Harnessing Digital Collaboration Tools to Tell Your Project’s Story
Overview
One of my performance goals, as I move into my first full fiscal year, as an Instructional Designer is to continue developing my project management skills. As a member of a remote team, harnessing digital collaboration tools is essential. It is also a topic I’ve found that I am quite passionate about. I feel a lot of my colleagues who work in Learning & Development (as well as adjacent fields such as Data Analytics, Project Management, and UX) will also enjoy thinking about how we can use our natural love of story to collaborate.
The Research Process
I began my research by trying to define what a digital collaboration tool actually was. But the term potentially encompasses a plethora of tools as evidenced by Capterra.com’s listing over 1200 items on their collaboration software list (Capterra.com, n.d.). For the purposes of my research, this list was jut too huge and didn’t give me the granular information I wanted for how each tool fit within the framework of storytelling so I decided to shift the focus of my research to see if anyone had described digital collaboration processes with narrative terms.
This is how I found researchers such as Figueiras whose 2014 case study argued for the inclusion of narrative elements when creating data visualizations because the storytelling elements allow users to interact and control some aspects of their experience with the digital data display (Figueiras, 2014, p. 46). The word interactive is key to harnessing the most from a digital collaboration tool. Interactivity gives your team the opportunity to join in the storytelling process of your data, project. etc..
Below is an example of an image that Figueiras enhanced to include a narrative element. In this case, Figueiras would like to see the pop-up windows added when you hover or click on a word to give additional context and interactivity to the data (Figueiras, 2014, p. 50). Think of this like having a flashback in a story.
But before I found researchers like Figueiras I had to weed through very technical articles involving the use of narrative cognition for AI development (Akimoto, 2018; Abdullah-All-Tanvir et.al, 2020). Besides Figueiras’ work on data visualization and narrative I also found others such as Dawson’s (2020) work on the emerging storying found in the use of hashtags on Twitter. And Anjaria’s (2019) research into narrative based metaphors as a way to improve technical education.
While I found Figueiras’ work on data visualization and narrative quite helpful, the narrative terms they utilized were limited. I also found that to be the case with the article PayPal Project Manager Ben Ludin posted on LinkedIn in 2017. I love his argument that project management is storytelling (Ludin, 2017); however, I would expand, and slightly modify, the narrative elements he names (structure, theme, and character) to instead include: theme (why /what), setting (where), plot (how / when), and character (who) (Ludin, 2017).
Next Steps
My plan is to develop (through a series of blog posts) the definitions of these narrative elements in reference to digital collaboration. I will then use these terms to categorize different tools. For example, I could evaluate XYZ Digital Tool and note how it does a great job of helping your develop the theme of your project but lacks some functionality for presenting the characters of a project or maybe ABC’s tool has an excellent setting but can be cumbersome to plot.
While this plan may change as I start actually applying the narrative element terms I’ve developed to the digital collaboration tools, I am really excited to start telling you the story of how this particular project progresses! How’s that for being a bit meta?
References
Abdullah-All-Tanvir, Mahir, E. M., Huda, S. M. A., & Barua, S. (2020). A Hybrid approach for identifying authentic news using deep learning methods on popular twitter threads. 2020 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing (AISP), Artificial Intelligence and Signal Processing (AISP), 2020 International Conference On, 1–6. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1109/AISP48273.2020.9073583
Akimoto, T. (2018). Emergentist view on generative narrative cognition: Considering principles of the self-organization of mental stories. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2018. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1155/2018/6780564
Anjaria, K. (2019). Narrative theory based metaphor generation framework for technical education. 2019 IEEE Tenth International Conference on Technology for Education (T4E), pp. 230-233, doi: 10.1109/T4E.2019.00051.
Best collaboration software 2022 | reviews of the most popular tools & systems. (n.d.). Capterra.com. Retrieved August 12, 2022, from https://www.capterra.com/collaboration-software/
Dawson, P. (2020). Hashtag narrative: Emergent storytelling and affective publics in the digital age. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(6), 968–983. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1177/1367877920921417
Figueiras, A. (2014). Narrative visualization: a case study of how to incorporate narrative elements in existing visualizations. 2014 18th International Conference on Information Visualisation, Information Visualisation (IV), 46–52. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1109/IV.2014.79
Ludin, B. (2017, October 9). Project management is storytelling. LinkedIn. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/project-management-storytelling-ben-ludin
