Learning from Human Support: Informing the Design of Personal Digital Story-Authoring Tools

Everyone has a personal story to tell. These stories are often captured in the photos and video we take to record and share our experiences. This paper examines the support mechanisms used by the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) to help everyday people unlock the stories captured in their images and video through the practice of digital storytelling. We conducted a field study of the digital storytelling workshop offered by CDS and discovered composing digital narratives using personal media requires a significant amount of storytelling and technical support. We present observed challenges (story development, content preparation, movie production, and process management) to creating digital narratives and then abstract a set of lessons learned from the human support CDS provides for creating personal narratives using digital media. We then consider how software designers might capitalize on our observations to provide a similar level of support in software. Author