Narrative Theory and Stories that Speak to Us - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
In addition, online spaces like the DALN—because they are digital, social, and networked—affect the form, the reception, and the circulation of personal narratives. The DALN, for example, stores video narratives in formats that can be played by media viewers (like Quicktime or Windows Media Viewer). These viewers provide cultural references (the video controller bar, the screen, titles) to the idioms of television, film, and video. In addition, once narratives are entered into the DALN, they are transformed into publicly accessible cultural artifacts and enter into the production and distribution systems of global computer networks (databases, interfaces, computer networks).
In the case of digital literacy narratives, we believe that the DALN provides individuals with the chance to reflect on their reading and writing practices and values during a fundamentally important time of cultural transition, a period within which print literacies are increasingly giving way to digital literacies, when the mediation of paper and pen is increasingly replaced by the mediation of a computer screen, and when written words are being challenged by audio and video as modes of vernacular expression (Burgess, 2006; Burgess and Green, 2008; Hull and Nelson, 2005).
In this exhibit, we have tried to point out some of the productive work that we believe the autobiographical narratives in the DALN can accomplish for individual contributors, as well as for teachers, scholars, and other literacy workers. We hope, further, that this exhibit can serve as the opening to a much longer conversation about narrative theory and literacy narratives in the DALN.
