Principle Investigator: Dr. Berber Hagedoorn, Assistant Professor Media Studies & Audiovisual Culture (RUG), b.hagedoorn@rug.nl

Project Period: October 1, 2021 to 1 July 2022

How do Dutch and international MA students, experienced in media creation and innovation, use the English-language content and collections in the CLARIAH Media Suite for creative storytelling practices: to search, contextualize and share the Media Suite’s cultural heritage content, and to engage users with it? The CLARIAH Media Suite provides online access to Dutch audiovisual cultural heritage (such as television, film and radio) and contextual (meta)data. The project has a three-pronged approach – focusing on the interaction of (a) content, (b) platform, and (c) user – to dig into and understand Media Suite use for multimodal storytelling purposes. Understanding storytelling in various forms as a sense-making practice and as a socio-technical practice, this project combines platform engagement analysis with user analysis, both via survey analysis and co-creative user-laboratory sessions. This approach triangulates insights into perspectives on digital storytelling and media use with first-hand observations of Media Suite use, to create (make) new creative storytelling products or experiences. It uncovers how students in the international classroom perceive the Media Suite platform as an effective storytelling tool.

Below you may access the final project deliverables.

Project Deliverables

Video Lectures

  • Video lecture: Multimodal Storytelling in the International Classroom

  • Video lecture: Creating a Visual Exhibition in the International Classroom

  • Video Example of a Visual Exhibition with Multimodal Timelines

Teaching Materials

Tutorial 1: Introduction to the Media Suite

Through interactive tutorials in a co-creative lab setting, students carry out user tasks in class in order to get to know the tool in a playful and exploratory manner. The first tutorial focuses on letting the students get familiar with the tool through tasks exploring the different affordances of the tool, and comparing the Media Suite to other search tools such as Google. By doing this the students are able to recognise the importance of being aware of the impact of tool use in the research process.

Tutorial 2: Refining your approach: from search to storytelling

Students this week work in a co-creative session on searching and making creative stories with the Media Suite’s cultural heritage content and discuss issues related to their visual exhibition. During this second tutorial we focus on the iterative process of research using the three steps exploring, refining, and producing of stories (Sauer, 2017). Using hands-on user tasks we challenge students to think about possibilities, affordances and functionalities of the Media Suite tool as a mediating factor within the context of their research and the tool they are using. The concepts of apply this idea to Through conceptualizing close and distant storytelling and applying this to the way material is understood and then explained to an audience, students gain a better understanding of why and how certain materials in the Media Suite should be used and understood.

Tutorial 3: From author to audience

Students participate and reflect in small focus groups on “sharing stories about storytelling”, focussing on the notion of author vs. audience, which provides an opportunity for kick-starting their essay (in which students reflect deeper on the interaction between search and storytelling). This third tutorial focuses on the process in storytelling from author to audience; what different ways of storytelling are there and how does this impact the way an audience perceives the story? During this workshop the students are also encouraged to think about how storytelling is part of their visual exhibition, and how their academic and personal experiences influence the story that is told in their visual exhibition, through reflective questions and discussion with their peers.

Additional Lecture Slides

Conference Presentations

Blog Post