{"id":44,"date":"2014-09-17T13:02:43","date_gmt":"2014-09-17T17:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/?p=44"},"modified":"2014-09-17T13:02:43","modified_gmt":"2014-09-17T17:02:43","slug":"rained-real-hard-and-it-rained-for-a-real-long-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/bestwork\/rained-real-hard-and-it-rained-for-a-real-long-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Of my storytelling to date, I think this is the one I&#8217;m most proud of. But then, it&#8217;s about one of the things in my life I&#8217;m most proud of.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/19-9i7GD6Ro?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>I made this during a workshop we hosted for faculty at Kenyon. It&#8217;s out of the Berkeley <a href=\"http:\/\/storycenter.org\/\">Center for Digital Storytelling<\/a> model. (The workshop was actually coordinated by a trainer from Ohio State&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/digitalstory.osu.edu\/\">Digital Storytelling<\/a> program.) This is a storytelling tradition which focuses on autobiographical narratives, respecting the storyteller&#8217;s experience and the &#8220;gift of voice&#8221; when they tell it themselves. There&#8217;s a strong social justice component to telling untold stories, which I think is part of why this particular mode of digital storytelling is appealing to academics (especially those pursuing a service learning pedagogy).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also a very intense process &#8211; really a full 40-hour week of work, considering the writing process, the tech training, and the process of recording, finding and layering soundtrack, and image selection, ordering, and import. A tremendous amount of the work is done in writing circles, in which these personal narratives are laid out for the group&#8217;s supportive critique. That&#8217;s a lot of vulnerability to give, and accept &#8211; and honestly, my story didn&#8217;t require the kind of exposure which some other storytellers engaged.<\/p>\n<p>This story is based on the diary I kept while on the rebuilding trip, and audioblogs I made at the time. Those audio reports were a particularly exciting composition exercise &#8211; every night, imagining myself as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0433383\/\">David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow<\/a>, I sat down and wrote my reflections on the day and the trip, and edited them into a short news-like report for my friends up north. I then posted them to Blogger through a now-defunct service which let me make audio posts through a cell phone call. (These were the pre-smartphone days, kids, at least for me. I was working on a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go burner.)<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Fortunately, I saved those MP3s before the system went belly-up. I&#8217;ve put them on Soundcloud, but marked as private. I haven&#8217;t decided whether I want to revive those particular moments yet; as years have passed I&#8217;m less impressed with the emotional rawness and quick polish of that work.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/keenetrial.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/truthiness-erk-e1348498751222.jpg\" alt=\"Truthiness! Stephen Colbert in a parody of the \" width=\"189\" height=\"244\" \/>I had a fair amount of trouble with the &#8220;truthiness&#8221; of the process. Some of the images in that movie are actual shots of the day in question. Some are other shots of our trip, or of New Orleans. Some are <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/\">CC-licensed<\/a> shots from Flickr or elsewhere, unrelated to my life at all. I had to wrestle with that. Did I sell out my own story by using a picture of &#8220;college students&#8221; which is from Madrid, not Gambier? Did I fail to carry the stories of\u00a0the people of New Orleans when I used pictures of cleaning up a South Asian volcano blast? At the end of the day, I decided that the images help me tell a story which I still believe needs telling, and I made my peace with it. I still grit my jaw every time I look at them, but I&#8217;m proud enough of the result to share it with you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of my storytelling to date, I think this is the one I&#8217;m most proud of. But then, it&#8217;s about one of the things in my life I&#8217;m most proud of. I made this during a workshop we hosted for faculty at Kenyon. It&#8217;s out of the Berkeley Center for Digital Storytelling model. (The workshop was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/bestwork\/rained-real-hard-and-it-rained-for-a-real-long-time\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,15,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bestwork","category-biographical","category-ds106-2","category-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p53vXx-I","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephmurphy.name\/ds106\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}