CMNS 419: Digital Storytelling (Rev. C1) Report a Broken Link

Welcome to CMNS 419: Digital Storytelling. This course explores a variety of storytelling frameworks. Stories—and the ability to tell them—are assuming a new primacy in contemporary culture. As the data glut of the World Wide Web threatens to drown out personal stories, social media is responding by providing a powerful forum for digital storytelling. Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Pinterest, Facebook, and Ancestry.com are symptomatic of the popularization of personal narratives in digital media. Even as the nature of contemporary stories morph in their articulation into new forms as diverse as computer games, narrative medicine, and organizational storytelling, they remain as essential as breathing.

Unit 1: Introduction to Story


Unit 2: Story Structure


Unit 3: Framing the Story—Point of View and Discourse


Unit 4: Visual Storytelling


Please note that the audio is in French, but you can click on the "CC" button to access closed captions in English.

Unit 5: Graphic Stories, Storyboarding, and Production—Making Your Story


Read the following sections:

  • Chapter 2: The Vocabulary of Comics, pp. 24–59
  • Chapter 3: Blood in the Gutter, pp. 60–93
  • Chapter 4: Time Frames, pp. 94–117

Unit 6: Thinking about Sound—Radio Stories and Audio Slideshows


Listen to whichever podcast is available this week.

Unit 7: New Media/New Stories—How Digital Technologies Create Opportunities for New Forms of Storytelling


Unit 8: New Media Narratives


Unit 9: The Search for Meaning—Massively Multiplayer Online Games and the Future of Storytelling


Unit 10: Postmodern Challenges to Traditional Forms of Storytelling