Part 1:Storytelling with Google Earth Web
These two sessions will cover how to tell engaging map-based stories about places of cultural and environmental importance that you can easily share online. Then we'll share techniques for presenting in a 3D landscape, including building virtual tours to guide your listeners through the landscape you’re discussing, whether your audience is your community, school children, or an official meeting.
Part 1 will cover Indigenous Storytelling and will demonstrate examples of how to tell a 5 beats story using Google Earth Web.
Part 2 will show you how to build a Google Earth Web maps to help tell your story and will include hands-on activities for developing your own storytelling map.
Storytelling1.mp4
Beat one: Set up the theme or the journey you are going on, and what land and cultural framework you will use in the story
Beat two: Introduce the main character
Beat three: The journey/crisis of the main character
Beat four: The resolution of the crisis of the main character
Beat five: The message and resolution of the theme where the character and land are once again in balance with one another
The first and fifth beats explicitly involve the relationship between the character, the land and the cultural/social context of the story. By creating a balance between land and character, the story provides a deeper role for place in our story as compared to a simple three beat story structure.
A story written in the three beat structure can be transferred to different places, different times, and different social settings without changing the structure or meaning of the story; in contrast, the five beat structure situates the story in a specific place and a specific social/cultural context and it can't be moved to a different place without changing the meaning of the story. In the three beat structure, place is often simply a stage upon which the action occurs; in the five beat structure, changing the location of the story changes the story in a fundamental way.
Often times "story maps" are created by marking locations named in a story without incorporating the land into the story itself. If we use the five beat structure, using a map in storytelling means that we forefront the land and provide a geospatial context for the story, moving through the landscape in specific ways. Using the five beat structure we can tell the story while walking the land, and that sets us up for storytelling using Google Earth Web or Google Earth Pro to virtually move on a path through the 3D landscape in an immersive fashion.
*Clague, Pauline. "The five beats of Indigenous Storytelling." Lumina: Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business 11 (2013). You can read the article and a discussion CLICK HERE
