DIGITAL STORYTELLING WITH GOSHTHI

Abstract

Almost all ancient civilizations have had a tradition of storytelling. This oral tradition has sustained the handover of valuable knowledge from generation to generation. The audience, especially the younger ones, used to assimilate diverse forms of articulation and varied opinions through these interactions, and become storytellers in their own walks of life. With the advent of the Internet, modern lifestyles and choice of leisure, exposure of this sort, through books and people, has significantly decreased. Although we receive vast amounts of audio-visual content on a single click, the ease of sharing them as posts, tweets and messages on a digital platform has made the need for reinterpretation and oral transmission obsolete. The penetration of smartphones, in both rural and urban areas, has diminished the need for face to face interactions to such extents that although we are forever connected, we are becoming less social. As technology creates new distractions, new disruptions are required to combat them. Storytelling workshops are popular among students of all grades. However, the interaction is limited to the participants of the workshop, which are often of the same age and intellectual calibre, formal in approach and less diverse in terms of presentation styles. These limitations have a debilitating impact on the expressiveness and creativity and problem-solving abilities of the masses. This work aims to revive this tradition, widening the sphere of sharing, through the closed community of students and their teachers, within a school. Goshthi is the proposed mobile app, creating a digital social platform for sharing audio. Taking cues from images presented in folk styles, or on hearing the narration of a folk tale, the students need to record a short story, which can vary in style, length and even interpretation. It can be paralleled in concept with a platform like Instagram, populated with audio instead of visual/audio-visual content. Its objective is to encourage articulation amongst students. The app facilitates peer to peer sharing and facilitates teachers in grading these recordings for cohesion, coherence and fluency. By restricting the activities to the school community, the app administrators can ensure that inappropriate content doesn’t pollute the platform and parental trust and guidance can be gained and sustained. Unlike a physical workshop, it gives those shy of speaking in public or slow in composing their responses the privilege to express themselves in private, at their own pace, in their own languages. Goshthi extends the language learning benefits of the ubiquitous Toastmasters’ Clubs. Taking inputs from popular apps such as Duolingo, OpenTalk and Shootwords elements of gamification will be incorporated. The viewers’ perception of image(s) is heavily influenced by the elements in their immediate surroundings, such as racism, abuse and violence, which show up in their expressions. Thus, manual analysis of their stories can help school counsellors detect warning signs and approach them with timely help. As we live in a vibrant, extremely competitive photoshopped world, visual content makes people more insecure and more depressed and less happy. Promoting interaction through non-visual media can be a refreshing change and divert the focus to more intellectual pursuits. It will be useful for intellectual growth, social support and