Digital Storytelling as a genre of mediatized self-representations: an introduction

This article provides a critical review of some of the most relevant studies ondigital storytelling and proposes a genre typology that allows an initialclassification of digital storytelling into two main types: educational and social.Digital storytelling is a multimodal emergent genre characterised by its versatilityand flexibility which has resulted in a series of subgenres. However, the mainpremise here is that differentiating between social and educational– although onedoes not exclude the other– and bearing in mind that most digital stories may lieat the intersection of both, is the most useful way to start labeling the massiveproduction of digital stories available nowadays on the Internet. The articlesincluded in this number are mostly educational (Ramírez-Verdugo & SotomayorGrande, and Reyes, Pich & García, Londoño-Monroy) but they all include sometraces of the social type. Thus, Bou-Franch is an example of how studentsinterpret certain events that had social impact and that are part of history whileWestman’s article involves the creation of communities of practice among thosewho share the same interests. Finally, Herreros-Navarro, although educational inessence, describes a social act in which students intentionally choose a way topresent their own identity to society using digital storytelling