Tag Archives: storytelling

Monday’s Link Roundup.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian compatriots! In this Monday’s Link Roundup, be sure to check out Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life.  It provides some pretty interesting ways to reduce the mound of stuff squirreled away in our boxes and filing cabinets.   And on a similar theme, you might want to avail yourself of the services of PeggyBank.com. You can read about them in Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age.

  • Banished Words. “As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.”
  • The 10 Greatest Biographical Poems (Part 1). “My work documenting lives on video always has me on the lookout for enduring biography in other formats, like great biographical poems.  I can’t claim to have boiled the ocean, but here are the first five of my personal faves.”
  • The Neurochemistry of Empathy, Storytelling, and the Dramatic Arc, Animated. “Paul Zak [is] director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity. In this short film on empathy, neurochemistry, and the dramatic arc, directed and edited by my friend Kirby Ferguson and animated by Henrique Barone, Zak takes us inside his lab, where he studies how people respond to stories.”
  • Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age. “Lots of people have memories locked away on old, deteriorating media: home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives and slides…Now, a small company in Omaha, Neb., called PeggyBank.com, is offering a service where you send in all your old media (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online “vault,” usable from any computer with Web access.”
  • Is It Worth Converting an Old Book Into an eBook? “Although ebooks are exploding in popularity, the tools we have to create them favor straight text books like novels, memoirs and literary nonfiction. With complex books that include all three kinds of content, we’re still a long way away from being able to easily and inexpensively re-launch the books of the past.”
  • Fall fashion – women in veils 1880s-1930s. “Looking through the new fall fashion magazines this weekend, I noticed hats, but few veils. Women have been wearing veils since at least the 13th century B.C. in Assyria. Classical Greek & Hellenistic statues sometimes depict Greek women with both their head & face covered by a veil.  Statues of Persian elite women from Persepolis show examples of some women wearing veils & some without.  Here are a few from the 19th & early 20th century, which I find fascinating.”

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The Best of Monday’s Links Roundup.

These are some of my favorite articles  from last year. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch up.

  • A Brief History of Film Title Sequence Design in 2 Minutes. “In his graduation project, an absolutely brilliant motion graphics gem, Dutch designer and animator Jurjen Versteeg examines the history of the title sequence through an imagined documentary about the designers who revolutionized this creative medium.”
  • A Crash Course in Marketing With Stories. “If you want your marketing to really sizzle, if you want people to remember it, you need to turn your marketing messages into stories. I’ve broken down the classical elements of story below so you can begin to think like a storyteller, and make your marketing messages stick.”
  • 10 Essential Books on Typography. “Whether you’re a professional designer, recreational type-nerd, or casual lover of the fine letterform, typography is one of design’s most delightful frontiers, an odd medley of timeless traditions and timely evolution in the face of technological progress. Today, we turn to 10 essential books on typography, ranging from the practical to the philosophical to the plain pretty.”
  • When Data Disappears. “…if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it.”
  • Selling My Mother’s Dresses. “Some of my favorite things — including the sundress I’m wearing today and the Winnie the Pooh car that Jay is pushing our daughter in — are from someone else’s life. I find no joy in shopping at regular stores anymore…I love trying to sniff out a memory from a bud vase or a favorite song from a case of L.P.’s. The stains and broken switches, the bend in the knee of an old pair of jeans. Sometimes I just want to look at how many Mason jars one person can collect and imagine what they might’ve held. It’s comforting to know that someone has breathed and laughed inside a sweater before me. That I am part of a continuum.” [Thanks to Mary M. Harrison of Morning Glory Memoirs for alerting me to this item.]
  • Tracking Personal Histories Across Time. “Sander Koot’s series Back from the Future is a pairing of new portraits of the individual with an older picture of that person from years past.. he only photographs individuals after interviewing them. “In this project, I ask people to find old portraits of themselves, of which they have good memories,” says Koot. “When talking to them about the picture, you see them reliving the happy moment. Only after I know all the details about the past of that picture, (do) we start the shoot.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Happy Civic Holiday to my Canadian compatriots. Being in a holiday mood, I’ve selected some summery items for this Monday’s Link Roundup. Two of my favorite articles are My summer memories are up for sale and Why road trips rule over resorts. And if you can’t get away, then the next best thing might be to read a travel memoir. Check out some good reading at A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs.

