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Part III. Digital Media and Storytelling in Research ] 113
there was a discussion with the DST facilitator. Ihe audience reception was
analyzed through data collected from YouTube likes and comments (Kunga
Thas, 2017). In the Turkish StoryHub" project, digital stories were created
by women on the topics of domestic violence, underage marriage and female
infanticide. Ihe most dominant part of the workshop was the story circle,
where the women expressed solidarity and belonging towards each other by
sharing stories on similar topics and analyzing the causes and consequences
of the events (Simsek, 2017).
DST’s supporting process is also relevant in the practice of participatory
theater, which is in itself a disciplinary hybrid genre, combining artistic,
exploratory, and therapeutic goals. Its primary role, however, is to bring
silenced issues to the public’s attention through a combination of theatrical¬
pedagogical, audiovisual, and narrative tools. Alrutz (2013) combined the
participatory theater method with DST for a group of neglected young people
(i.e., children of prostitutes, drug users and other addicts). In Alrutz’s DST
workshop, young individuals wrote a text entitled I come from a place where...
and created digital stories. To gain a deeper understanding of their topic, the
young people built interactions with each other while also critically reflecting
on themselves and their social situation. The young people created a theater
performance of the digital stories, presenting their personal life experiences
and group identity in a performative way. They reflected to their relationship
with social stereotypes, described their unique situations and showed invisible
processes to mainstream society through their meta-narratives.
The aim of community theater is to help young people in search of identity
as well as traumatized people to articulate their social situations and raise
awareness for social purposes. This was also the aim of Horvath, Oblath,
Lanszki, Teszary, Csosz6 and Takacs’ (2017) project SzivHang, in which
rural Roma women thematized their coping strategies in the context of the
Hungarian healthcare system. The DST workshops were complemented by
sociodrama sessions. The overall research and creation process resulted in
a number of stories from which the narrators, with the help of a dramaturg,
director, and scriptwriter, created a stage performance to confront the
audience with life narratives that are silenced in mass media or kept silent
by individuals due to shame (Horvathet al., 2017). Similarly, the auto¬
ethnographic documentary theater performance Long live Regina”! was
made up of the narrators’ personal digital stories. Life stories were also used in
the play Excellent Workers®, presented at the Orkény Theater, starring people
working in the service industry discussing the lack of social appreciation of
their work. Such individual life stories may also appear on television, as in
the example of the BBC’s Capture Wales project, which broadcasted digital
stories created by individuals in Wales.
50 http://digitalstoryhub.org/
» — https://trafo.hu/programok/eljen_soka_regina
* https://www.orkenyszinhaz.hu/hu/musor/kivalo-dolgozok