Could we design a project to use a (hypothetical) special collection of menus or cookbooks to find evidence of social change? Did restaurants change their menus after integration? How and when did various ethnic flavors and ingredients enter our experience? Is there a way to trace a culture’s understanding of ingredients and their cultural heritage? What is the relation of fusion cuisine to cultural authenticity? Could it be visualized? What other questions might we ask of such a collection and how would we display the findings on the web?

I’d like to have a session about telling stories digitally, using whatever tools, on whichever platforms. Depending on our interest, this could be show-and-tell about interesting stories you’ve seen or created, brief walkthroughs of tools you’ve used, ideas about best practices, etc. Not thinking of a full-on intro to Digital Storytelling, like Bud Deihl’s workshop Friday, though maybe those of us who attend it can use some of what we learn there as a springboard for discussion & ideas.

Alternatively, if we want to run a Make-type session, we could try to create a story told collaboratively across many platforms, to give us all a hand at trying new tools. In this kind of scenario, perhaps we could all resolve to try a new (to us) platform for storytelling, but offer to act as resources for each other — e.g. I don’t have an Instagram account, so maybe I could try to tell part of our story on there and learn something about it, while answering questions about, e.g., WordPress. Not necessarily thinking of a complete/coherent narrative here; it could be finding new ways to present different aspects of a fictional project (Newspapers to Prisoners; Enslaved Geographies; etc.).

I like fiction and telling stories, but the practical takeaways I see for participants would be:

• Exposure to new tools
• Ideas about pitfalls & virtues of different kinds of storytelling
• Examples of online engagement/storytelling that might inspire you to try new things with promoting/discussing your project
• (Perhaps) experience using a new-to-you storytelling tool