OCR
Preface At first glance, the book Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education connects three distinct entities. Ihe aim of the volume is to present the typical narrative forms of the information society, as well as the areas of research and education in which the analysis and creation of narratives can be utilized in higher education. The book is divided into five major sections. In the first part, storytelling is examined with the help of scientific approaches and definitions from different disciplines. In the first chapter, the role of storytelling in human cognition, memory, and interpersonal communication is explored through approaches from cultural, narrative, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology. The second chapter examines the structure and functions of narrative texts with the help of narratology, an interdisciplinary discipline in itself. The third chapter of the first part reviews the characteristics of storytelling through technical media. The first part of the book uses different disciplines to define the conceptual framework by which the narrative feature of cognition and cultural knowledge transfer can be interpreted in a complex way. Narrative, narration, narrator, representation, fabula (story), and syuzhet (plot) are definitions that help to understand the connections and phenomena described in the rest of the volume. The second part of the book presents the characteristics of the new storytelling conventions of the information society. The first chapter focuses on how digital narrative conventions have been transformed in the first decades of the 21“ century by the emergence of smart devices and web 2.0 platforms; in addition, phenomena such as media convergence, hypertextuality and participatory storytelling are characterized. The second chapter explores the 21% century’s modular and interactive transformations of the traditional audiovisual narrative expressions of the 20" century. These new storytelling practices are then presented and adapted to the complex media environment of the 21“ century: transmedia storytelling which is a multimedia form of plot extension; interactive storytelling, which turns the recipient into an interactor who can influence the plot; data-driven storytelling, which is a complex and dynamic form of narrative data visualization; and digital storytelling, which can take the form of individual and participative content communication and self-representation.