  • The Science of How We Came to Live and Breathe Stories. “Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world…In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively.”
  • Memories, Lighting the Corners of Minds. “I went to the annual conference of biography writers last year in Washington DC…I soon realized how much biographers depend on written records, and how often those written records are letters. Letters that have gone the way of the dodo bird in our new electronic world…I realized personal memoirs would be the only written records of what it was like to grow up in West Virginia before electricity. Before a lot of things. Someday in the not too distant future, if you want to know what it was like “back then” these memoirs will be the only way to know.Thus,these memoirs can serve a much greater social purpose than simply memoir. They are the written records of how we lived. It isn’t an indulgence to write them. It’s a social imperative. There may not be a lot of people who want to read these memoirs. There may only be one. But that one might be a historian doing research in the far distant future and if we want them, those kids of ours, to know what it was like, we have to tell them now.”
  • Why road trips rule over resorts. “Road trips have inherent downsides – people throwing up, bad hotels, children fighting in the back seat – but the odd thing is that as people grow into adults, they remember this with fondness. Those difficulties are put into a sentimental context of family memory,” says Susan Sessions Rugh, a history professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who wrote the book Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations.”
  • Historians discover medieval banking records hidden under coats of arms. “A rare accounting document, half-concealed beneath a coat of arms design, has revealed the activities of Italian bankers working in early 15th century London, decades before the capital became a financial powerhouse. The discovery was made by economic historians at Queen Mary, University of London.”
  • My summer memories are up for sale. “My Mum sent me a real-estate listing today. It turns out that my uncle is selling the old family cottage where we spent our summers when I was a kid. And since nobody in the family can afford to buy it, pretty soon it will no longer be a part of the family at all.”
  • Are You Brilliant At Marketing? “Are you brilliant at marketing? We think you can be., We’ve assembled some great links meant to boost your marketing creativity. Check them out and see how “brilliant” you can become.”
  • A World On The Page: Five Great Travel Memoirs. “Let’s stay put this summer. Let’s live other lives from the comfort of our couches. Crank the AC and allow these five books to take you to other worlds. But be warned: These are dangerous places, the underbellies of our great cities. You’ll meet unforgettable characters: a future first lady, a one-booted hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, a young Angela Davis. You’ll encounter beauty, bravery, chilling strangeness — and you won’t even have to take off your Slanket.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup I seem to have been intrigued by disappearing things. There’s Disappearing Ink Book, ideal for the procrastinator. Endangered Languages, an online resource to record languages in danger of disappearing. And  Vanishing Languages, a National Geographic site containing some frightening statistics on the weekly disappearance of languages.

On a lighter note you might want to check out Top Punctuation Howlers.

  • Disappearing Ink Book. “For less voracious readers and those with busy lives, finishing a book can be an elusive task continually pushed to the bottom of to-do lists, right along with reorganizing a closet and learning French. A small Argentinean publisher, Eterna Cadencia, has found a way to combat this: They created an ink that begins to fade away after only two months of interaction with light and air.”
  • India’s paper trail runs for centuries. “Hundreds of years before the colonizers came, Indians were counting, sorting and filing with a precision that the British could only hope to envy. They went deh-be-dehi, or village-by-village, he [Mohammed Irfann] said in the mellifluous Persian of the Moghul Empire, and they made meticulous lists of everything from castes to trees. Dr. Irfann, archivist in the Oriental Division of the Indian National Archives, understands how monumental a task that was. He is near the end of more than 25 years of work cataloging a trove of 137,000 Moghul documents, known as the Inayat Jang Collection.”
  • Endangered Languages. “…an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat.”
  • Top Punctuation Howlers – The Comma. “What’s so great about the comma? It clears away ambiguity, confusion, and on occasion steers us away from cannibalism. For example: Martha finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.
  • Vanishing Languages. “One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?”
  • “I Am Allergic to Abstraction” by Carlo Rotella. “What does it mean to explore the world through stories? Martin Eiermann sat down with scholar and writer Carlo Rotella to talk about vivid characters, Bostonian accents, and the future of suburbia.”
  • 11 Ways to Bore the Boots Off Your Readers. “I’ve collected the 11 most common mistakes bloggers make that bore the hell out of their readers. And of course, if you prefer to engage, entertain, and entice your readers … just turn these around, and make your content really work.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup check out the animated talk 5 Things Every Presenter Should Know About People. If you make presentations, I highly recommend it.  And for something creative and fun, be sure to watch Publisher Creates Inspirational Book Sculpture Video.

