Week-6

Before conducting the activity, I thought it would be more helpful to first finish reading my readings and research more about Narratives - Creative Writing(?). Currently there is a lot on my mind while I am also trying to focus on one thing at a time.

Traditional Storytelling Today

After reading ‘Traditional Storytelling Today’ - Margaret Read MacDonald, there were a lot of thoughts occurring in my mind, lot of new research points like the chapter I read from this book, was about how the digital age has caused a decline in traditional storytelling methods and how people to this day are trying to revive the culture of storytelling. It also gave me an insight into something known as the ‘National Storytelling Festival’ that first happened in 1973. Reading about it, I also realised that when the book talks about Traditional Storytelling, it is not focusing on writing and reading, it is rather focusing on the origin that is oral storytelling and live performances which is defined as ‘Traditional Storytelling’. I thought I would be able to go through a few chapters in a day but reading just one already got me to re-consider the activity that I had recently planned to do - to sketch through a narrative. Also at the same time I feel like I should look for similar projects but I also want to first go through the readings. I want to research ‘Different ways to build a narrative’. Or is it that I want to tweak an already existing narrative and communicate it differently? Or am I doing it again - using really big words which could be separate concepts?

So for now - I have decided to focus on the readings first. Go through the chapters that I have marked to be useful for my research direction.

Later, I was talking to Vionetta about this and she pointed out the fact that historic narratives aren't exactly accurate and some of the moments are interpreted. This reminded me of these readings from BADC3 - “Memory in Culture by Palgrave Macmillan” and Mitzals “Theories of Social Remembering”. I think these readings could also help me with researching historical narratives, legends. Then a while later I realised that they are irrelevant to my research.

More mind maps

Currently there are a lot of thoughts going and I think I need a bit of a structure and need to specify some areas of my research, starting with the research objective. So some more mind maps: I was just trying to write things down until I get my thoughts clear so first I just randomly made a mind map and then divided it into a more organised structure for the RPO (Summary of Readings)

I still was not able to specify the narrative parts and I realised that there are a lot of gaps in my concept.

Weekly Consultations

During the consultations, Andreas asked me what culture would I like to focus on?

With this consultation I was able to specify some of the things like the narratives to be about Indian heritage since I am also more familiar with it. The core is still interactive storytelling, so maybe specifying one of my pillars to something more familiar would be a good way to go. I was also able to specify my target audience to maybe kids learning about their roots. And later I also thought about the heritage in the city of Ahmedabad, India, since that’s where I live. Although I am not aware of much history related to the city, I thought it could be interesting to research.