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86 | Digital Media and Storytelling in Higher Education
premise that the whole can be understood by analyzing the details, and that
individual parts are unintelligible without the broader context of the whole
(Gadamer, 1960). The researcher can therefore only authentically explore
the complexity of the whole and the part in the context of the phenomenon.
The story and the narrative fragments that unfold during its creation, and
ultimately the nuances and layers of the narrative, are as meaningful as
the social and interpersonal relations that are revealed in the process. In
hermeneutic research, both the details and the whole are important, as well
as the truth of the multiplicity of interpretations.
The constructivist approach can be considered valid for researching
teaching-learning and also as a research paradigm for storytelling-based
studies, especially in the case of DST. Each step of the storytelling process
brings the creator closer and closer to (re)constructing his or her story and the
group closer to the formation of a group narrative, ultimately leading to the
creation of individual and group identity. All this reveals hidden information
and new layers of meaning to the researcher involved in the process, as
narratives change depending on the modalities attached to them. An oral
experience becomes a written text which becomes audio material, culminating
in the completion of the story as an audiovisual artifact through the addition
of images. As shown above, it can be seen that the phenomenological,
hermeneutic, and constructivist approaches cannot be separated, as group
members and researchers are all involved in the construction of the narrative.
This can be combined with an emerging approach in Anglo-Saxon
education and research, the transformative approach, which is particularly
relevant to DST. The transformative aspect of the approach can be observed
at different levels. Hessler and Lambert (2017) argue that participants learn to
look at and interpret the issues they discuss in the group in a different way by
listening to others and critically reflecting on their own life events. However,
the transformative nature of DST, through its dialogically collaborative
and actively engaging methodology, has a personality-forming effect on
participants, facilitators, and researchers. At the same time, digital stories
can also trigger social transformation by being published and viral through
social media, and by being used in university curricula or even in political
decision-making.
In this section, digital narratives and their related research methodological
principles are examined. In the first part, research approaches in the humanities
and social sciences are presented that consider narrative as a primary data
source. This is followed by a presentation of studies on the effects of narrative
structures. Community participatory research methods that go beyond the
digital narrative artifact to create narratives are also discussed. Finally, research
is presented which focuses on the skill-building effects of video games with
branching structures based on interactor decisions.