  • 10 Important Life Lessons We Learned from Children’s Books. “This week, one of our favorite children’s book authors and illustrators of all time, Chris Van Allsburg, turned 63. Allsburg’s books were formative literature for us as children, so to celebrate the author’s birthday, we were inspired to think about all the life lessons we learned from children’s books — both picture books and early chapter books — that still stick with us.”
  • 8 Things You Should Include In Your Terms of Service Agreement. “If you’ve been a solo freelancer for any significant stretch of time, you’ve probably learned the hard way that a work project can go horribly wrong. They turn out to be life lessons in the long run, but there are ways to protect yourself.”
  • The Life Biographic: An Interview with Hermione Lee. “Acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee talks about life-writing as a scholarly and literary pursuit: the fictions and facts that make up written lives, rules that can be broken, conventions that change and motives that remain the same.”
  • Participatory Archives: Moving Beyond Description. “Last week, the Library of Congress Archives Forum hosted a talk by Kate Theimer of the popular blog ArchivesNext…Theimer spoke on the subject of participatory archives, highlighting the ways that archives can use crowdsourcing projects to increase user engagement and understanding, while also enhancing the information and resources that they provide.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

Too busy for a vacation this summer? Then you may want to read The Importance of Vacations in this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup. If you’re not familiar with Cowbird, check out this latest web-based means of  collecting stories. And as someone who relies on my copyeditor to save me from embarrassing gaffes, I highly recommend 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better.

  • The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood. “Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristo…In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below.”
  • Narrative Concepts. “…narrative medicine means an understanding of health and disease for humans, that is grounded in the stories humans live out in their lives and the stories that we understand about our lives which give our lives meaning and purpose…it means that illness is embedded in the stories we are performing and that are performing us.   There is a biological story about how we are organisms who are born, live, wear out, and die.   Our lives are finite.   Within that finitude, however, are multiple social stories which interact with the “how long do I have to live story”.
  • 6 Ways Copyeditors Make Your Book Better. “Linda Jay is a very experienced book editor…I asked [her]…if she would give readers some advice on one of the most important decisions a self-publisher makes: hiring a copyeditor. Here’s her reply.”
  • The Importance Of Vacations. “As an entrepreneur who has launched three businesses, I have on several occasions in the past found myself working long hours, seven days a week and forgoing vacations owing to lack of time and reduced income. As I have grown older, I realize that was a mistake.”
  • Cowbird. “…is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

For Ken Burns fans,  this Monday’s Link Roundup includes a terrific 5 minute video,  Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling. In Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique,  you’ll find a challenge to the popular view that people’s lives are a collection of stories.  And find out if you live in one of America’s well- read cities by checking out What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America?

  • Alzheimer’s Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories.[NPR] “Storytelling is one of the most ancient forms of communication — it’s how we learn about the world. It turns out that for people with dementia, storytelling can be therapeutic. It gives people who don’t communicate well a chance to communicate. And you don’t need any training to run a session.”
  • Life Writing. [pdf] “This special virtual edition of Life Writing presents eight articles that have a clear connection with the themes of the upcoming conference of the International Auto/Biography Association, to be held in Canberra, Australia, in July 2012. The conference is called ‘Framing Lives’, and its title signals an emphasis on the visual aspects of life narrative: ‘graphics and animations, photographs and portraits, installations and performances, avatars and characters that come alive on screens, stages, pages, and canvas, through digital and analogue technologies’ (www.iaba2012.com).”
  • The Colossal Camera that will capture Vanishing Cultures. “One photograph, no retakes, no retouching, just a pure honest photograph and a giant camera that will travel 20,000 miles across the US to photograph American Cultures. Vanishing Cultures is an astounding and completely unique concept…This one of a kind monumental camera will be transported by a huge truck trailer, due to it’s extremely large size. His [Dennis Manarchy] aim is to capture cultures that are rapidly fading from society and to feature their portraits on 2-story sized prints displayed in stadium-sized traveling outdoor exhibitions along with the amazing negatives and the stories behind the people and cultures.”
  • Skepticism About Stories: The “Narrababble” Critique. “…it is a very popular idea in psychology, philosophy and various social sciences that people experience their lives as a story or collection of stories. For example, the philosopher Dan Dennett explains the mind as a master novelist: “We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography,” he has written. Moreover, says the philosopher Galen Strawson, there’s a parallel claim in the air that this is A Good Thing: that each person should be able to understand his/her life as a meaningful story, with an arc and a recognizable end. Strawson, though, is having none of it. He thinks these ideas, which he’s called “narrababble,” are a fad.”
  • What Are The Most Well-Read Cities In America? “Amazon has released their second annual list of the most well-read cities in the country, based on their book, magazine and newspaper sales data in both print and digital, since June 1, 2011. The statistics are per capita, and only include towns with more than 100,000 residents.”
  • What’s so special about biography? “It is my contention that biography has a unique way of helping us to understand what we are like as people. There have been true Golden Ages and Reigns of Terror in the fabric of human history; but, by examining the lives of real, flesh-and-blood human beings who inhabited those places and times, we can see the similarities and the constancy of human nature throughout that history. So, how does biography accomplish this in ways that other genres cannot?”
  • Ken Burns on the Art of Storytelling.[Video] “In explaining his own view on filmmaking, Burns rolls out that old quote from Jean Luc-Godard, “Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.” But he has his own response to the famous proclamation: “Maybe. It’s lying twenty-four times a second, too. All the time. All story is manipulation.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup a favorite of mine is Sixty years in poems. I like it not only for the poetry but also for its illustration of the many ways we can capture our stories. For a thought-provoking piece on the harmful side of life writing, be sure to read Life Writing: An ethical source of self identity, or painful invasion of privacy?

