Page 108 [108]
OCR
Part III. Digital Media and Storytelling in Research ] 107 social problems. Similarly, the personal digital stories produced in the Silence Speaks project? addressed highly sensitive issues, focusing on public health problems (e.g., HIV prevention and domestic violence) and raised awareness among the public and policy-makers. In oral history narratives and digital stories, narrators organize their experiences of historical-cultural events in a causal context. This is done through reliving their own experiences as they narrate, reflecting on the events as witnesses, and thus interpreting them. The narrators include moral values and self-reflections in the narration and draw conclusions from the story. The more oral histories or digital stories are revealed about an event, the more perspectives and details the researcher and the recipient can examine. Although these narratives are individual stories, they can also contribute to the construction of a collective social memory. In various social science discourses, the question arises as to which interpretations are considered “true” and congruent in relation to a particular topic. This question is particularly relevant to history and its interpretation since there are as many individual readings of an event. It is worth examining how individual memories relate to the collective memory and cultural heritage of a nation. The concept of memory can be approached by different disciplines and researchers, including historians, sociologists, anthropologists, aestheticians, communication experts, as well as narrative and experimental psychologists. Sonkoly (2005) interprets cultural heritage from a historical perspective, drawing from the research fields of heritage and memory. He considers individual commemoration as part of collective historical memory, in place of or in addition to the commemoration at the religious or national level. In order to reconstruct historical events, it is essential that individual narratives, or so-called testimonies, evolve. They are often uncensored, giving individual memory-growing autonomy and impact. The rememberer contributes to the construction of history as a witness to past events. According to Laszl6 (2003), a narrative is a cognitive tool which can be used both in the social (and historical) space and in the individual’s process of self-understanding. According to narrative psychology, memories are narrative constructs that cannot be disconnected from the cultural narratives of a given society. The narrative is thus dual in nature: the individual constructs history through narrative, but its cultural schemas can have repercussions on individual narrative construction. As Bruner wrote: “It is through our own narratives that we principally construct a version of ourselves in the world, and it is through its narrative that a culture provides models of identity and agency to its members.” (Bruner, 1996, p. 14) # https://www.storycenter.org/silence-speaks
