StoryCorps, a Mobile Application and a Web site

This past week I explored StoryCorps, a digital storytelling application designed for multiple mobile platforms (Personally, I used my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 to navigate the application). StoryCorps allows users to conduct interviews with individuals and share them in a vast and burgeoning archive of other interviews collected within the application itself. Overall, it was relatively easy to find (I used the Google Play Store), download (It was only 37.5 MB), and sign up for (It only asks for a Username, Email, and Password, with other optional information). The interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate, with a rather simplified drop-down menu that includes just six options (including logging out). Below I will provide a brief narrative of my specific "user experience" of StoryCorps. Many of the observations that I make in my brief narrative will be expanded further when I articulate the terms of prospective pedagogical applications of StoryCorps in a DTC 101 course or otherwise.

In the "About StoryCorps" tab, they announce that their mission is to "provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives." They also indicate that interviews that are recorded with StoryCorps are preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The language used throughout the application itself is exclusively English without any recognizable options for alternative language or access options.


In looking at the interviews that were archived in the "Browse" tab, I was a bit dismayed by the lack of options available for users to somehow conduct more dedicated and specific keyword searches, thus making it a bit difficult to understand or manipulate the logic of how interviews were initially organized. However, users do have the option to "like" (indicated by the heart) or "friend" (indicated by the plus sign beside the outline of a human body) other users. In this sense, users can personalize their own "People I Follow" pages, though there were no options available to comment on or interact with these same or other users on the mobile application.

Though I did not myself conduct and record an interview with the StoryCorps mobile application, I was very much intrigued by what Melanie Kill dubs, the "hard and soft infrastructure" ("Teaching Digital Rhetoric") of the application in terms of how users are limited in many ways by the existing infrastructure and design components imposed within the platform ("hard infrastructure"), yet also offered unique and important avenues within the platform with which to carve out spaces for more personalized manipulation and agency ("soft infrastructure").

As it stands, StoryCorps generally requires that interviewer(s) and interviewee(s) occupy the same physical space, therefore limiting interview options based on mobility and geographical proximity. While StoryCorps does provide rather extensive and generally categorized lists (ranging from "Family Heritage" to "Love & Relationships" to "War") of sample questions with which to organize and conduct interviews, they also provide options to "Write your own question" as well. What is more, after users complete their interviews they are also invited to provide a title, summary, keywords (which includes keywords that are: "General (ex. birth, marriage, war)"; tied to an "Organization (ex. TED, YMCA)"; and/or related to specific "Places (ex. Chicago, IL)"), participant information (which includes: "First Name (required)", "Last Name (optional)," and Email (optional)"), and location ("City," "State/Region/Province," and "Select Country"). Though I certainly appreciated and valued the capacity with which users might generate and include all of this sort of personalized information, it was unclear how this information could actually be used by users of the StoryCorps mobile application themselves if that information if it is neither made available for perusal in the "Browse" tab nor made searchable with any kind of search field.

Many of the limitations I've described above with regard to the lack of search options available in the StoryCorps web application vexed and gave me enough pause to the extent that I decided to visit the StoryCorps Web site itself. Without engaging in an exhaustive study of the affordances and capabilities available to users on the StoryCorps Web site, I will certainly say that it is far more complex and dynamic than its counterpart, the mobile application. For example, it offers: playlists, recording locations, programs and initiatives, and, most importantly, a search field in which users can find other interviews in accordance with their own keywords and search criteria. The distinctions that I recognized between the mobile application and the Web site really helped me to develop some provisional and half baked activities and assignments which might be used in a DTC 101 course.

While I see quite a bit of value in actually composing with StoryCorps, though, I was primarily interested in the varied levels of affordances and design features that distinguished the mobile application from the Web site. This line of inquiry is intriguing to me, because it highlights the ways in which mobile applications are not simply digital surrogates of the Web sites that they emerge from but profoundly different platforms with which to accomplish comparable tasks. Which is to say, I could certainly imagine a longer sequence of assignments that use StoryCorps, a sequence that begins at the level of "listening to" and recognizing design features and affordances between and among the Web site and mobile application and then moving to actually using the platform itself to conduct and archive interviews. With StoryCorps providing a number of sample questions that users can use in the course of their interviews, it would be valuable to have students perhaps conduct a series of interviews in which they use these sample questions for some interviews and others where they design their own questions. Having students use as well as reflect on their use of StoryCorps in these different registers would go a long way in really simulating the "hard and soft infrastructure" of the digital storytelling platform. I also see quite a bit of potential in asking students to consider the rhetorical implications of the choices they elect to make in the course of their composing the title, summary, keywords, participant information, and location. This is all food for thought, though I am sure I will continue to flesh this out in the days that come.