Drawing on expert interviews, desk research and a literature scan, the research team set out to answer a few big questions: What’s the history and current landscape of impact storytelling, in the UK and internationally? What is the structure of the ecosystem, who are the key players, and what are the live debates, current strengths and challenges? How do key players think about the idea of impact? What is the evidence that impact storytelling works? And where are the ‘white spaces’ for intervention and investment in the future?

The Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL) proudly presents the 8th edition of its annual “Immersive Things“ list, celebrating groundbreaking projects at the intersection of storytelling, technology, design and code. This year's selections highlight how creators are leveraging emerging technologies  (artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and generative systems ) to craft experiences that challenge traditional narratives and redefine audience engagement.

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This session explores how Harmony Labs and Earth Alliance collaborated to identify and engage audiences missing from the climate conversation, blending together in one pilot project groundbreaking behavioral media research with influencer partnerships and media testing and iteration. Harmony Labs Executive Director Brian Waniewski shares key research findings and showcase how these findings informed an influencer media strategy to connect with untapped audiences, offering climate communicators new pathways for engaging diverse communities. (04:29–06:55) They created content with 60 creators through co-productions and a creators fund—rather than scripted ads—with two goals: engagement and transporting audiences toward awareness, pro-climate futures, and participation. (07:26–09:14) Using their Narrative Observatory, they tracked media behavior from half-million US panelists, mapping how people move through media and which values shape their consumption. (09:14–13:07) Identified a key overlooked group: the “If You Say So” audience—online, culture makers who avoid news—so they tailored content to their values (autonomy, fun), not traditional activist messaging.

The Cultural Currents Institute's proprietary SPREAD framework is ideal for testing and refining messages and strategies at the conceptual phase, diagnosing and troubleshooting campaigns that may be struggling after launch, and accelerating efforts that have already found some success. The core concepts of the framework are introduced here. Simple to Remember and Share Plausible to its Intended Audience Relatable to Common Lived Experience Emotional and Evocative Actionable With Clear Steps Duplicable With Low Effort and High Fidelity

The Trauma-Informed Storytelling Toolkit offers customizable Google Doc templates and resources to help nonprofits share stories that promote safety and resist harm.

the difference between stories and anecdotes

CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction 00:20 Identify a subset of people who get it 00:54 1st Slide: What we do 01:34 2nd Slide: Our Insight 02:13 3rd Slide: Proof Points 02:45 Don't create a Frankendeck 03:30 Conclusion

Believe it or not, analyzing seemingly unrelated data can reveal hidden truths. Take the Pentagon, the nerve center of the U.S. military. While classified briefings and high-level meetings happen behind closed doors, open-source data can offer clues about what might be brewing. Here’s where things get interesting. We can use Google Trends data to track searches for “Pentagon pizza delivery” and nearby “gay bars.” Why pizza and bars? Increased late-night activity might indicate longer work hours for Pentagon staff, potentially signifying preparation for a major event.

Story revolves around transformation and change, defined as the “Transformational journey of a human being.“ First type: A character changes drastically for the better, exemplified by “A Christmas Carol“ and “Groundhog Day.“ Second type: A character remains steadfast in their beliefs, changing the people around them instead. Third type: A character fails to change or realizes the need to change too late, resulting in a tragedy. The essence of a story is determined by its support of transformation, guiding what to include or exclude in the narrative.

And the result is a new beta framework: INCITE — Inspiring Narrative Change Innovation through Tracking and Evaluation. This new learning and evaluation framework has been developed to equip the pop culture narrative change field — comprised of artists, values-aligned entertainment leaders and companies, movement leaders, cultural strategists, narrative researchers, philanthropic partners, and more — with a shared methodology to unearth learnings and track short and long-term impact, at both the individual and collective levels. This launch of the beta INCITE framework is the first step in a road testing process set to take place over 2024 to make it useful and usable by field members and funders alike.

Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

Now though, venturing into the world of AI-assisted transmedia storytelling, we are presented with what could be an exciting opportunity to overcome challenges such as the ones above and perhaps finally see the emergence of “true” transmedia storytelling. Looking at the rapid advancements in AI over the past year and months (and weeks and days!) it quickly becomes clear that these technologies are offering creators a wealth of opportunities to push the boundaries of narrative experiences.

