The topic
As is mentioned in the second chapter of module one the first question to help you define your subject could be: what do I or does my community do, know, or celebrate that deserves to be recognized as heritage, to be more precise, as intangible cultural heritage?
You likely have already answered this question. After all, because you and/or the people in your community feel that a custom, recipe, traditional craft, or whatever cultural heritage deserves more recognition, you started thinking about digital storytelling in the first place.
It may also be that someone from outside the community wants to work with the community to identify its heritage, often on the assumption of its existence. In that case, there is a preceding process, for which methodologies and guides have been developed which are described in module 1, ‘Identification and Cataloging of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Rural Areas’, in chapter 4.
What to tell about the topic
Just by determining the topic of the story, you don’t have the narrative. What do you want to tell about this topic? To determine this you can ask yourself questions such as: what does this particular heritage mean to you personally? What was the moment that you realised this meaning? Why do you need to tell the story now? What more is there to tell about the heritage itself (research!)? In finding the answers, whether you do it individually or in brainstorming sessions with people from your community, we advise you to make a mind map or an affinity diagram or something alike, on paper or online. Think freely and write down whatever you think might be interesting to use in the story in this early stage of the process. Try to turn off your internal editor! Later on, when you have clustered and edited these ideas, they will help you to put the narrative together.
Digital storytelling emphasizes personal narratives and individual experiences, often using multimedia elements like text, images, audio, and video to create an engaging and interactive experience.
Who is telling
Deciding early on who will tell the story will help you in the story creation process. Will the story be told by one person, or by several people in your community? Will people speak for themselves (in the first person), or will the story be told in the third person, a narrator outside the story? And if so, does this narrator focus on the thoughts and feelings of one specific character, or does s-he know the thoughts and feelings of all characters in the story. In other words: who will be the narrator(s) and what will be the narrator’s perspective? Keep in mind that each perspective creates different levels of intimacy and detachment, allowing the audience to experience the story from the narrator’s immediate, first-hand perspective or from a more detached, omniscient view.
Decisions like the aforementioned you usually make together with the people in your community with whom you share the cultural heritage. Chapter 2 of module 2 (‘Collaborative Management and Community Engagement’) focuses on involving the community in making decisions like these.
There are a few practical aspects we advise you to keep in mind, such as time required and available, podcast or video and the availability of equipment and programmes and skills or expertise to use those to create a podcast or video. It is also useful to think about the voice and/or presentation of the narrator(s). After all, you want to present the heritage story in the best possible way to which mumbling by someone hiding behind a shawl doesn’t help, for one thing.