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Part II. Storytelling in the Information Age ] 83
In autobiographical narratives, the author interprets and formulates his
or her own family, social, or political relations (Lanszki & Horvath, 2017).
In this sense the author engages in identity construction, relaying the events
of the individual's life that are considered the most suitable for narration at
the given moment (Ban & Nagy, 2016). In the educational context, subject
content is thematized through digital stories adopting a narrative form of
organization. After analyzing and synthesizing external sources and personal
experiences, students construct their texts based on their own logic and
present them in an audiovisual form in their digital story. Such cases of DST
reflect an individual reworking of a topic.
Overall, the significance of DST is the impact of the process and the
communicative and resource value of the artifact, the digital story. The process
promotes acceptance and positive attitudes among members of heterogeneous
groups, and in the case of homogeneous groups, it promotes mutual support
and the formation of group identity.
A digital story is a compact form of human expression, and its digital
and film-like format allows for easy sharing on Web 2.0 platforms. The
video contains visual elements, but at its core is a text formulated by the
creator which is a unique combination of verbal and written modality. Digital
stories can be representative on several levels: they reflect the linguistic,
autobiographical, and cognitive characteristics of the author, but also represent
his or her narrower cultural environment; from a more global perspective,
digital stories are narrative documents representing a particular time and
social context.