Category Archives: Digital Storytelling

A Postcard History

June 17, 2013 1:15 pm , Leave a Comment ,

Arcadia Publishing Books

Are you familiar with the Images of America and Postcard History series of books? They’re popping up for all sorts of locations, eras and topics. I have several and find them fascinating. They are also a great template for a family history project.

The beauty of this format is that each photo/caption combo becomes its own story and doesn’t necessarily have to tie into the next one. It’s also quite flexible. You can organize your photos/stories by timeline, places, people or topics (schooling, pets, weddings, etc.). Don’t think a caption has to be limited to just a few words either. The books often have paragraph-long captions.

This style is a perfect fit for genea-bloggers. I’m having a great time doing just that at my Moultrie Journal blog – a look at my hometown’s local history. The beautiful building shown below is where I attended kindergarten.

Villa Flora

I’m working on a word processing template to build postcard history ebooks for my Kindle-connected family. One photo/caption per page should be a perfect fit for the Kindle screen and email “publishing” via Kindle’s Personal Document Service couldn’t be easier. I’ll share the details once I get it all figured out.

Related articles:

  1. Build your own family history distribution system
  2. Set Up A Family History Project in Scrivener
  3. Outlining Your Family History
  4. A Living History
  5. King Street
  6. Family history in your pocket
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , ,

Family Trading Cards

June 13, 2013 3:15 pm , Leave a Comment ,

Sample ATCTake inspiration from artist trading cards to create family trading cards. You can make each one individually using the instructions from wikiHow at the link below or create them digitally so you can “mass produce” them. Cards can be combined with the magnetic frames used to post photos on the fridge to create family trees or other interesting displays. It’s a great way to spark your kids’ interest in their family history – and you might capture a few adults too.

Artist trading cards, or ATCs, began in the tradition of business cards, but with a personal, artistic twist. Most ATCs are created on paper, but they may also be any other medium that can be worked in a suitable size. ATCs are traditionally the size of baseball cards and other trading cards. They’re a fun way to exchange your own one-of-a-kind artistic flair with other artists you meet. You can also use them as business cards.

via How to Make Artist Trading Cards: 11 Steps (with Pictures).

Related articles:

  1. Yankee Trader
  2. Christmas Cards in a Facebook World
  3. You never know where you’ll find some family history
  4. Build your own family history distribution system
  5. The Family Yearbook
  6. Designing Family Trees
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , ,

Flipboard Magazines with Multiple Contributors

June 13, 2013 11:37 am , Leave a Comment ,

Just think of the potential this offers family historians!

Related articles:

  1. Become a Magazine Publisher with Flipboard
  2. A look at digital magazines
  3. Build a Flipboard Magazine
  4. Tell a Story with a Flipboard Magazine
  5. Flipboard – a new reading experience
  6. Book Building
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: ,

Getting Started Story Contest at Treelines

June 12, 2013 8:34 am , 1 Comment ,

Treelines is having a storytelling contest!.

Take a break from telling the stories of your ancestors and tell us about yourself and how you started on this amazing genealogical journey!

We’re looking for the stories that best capture the fun, wonder, self-discovery, and, well, increasing obsessiveness of our beloved hobby. We’re also looking for stories that are well-written, illustrated with captivating photographs, and take full advantage of the Treelines storybuilder’s capabilities.

Stop by Treelines for contest details. You have until July 19th to submit your stories for the contest.

Related articles:

  1. Tell a Story with a Flipboard Magazine
  2. Telling Your Own Story
  3. Curate a Story with Storify
  4. Vacation Stories
  5. Digital Storytelling – Finding the Story
  6. Getting Started with Scribd
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , ,

Vacation Stories

June 6, 2013 6:46 am , 8 Comments ,

The latest newsletter from Saving Memories Forever had a great idea for keeping the kids occupied while you’re on the road this vacation season. Turn them into reporters and have them submit updates from the trip. My grandkids all have iPod Touches which would be perfect for this kind of project, but you could use your iPhone or Android phone to capture the recordings and photographs using the free Saving Memories apps. The the premium subscription ($3.99/month or $40/year) is quite affordable and gives each family member their own storyteller account (or byline in reporter terms) with their own photo. Each can use the app to record audio news stories with supporting photographs throughout the trip. If your kids are using iPod Touches, you don’t always have access to Wi-Fi at hotels and campgrounds.  In that case, stop by a local public library so those stories can be uploaded to your Saving Memories account. Library Wi-Fi is generally safer than other public Wi-Fi locations.

This is a great way to get your children interested in family history and challenging them to observe, research and document the sites and experiences of a vacation trip teaches them techniques that will useful throughout their lives. Best of all, they’ll have fun doing it.

Don’t forget to hook the grandparents up with “listener” accounts at Saving Memories. That way they can keep up with the mayhem fun from a safe distance.

