Digital storytelling on life-cycle websites
ENAs anthropologists have become increasingly engaged with the study of digital visual anthropology, the issues of digital storytelling or visual narrative have emerged as central concerns. This chapter examines visual stories as the narratives filled with ethnographic, historical, religious, commercial and cross-cultural contexts. Visual stories on the web communicate in a different way and invoke understandings in a way that words alone cannot. Images, as visual field notes, include stories of people, places, events, impressive performances and practices. In this chapter, I pose two related questions: What is the role of digital storytelling in the life-cycle websites? What are the forms of digital storytelling in the life-cycle websites? The basis for digital ethnographic analysis is visual storytelling from life-cycle commemorations websites, focusing on photographs, images, movies and written texts comprising that site. During my field research, I was exploring how digital visual representations created meanings in relation to written texts. To sum up, visual analysis of digital storytelling helped me to analyse, understand and discover the life-cycle celebrations as individual, social and also as commercial phenomena. Keywords: digital storytelling, visual narratives, life-cycle websites, Lithuanian and Latvian, family, commemorations.
