Interactive Storytelling
Growing out of several workshops and exchanges with Dr. Helen Atawube Yitah, Professor of English and Dean of the School of Languages, University of Ghana, Accra, this project explores the potential of digital technologies to enhance understanding of oral, written, and multimedia storytelling practices generated at distinct cultural sites around the world. The first guest-edited series is a collection of three fantastic folktales from the Ghanaian Savannah in West Africa – “The Singing Calabash,” “Ankansaare’s Pact,” and “Trusting Hyena” – translated into English with links to Kasem language versions, as performed in video by local storytellers. For young school children, teens, adults, and educators who love stories and learning about story cultures around the world.
These stories have been collected, transcribed and translated by Dr. Helen Atawube Yitah, Professor of literature and Dean of the School of Languages, the University of Ghana, Accra, who proposed the idea of a digital Ghanaian folktale archive. The digital versions of the stories have been co-edited by Dr. Laura Shackelford, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft. Ms. Namrata Nagar, a recent graduate of the Master’s Program in Communication at RIT has designed, curated, and produced the digital version of these stories for the ebook platform and to be featured, at a later date, in our Center for Engaged Storycraft’s Storylines web archive. The ebook versions of these three stories will be released in spring 2023. A description of these 'Fantastic Folktales' and the project's aims are provided below.
Take a deep dive into these traditional stories from northeastern Ghana, a country on the coast of West Africa, and the Kasena culture in which they occur. These are traditional stories retold from memory, usually in the evening by both child and adult storytellers, who have heard the tales from their parents and community members so many times that they know them by heart and can also change them up to keep things interesting for their live audiences. The storytellers often announce each new tale with, “Asinsɔla Kampo,” which can be translated from the Kasem language into English as, “My Story Bursts Forth!” These stories “explode” with good entertainment and also introduce you to northern Ghana’s Kasena culture, its talented oral storytellers, the Kasem language in which the stories are told, and other cultural traditions elsewhere in the region.