A Transnational Exhibit: A Sampling
We note at the same time that the DALN is a great deal more than merely a collection of individual tellings of literate experiences. The DALN and our own contribution to this collection reflect many different approaches to relating the literacy stories that populate the Web but do so aided by various diverse reporting tools. Our selection, for example, represents dramatically different methods of reporting: Debleena’s textual narrative on life and language in India juxtaposed alongside Cornelia’s voiced-over video of her childhood imaginings with Croatian picture books and Lisa’s video-recording of her literate life as an English-speaking American in the Netherlands.
Debleena chose to represent her literacy musings through what some might consider the more conventional mode of alphabetic text. But there is nothing conventional about Debleena’s story as she lays out its telling in the most compelling of written words: “Once upon a time, beyond the thrice nine lands in the thrice ten kingdom, the story of a childhood unravels amidst that formulaic opening. It is the incantation of the beginning of a near-forgotten love affair with words.” And her written literacy narrative continues in this lovely, mysterious vein accompanied only by images of the Santhali alphabet and numbers she has drawn and a black and white photo of herself as she walks with children in the Santhal village. Conventional? We think not.
Digitally, Cornelia’s story is set apart from Debleena’s by her use of a video camera to capture still images of Croatian picture books that were first translated into Italian from English and then into Croatian. As viewers watch and listen to her voiced-over story of the 1967 Croatian representations of Puss in Boots or The Prince and the Pauper, they are treated to hearing her imaginings of these picture books that her Croatian mother sometimes read to her but that she perused constantly on her own.
Lisa also distinguishes her telling by employing video as her tool of choice and also talks about children’s books in part. But this time the literacy narrative focuses on the books that helped her learn Dutch in Amsterdam as an American immigrant. In her telling, she also employs a MacBook as a video camera focusing on her own oral rendition of her video-taped literacy narrative.