the immersive 3D capabilities of Google Earth to provide the experience of physically walking through the landscape upon which the story unfolds.

We will begin by using Jamboards to organize our stories into the 5 Beats structure, then develop our stories in Google Earth Web. We will use written text, links, photographs, and video to create our stories (see examples below).

1. Choose a partner to work with in a breakout room. You will each work on your own Jamboard, but will share your work on each of the beats with your partner and discuss your ideas for developing your story. 

• Go to the folder below and click on a Jamboard to expand it and work in Edit mode.

• Change the name of your Jamboard to your initials to make it easier to find in the folder.

• You can add text, shapes, sticky notes, images, etc. to make your points. Use the drawing and eraser tools to draw freehand.

2. Your Jamboard will be public, so be careful about not sharing private information such as addresses.

3. Pay particular attention to Beats 1 and 5, these will be important in setting the tone for your story. All semester we have been discussing the importance of place, of connection, relatedness, and community in an expanded sense that includes the natural world. This is your opportunity to use those ideas to tell your own personal story.  Go back to the map that we made earlier this semester for ideas.

4. Once you have finished outlining your 5 Beats in Jamboard we will create a Google Earth Web map as an aid to tell your story. Use the instructions in the next section below to build your map.

Part 2: Creating your map

Go to Google Earth Web

Google Earth Web is a platform that requires good bandwidth and a good computer. The advantage of using Google Earth Web for your storytelling is that it can be viewed in 3D, which helps the listener better understand the experience of walking up a mountainside or through a deep valley. You can also control how the viewer orients and moves through the land, which can help provide context to elements of the story.

Google Earth Web is browser based and can be shared (unlike Google Earth Pro, which is a desktop application). If you create a new project and choose "Create project in Google Drive" you will be able to share the map (if you create the map by importing a KML file you will not be able to share it). 

The advantages of using Google Earth Web for Storytelling are:

• Maps are in 3D with rich, immersive topography and the angle and direction of view can be controlled

• The text, photos and videos are nicely formatted and easy to show in presentations

• You can use HTML coding to add customizations to your information panels

• Maps can be shared on the web

Examples of Google Earth Web maps that tell a story

The Voices of the Wilderness, An Alaskan Artist-in-Residency (JAS)

Kanza Language and Landscape

A refugee's journey

• How does it change the way we tell stories when we prioritize the land (rather than the character) in the narrative by beginning and ending the story with beats 1 and 5? What do we mean by “land, place, homeland”? What role does the land have in the story? Can your story be removed from the land and the culture in which it was originally embedded? Does the meaning change when it is told from a different cultural perspective and in a different place? When you are forced to move from your homeland, do your stories change?

• If a place is changed because of human activities (pollution, industrial development, mining, etc.) do the stories related to that place cease to have meaning; do the stories change their meaning; do the stories remain unchanged but become relegated to the past?

• Does altering a place change the characters? The cultural context of the story? Is it possible for the characters to remain unchanged if the land is changed?

• What do we mean by the “message” of the story? What changes when we add beat 5 and resolve the story by bringing the character and the land back in balance? How is this different from ending the story with the resolution of the character’s story in beat 4?