Worlding the World: Methodological and Conceptual Challenges of 360 Storytelling

• In Event: 15.018 - New Directions in Visual Research

Abstract

In a “post truth” era, the desire and capacity to separate evidence from diatribe seems lost, as people hold fast to existing worldviews. This year’s AERA wrestles with this concern and wonders how researchers might navigate it by using multimodality to construct powerful narratives and points of view. In this paper we focus on fostering generative worldviews that are inclusive, compassionate, and critical, and that weave together fact, emotion, language, and aesthetics, as well as multiple modalities in storytelling. Centering youth as responsible makers of their own representations of self, community, and future, we discuss our exploration of new forms of storytelling that take as their aim “worlding” (Trend, 2013) through immersive, virtual reality technologies. Focusing especially on the methodological challenges that accompany such storytelling tools, we ask: How can we document the complex authorial process of composing “in the round”? How can we trace a viewer’s path through such stories? How can we theorize the conceptual challenges associated with creating and experiencing an immersive world and their moral and ethical entailments?

Working within a sociocultural perspective on literacy and learning (Scribner & Cole, 1981), we treat 360-video making as part of a lineage of culturally-situated storytelling that uses diverse kinds and “modes” of semiotic resources (Kress, 2003). We also draw from the new cosmopolitanism (Robbins & Horta, 2017) to theorize the challenge of cultivating “hospitable” (Silverstone, 2006) dispositions in a global world, and on post-colonial theorizing (Spivak,1988) to stay alert to the necessity of hearing the “other” speak and articulate her world. Our findings derive from a five-day workshop held at a school in India where 25 high school students developed 360-degree stories to share with partner schools around the world. Using ethnographic methods in a design-based (Barab & Squire, 2004) case study, we collected video/audio-recordings and fieldnotes; questionnaires and focus group interviews; and the 360-degree stories.

Participants embraced 360 storytelling, quickly intuiting its narrative power, and constructing “disruptive texts” (Kamler, 2001) to counter stereotypes of India by immersing viewers in their local spaces—markets, temples, streets, and homes. Yet the medium also presented students and researchers alike with unexpected authorial and analytic challenges. VR technology represents a rupture from other semiotic resources—for example, by not easily permitting the interpolation of still images or frames from conventional video, and thereby constraining the prior textual universe that composers can draw from. For researchers, the challenge was analyzing the immersive, experiential quality of the 360 space that seemed integral to students’ compositional choices. Our compromise was to annotate a “flattened” video, taking a bird’s eye view over the shots that represented a space, but this process altered the viewing experience. Our presentation will describe such analytic conundrums, and also offer an initial framework for understanding how creating an immersive story requires acts of social imagining that may be key to inclusive and ethical compositional practices in a global and digital world (Sinclair, 2018).

Authors

• Glynda A. Hull, University of California - Berkeley

• Jessica Adams, University of California - Berkeley

• Devanshi Unadkat, University of California - Berkeley