 

Related articles:

  1. Enjoy a bit of Face Time
  2. Evernote’s Favorites Bar
  3. Podcasting Family Stories
  4. Digital Storytelling – On the Spot Stories
  5. Personal Archiving at Library of Congress
  6. Charming Stories
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: ,

Taking Scrivener to the Porch

June 3, 2013 7:57 am , 1 Comment ,
Porch at Cross Creek

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings “office” at Cross Creek.

Last week we paid a visit to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ home at Cross Creek. She wrote her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Yearling, and most of her other stories from this table on her porch. Although I’ll never have anything close to her writing talent, I do have a delightful porch and it’s been an enjoyable place to work the last couple of weeks. And, thanks to Scrivener’s Sync with External Folder feature, I can work on my current manuscript on the porch using my iPad. Here’s how.

Although Scrivener provides synching with Simplenote and Index Card for iOS, I’ve found the Byword app [Mac - $9.99 & iOS - $2.99] an easy-to-use editor that “plays” well with Scrivener. Byword offers Dropbox support so I use the Sync with External Folder function to work between the two apps. While Byword is my editor choice, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to use this feature. Any editor that works with plain or rich text formats should work using this feature.

The initial external folder setup is done via Scrivener. With the project open, I choose the Sync with External Folder command from the File menu. The Sync pane appears.

Scrivener Sync

Here I identify the Dropbox folder I want to use for this book project along with document formatting options. Notice that I’ve chosen to have Scrivener take a snapshot of my project before each sync operation and to sync automatically when a Scrivener project is opened and closed.

The first sync will put all my Draft items in the Dropbox folder I specified. Blank text items in Scrivener become blank documents in the folder. Unfortunately, the pseudo folder/file structure created in Scrivener does not sync with the files. The files are displayed in whatever sorting structure I have set up in my file manager. However, if I had chosen to use the Prefix file names with numbers option, the added number would give me a better sense of the project structure.

By setting the auto option, Scrivener will check the external folder for updated files each time I open the project and synch with the external folder when I close it. I can also do a manual sync at any time using the File > Sync with External Folder Now command.

When setting up Byword to connect to Dropbox, the default location is Dropbox/Apps/Byword. If you want to sync your Scrivener files to a different Dropbox folder, you’ll need to update the Byword settings so you can access them.

I’ve found that if I add a new document in Byword it will sync to my Scrivener project – at the bottom of the current Draft structure. If I delete a document file from the external folder, it will be replaced with the last Scrivener version of that document the next time I sync. To permanently remove an item, I have to remove it from the Scrivener project.

I’m still looking forward to the iPad app for Scrivener so I take all my project files – research, notes and draft – to the porch. Until that time arrives, I’ll take advantage of Scrivener’s sync options and my Byword app to work wherever I am.

 

Related articles:

  1. Scrivener to Go
  2. Scrivener Tip: Managing Project Ideas
  3. Setting Up a Scrivener Project
  4. Create a Custom Scrivener Template
  5. Scrivener, Split-Panes and Safari’s Web Archive
  6. Scrivener Tips
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , ,

Day One – Your Social Calendar

May 28, 2013 7:30 am , Leave a Comment ,

A personal journal is a lot of things – a record of your activities, your thoughts and your opinions. A digital journal can also serve as a personal photo album and a scrapbook full of ephemera captured using your phone’s camera. And while you may want to keep much of the contents of your journal private, the Day One [Mac & iOS] journaling app also lets you share selected entries with others.

Normally I’d use 3 or more different apps to compose and share my social activities on the web. Twitter for the tweets, Instagram for the photos, Squarespace for the blog posts. Bundle them all together and you’ll get a timeline of your life. By composing all those entries in Day One I’m slowly creating my own timeline that packs all the content that is scattered all over the internet after publication. I own all the content and I’m able to search through all my entries via the spotlight, hashtags or the calendar.

@Vetpan (Siebe Warmoeskerken) on his Journal

The Mac version of Day One supports sharing via email, Message, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and AirDrop. The iOS version supports email, Twitter and Foursquare sharing. Using the email option, you can send the contents of an entry to any number of blog platforms – especially handy when your blogging from an iPhone. For a traveler or a busy mother, this is a great way to capture your world and share selected bits with family, friends or the public.

Day One entry as email

A Day One entry being emailed to a blog platform.

If you have a personal blog, check your settings to see what’s needed to allow email posting. On WordPress.com, go to your My Blogs page and click the Enable button under Post by Email. An email address will be generated automatically. Copy that address and paste it into your address book so you have easy access to it. When emailing a post, the subject line will become the title of your post and the message itself will become the body. Each blog platform has its own format for including additional information such as tags or publishing instructions within the post. For example, WordPress has a series of shortcodes to handle them while Tumblr converts hashtags at the bottom of a posting message to tags.

Is Day One a fully-functional alternative for mobile blogging? No. But for the busy mom, traveler or individual who wants to document her life and share selected bits with minimal effort, Day One offers some handy tools to do just that. Just another reason why journaling apps like Day One should be a part of any family historian’s digital world.