  • Byte-sized Life. “We are used to duration—getting to know people over time. One of the great innovations of film during the silent era was the close-up. Directors used the facial expression of a character the way one might use an interior monologue in a novel. But it was always shown in some sort of larger narrative context. Now, DVDs, the DVR, and YouTube allow for piecemeal and repetitive viewing…We require so little—a gesture, a word, a simple facial expression—to form an understanding, or the illusion of an understanding, of another person.”
  • Harper Lee’s sister gives glimpses of reclusive author’s life. “Glimpses into the family life of the famously reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee, have been given by her sister Alice, a practicing lawyer who recently turned 100. Alice Finch Lee, known as Miss Alice, was speaking to documentary maker Mary McDonagh Murphy.”
  • Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City. “Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet. The city’s Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database. Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight — from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.”
  • Life Writing: An ethical source of self identity, or painful invasion of privacy? “On Tuesday evening, roughly 30 students, faculty, staff and Greencastle community members gathered to hear John Eakin’s reflections on life writing in his talk, “Telling Life Stories: The Good of It, and the Harm.” … Eakin, a professor at Indiana University and one of the foremost authorities on the autobiography and memoir, addressed the complexities of the genre.”

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Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup there are many treats. If you’re a graphic designer,  I think you’ll love watching Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments.  For those who admire good craftsmanship, don’t miss  The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. It’s a poignant video about what is being lost in our digital world.

  • Memoir Writing Tips for Creating Story Structure and the Narrative Arc. “Memoir writers struggle with plot and structure for a very good reason: they think they know the plot. They assume that writing “what happened” is enough to create a memoir, and think that putting journal entries into the computer can be their memoir. A memoir is a story, created and constructed with skill and focus. It can be chronological or it might not be. Writing a memoir asks for you to dig deep into your biography and come up with scenes that bring a reader into your world fully and inspire them to keep reading–something about you and your story is relevant to their lives.Some tips for thinking about story and plot:”
  • From Psalters to Downloads. “The MP3 is just the latest in a long line of ways of buying music. Tim de Lisle composes a short history …”
  • Print in Motion Winner: Medusa in Fragments. [Video]“With so much stunning work being produced in the world of motion graphics these days, we wanted to invite the field’s artists to show off a bit. And so Print in Motion was born. We approached the competition with no real parameters other than to feature the most interesting and innovative work we could find, and to build a forum for designers eager to see—and be inspired by—what their peers are doing.We received many worthy entries, but eventually we whittled them down to 10 standouts, starting with this great piece titled Medusa in Fragments.”
  • A Storytelling Lesson from South Park. [Video] “A while back I gave some tips for tightening stories. One of them was to watch out for “and then” syndrome. That is, if you find yourself saying “and then” a lot, what you have “may not actually be a story, but just a long sequence of events”…Then this weekend I came across this video of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone making the very same point. Only more eloquently. (And profanely, of course.)”
  • Nelson Mandela’s life in a digital museum. “For a look at the future of digital museums, check out the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory’s new digital archive composed of thousands of scanned documents from the African leader’s life…But instead of scanning them and dumping them online for scholars to peruse, the center, with Google’s support, created a virtual museum experience — highlighting certain pieces from the archives, putting them in the context of Mandela’s life and then enabling a visitor to the site to go deeper if they’d like.”
  • The Last Letterpress and Paper Store in Downtown Los Angeles. [Video] “ink&paper is a portrait of Aardvark Letterpress and McManus & Morgan Paper, neighboring businesses working together to survive in a digital era. The film was directed by Ben Proudfoot, a film student at U.S.C., and he describes the making of the film in a brief interview below.”

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