Storytelling and the Web in South African Museums

This evaluation explores a web-based concept that combines oral storytelling with new technology to connect schools in South Africa with those in Norway and elsewhere in the "North". Developed by the Iziko museums in Cape Town, South Africa in collaboration with the International Museums Studies Programme at the University of Bergen, Norway, this method involves the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to preserve African storytelling traditions. The strategy examined here involves supporting communal ownership of stories, and integrates multiple forms of expression: mime, dance, music as well as verbal narrative. The document considers how the internet can be used to support and enhance these forms of storytelling with authors in the South and North. The authors explore how community involvement - which includes extending storytelling workshops at community centres to the internet - enhanced the "Iziko Project" in widely differing socio-economic contexts.

Specifically, this paper evaluates the particular strategies that were selected for this township project, which involved the use of a mobile van in collaboration with community centres and satellite museums in outer urban and rural centres. Stories by children as well as adults were collected through digital video and disseminated through handheld devices (PDAs) as well as through the web to computers in collaborating schools, museums and community groups within South Africa and overseas. In short, ICTs were used to incorporate storytelling into the museum environment, and to disseminate these tales to a wider audience (the members of which, due to poverty, may not otherwise be able to travel to a museum for entertainment reasons).

In short, the authors find that local participation was a key strategy; it was at the forefront, even before details about how technology could be used were considered. They explain that "Participation has moved from simple consultation in the preparation of exhibitions by settler curators to active training of indigenous curators, inclusion on administrative boards and clear guidelines regarding consultation at all stages of exhibition planning. New technology in this scenario should then be used not only in the gathering and dissemination of local information by traditional museum staff but also involve local communities on a variety of levels including the creation of exhibition materials."

Moving on to explore strategies informing the Iziko initiative in more detail, the authors observe that organisers chose a route that involved cultural heritage and speaking to both local and foreign audiences. Education was carried out through children's and community groups' use of new media as well as through traditional oral histories which used a high level of audio-visual material. The latter strategy, which involved use of interactive narratives on the web or CD-ROM, was found to be an effective match with the structure of many African oral stories. Participation was also primary here, in both consultation as well as in "curating" the project itself.

The authors then detail specific components of the Iziko approach, such as the use of new media in conjunction with workshops in which children develop skills in, and knowledge of, storytelling. ("The storytelling workshops are organised around everyday, iconic images available across cultures - such as a shoe....The children are then encouraged to create fictional characters with a relationship to the image...") They also discuss a large walk-on map exhibition that "gives the students a sense of place", and that draws on the use of PDAs and short messaging service (SMS) technologies to enable students to share their stories with other children, as well as to interact with the narrators by communicating their ideas and reactions to the stories. Again, active participation was found to be crucial. Finally, they detail the development of a website - involving "an intuitive interface and a simple basic structure" - through which children can access a web version of the map exhibition and continue to communicate with other children around the world through an SMS portal.

In conclusion, the authors note that, by drawing on ICTs to connect people through stories, the Iziko project "assures universal interest as well as expression of local perspectives, local desires and local needs. Obviously it is not sufficient on its own to redress the unbalanced representations that have developed within South African museums during the colonial and apartheid periods....The Iziko Stories project does, however, offer a start that allows people with diverging backgrounds to participate in both the transformation of museums as well as transformations in communication practices through new technologies."