Published: Apr 23, 2026

Researchers often rely on interviews, surveys, and written reflections to understand people’s experiences. But sometimes those formats do not fully capture how people make meaning of their lives. Digital storytelling offers another approach. It is a creative, participatory method in which people create short first-person multimedia stories, often using voice narration, photographs, video, and music. Researchers use it to explore lived experience, identity, memory, and community in a way that centers participant voice.

Digital storytelling is a natural fit with other interpretive and participatory methods. Like narrative inquiry, it treats personal stories as meaningful data. Like photovoice, it allows participants to represent their own experiences through media rather than relying only on researcher description. This makes it especially useful for research that values reflection, creativity, and self-representation.

One reason digital storytelling is so valuable is that it captures meaning in multiple ways. A participant’s voice, choice of images, pacing, and structure can all communicate something important. For researchers, that can lead to richer qualitative insight than text alone. It can also make research findings more accessible, since digital stories can be shared in classrooms, community settings, exhibits, or online spaces.

For LIS researchers, digital storytelling could be used to study how people experience library spaces, engage with archives, develop professional identity, or navigate information in everyday life. It may be especially useful for projects focused on community memory, information experience, digital inclusion, or user experience.

A typical digital storytelling project includes several steps: developing a research question, creating a story prompt, supporting participants as they script and assemble their stories, and then analyzing the final stories as qualitative data. Researchers may focus on narrative themes, visual choices, emotional tone, or the storytelling process itself.

Like other participatory and visual methods, digital storytelling also raises important ethical questions. Because stories may include voices, faces, places, and personal details, researchers need to think carefully about consent, privacy, emotional risk, and future sharing. Participants should understand whether their stories will remain private, be used only for analysis, or be shared publicly.

Digital storytelling takes time, technical support, and thoughtful planning. But when a study aims to understand lived experience and foreground participant voice, it can be a powerful and engaging method.

For LIS research, digital storytelling is a useful reminder that methods do more than collect data. They also shape whose voices are heard and how those voices are represented. Used carefully, digital storytelling can help researchers produce work that is both rigorous and deeply human.

Further reading

• StoryCenter, digital storytelling workshops and methods
• Digital Storytelling: The New Arts-Based Research Method
• Digital Storytelling in Research: A Systematic Review