Abstract:

Short stories have shown to be a rich kind of script for digital transcreations intended to engage educational communities [1]. The peculiar structure of the short discourse, enriched with some cinematic and literary elements, facilitates the construction of reversals and surprising ends in the digital mode. This seems to be particularly true for narratives where the writer and reader explicitly meet halfway, prompting the digital transcreator to creatively imagine and complete the storyline in his/her own style and understanding. In this paper we focus on stories that create an experience of dissonance, thus motivating the digital author to include some form of dissonance reduction. Particularly, we discuss the main challenges of using a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach as a resolution strategy. Two stories are presented as cases of dissonant cognition: Kiss & Willemsen’s version of Julio Cortázar’s short story The Continuity of Parks [2, p. 1]; and Richard Brautigan’s well known short story, The Scarlatti Tilt [3, p. 504]. We argue that these stories have the quality to exert attractiveness and to push readers towards a cinematic interpretation. To conclude, we provide some insights on how the DIY approach may help us to deal with meaning-making; and raise implications for storytelling pedagogy as practiced by the Digital Storytelling Project (Digital Metropolis Institute/UFRN/Brazil).

Keywords:

Digital transcreation of short stories, dissonance reduction, DIY approach, Digital Storytelling Project.