Related articles:

  1. iPhone Baby Book
  2. Research Essentials – Day One
  3. Project Life for the busy family historian
  4. Telling Your Own Story
  5. The Evernote Social Club
  6. Create a Digital Family Treasure Chest
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , ,

Tell a Story with a Flipboard Magazine

May 27, 2013 7:22 am , Leave a Comment ,

I am having great fun with Flipboard’s new magazine feature. If you don’t already have the free Flipboard app on your tablet [iOS & Android], you’re missing a delightful reading experience. With Flipboard magazines, any user can create a special interest “publication” by collecting content from all over the Web. If you’d like to see an example, check out my Fiesta 500! magazine which celebrates 500 years of Florida history.

Fiesta 500! info screen

This is a great topic with a huge collection of online content that combines photographs, newspaper articles, magazine stories and blog posts with maps, charts, videos and other ephemera located in digital archives. As I wander around all these delightful places, I “flip” any interesting item into my magazine using a very nice bookmarklet downloaded from Flipboard.

Before you get too concerned, Flipboard takes great pains to insure that each flipped content item is correctly and obviously sourced. Not only is the originating site given full credit, but when you open it to view the entire article, you are seeing the original article at its home site. So, Flipboard and the magazine editor are actually driving more viewers to each item included in a magazine. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.

From now through 2015, my little corner of Florida is celebrating. This year is the 500th anniversary of Ponce de Leon’s discovery of Florida and 2015 is the 450th birthday for St. Augustine. My Fiesta 500! magazine is a great way to learn many of the stories that make this part of the country so interesting and we’ve got lots of beautiful things to photograph too. Subscribe and see for yourself.

Even better – use Flipboard to tell your own stories!

Related articles:

  1. Build a Flipboard Magazine
  2. Become a Magazine Publisher with Flipboard
  3. Flipboard – a new reading experience
  4. Flipboard: iPad App of the Year
  5. Curate a Story with Storify
  6. Flipboard for Android
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged:

Scrapshot: Creating Atmosphere

May 13, 2013 10:00 am , Leave a Comment ,
Digital sketch of shrimpboat with superimposed text.

Using a photo to add atmosphere to a story. (Click to view full size.)

Here’s a situation where I had no supporting images for the story. So, I used a current photo of a shrimp boat coming through the bridge. I then used an app [SketchMee for Mac - $7.99] to convert the photo to a monochrome (sepia) sketch. I did this for two reasons. First, the story is set back in the 1950s so the sepia image gives it a bit of a vintage feel, and second, using a monochrome color scheme reduced the contrast between the sky and the clouds – making it easier for the text to stand out. The font used in this example is Jayne Print.

Related articles:

  1. Scrapshot: Text Over Image
  2. Scrapshot – Pirate Gold
  3. Creative Covers
  4. Storytelling with Keynote
  5. Creating Kindle Docs
  6. Scrapshot: Behind the Alligator Farm
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: , , ,

Build a Flipboard Magazine

May 10, 2013 7:30 am , Leave a Comment ,

If you aren’t already familiar with Flipboard, it’s an amazing app for your iOS or Android tablet that will turn all kinds of news feeds into a beautiful magazine-style reading experience. You will find a huge selection of fascinating news sources ready and waiting for you to choose from or you can create your own custom news service by connecting to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, Google+ and many other social networks to follow their latest updates.

Sample Flipboard magazine

The DIGITAL Storytelling magazine on Flipboard.

A recent Flipboard app update gives every Flipboard user the ability to create and share their own magazine on Flipboard. It lets you collect content from across the Web and organize it within your magazine’s news stream. This is not a magazine that’s “published” one issue at a time. Instead, this is a streaming magazine that is constantly being updated with the content you select. Here’s how you can build your own magazine in Flipboard using your iPad.

The bookmarklet mentioned in the video, as well as a Chrome extension, can be found on the Flipboard support page for magazines. Now here’s the video showing Android users how to create magazines.

But that’s not all! Flipboard just released a web-based magazine editor that gives you even more control over your magazines. It lets you edit the magazine’s profile, change the cover page, rearrange the order of articles collected in the magazine by dragging and dropping them, and even delete articles you don’t like. You’ll find the editor at http://editor.flipboard.com and once you’ve logged in using your Flipboard account, you’ll be ready to work. This video gives you a tour of the editor and how you can use it.

My magazine focuses on my favorite topic – DIGITAL Storytelling. I’ve found several other genealogy topics which you’ll find in the gallery display below. The easiest way to find these magazines is to use the search bar on your Flipboard home screen and search for the title or topic that interests you. As you already know, the genealogy community is creating a massive amount of online content. Flipboard magazines give us the opportunity to build focused magazines covering all kinds of genealogy topics like archives, apps, photo restoration, preservation, research . . . Not only would it make it easier for readers to get information on a specific topic, it would give the content creators additional, well-deserved attention.

This could get real interesting real soon!

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Related articles:

  1. Become a Magazine Publisher with Flipboard
  2. Flipboard – a new reading experience
  3. My Blogging Wish List
  4. Flipboard: iPad App of the Year
  5. Flipboard for Android
  6. Flipboard for News
Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: ,