This is SenseMaker in its most simple form, usually structured to have an open (non-hypothesis) question (commonly referred to as a ‘prompting question’) to collect a micro-narrative at the start. This is then followed by a range of triads (triangles), dyads (sliders), stones canvases, free text questions and multiple choice questions. The reason or value for using Sensemaker: Open free text questions are used at the beginning as a way of scanning for diversity of narratives and experiences. This is a way to remain open to ‘unknown unknowns’. The narrative is then followed by signifier questions that allow the respondent to add layers of meaning and codification to the narrative (or experience) in order to allow for mixed methods analysis, to map and explore patterns.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? According to digital storyteller, Brian Clark it doesn't! In this DIY conversation, Brian Clark applies the philosophical concept of phenomenology to art in the digital age.

Time/Difference/Relationships vs Head/Heart/Hands (Logical/Metaphor/Literal)

Wondering how big, small, tall, long, fast, heavy, or old something is? The Measure of Things is a tool to help you understand physical quantites in terms of things you (or your audience, or your readers) are already familiar with. Need a metaphor to emphasize a written measurement? Try including a comparison to the size of a whale, or the height of the Empire State Building, or the area of a tennis court. Need to understand how big a metric or English unit really is? Try comparing it to real, tangible objects.

One of the main goals of the project was to develop a model (presented below) that NFPs can use to structure and execute their social media outreach campaigns. The resulting model is an extension of the previous work in this area by the Initiative of Georgetown University Center for Social Impact Communication and the Meyer Foundation. The model rests on five strategic pillars, these are the Campaign Architecture, Narratives, Platforms and Delivery, Third Party Resources and Social Awareness.

One of the exciting promises of web3 is the idea of decentralized networks, so that one decision maker can’t necessarily take down a platform used by hundreds or thousands, alone. But how do you build that network? How does that fit with your business model? Your marketing goals? If you’re a creator, why would you spend the time developing a corner of this new internet just for your project’s fanbase? While social media platforms will persist, there’s a layer that has always separated successful, memorable projects from one-hit wonders: fan communities.

Evidence and Action Towards Safe and Nutritious Food (EatSafe) is looking to positively impact behavior around food safety practices in traditional markets around the world. As part of the program, Story Sourcing uses journalistic techniques to uncover stories and anecdotes from daily life that sheds light on people's motivations, fears, and aspirations. These stories, in turn, help guide the design and development of EatSafe food safety interventions. EatSafe previously conducted this work at traditional markets in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

Now a new study by researchers at The Ohio State University has taken this even further, discovering that people who become immersed in the fiction they read use the same part of the brain to think about fictional characters as they do to think about themselves.

This is the story of a marriage, told through an email being drafted in real time. It takes about five minutes to read/experience.

https://twitter.com/juliayorks/status/1588182939933605888?s=20&t=m8xmsJ8zgWPAAb-FpU2L3w For YEARS, I used the Save the Cat beat sheet template when writing my features. But, I'm currently working with a director who thinks about story using the 8 sequence method, and I liked that too! So, I created a new template that marries both... and then some.

Character.AI is bringing to life the science-fiction dream of open-ended conversations and collaborations with computers. We are building the next generation of dialog agents—with a long-tail of applications spanning entertainment, education, general question-answering and others. Our dialog agents are powered by our own proprietary technology based on large language models, built and trained from the ground up with conversation in mind. How does the Character.AI beta work? The Character.AI beta is based on neural language models. A supercomputer reads huge amounts of text and learns to hallucinate what words might come next in any given situation. Models like these have many uses including auto-complete and machine translation. At Character.AI, you collaborate with the computer to write a dialog - you write one character's lines, and the computer creates the other character's lines, giving you the illusion that you are talking with the other character.

We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this area, we conducted a meta-analysis of experiments in which memory and/or comprehension of narrative and expository texts was investigated. Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

This toolkit is a short guide to strategic communications, based on extensive research and building on the experience of activists and communicators from around the globe. It aims to provide a framework rather than a blueprint; helping you to ask the right questions rather than giving you the right answers. It’s designed to be helpful for anyone who communicates as part of their voluntary or paid work. It’s written with a focus on European LGBTI activists, but we hope it will be useful to others with a similar vision