MEDIAting Immigration Stories at Canada's Pier 21

The collection of digital stories (DS) available at Pier 21 is the outcome of digital storytelling workshops held across Canada that were offered by the museum as part of a project that involved facilitators from Community Story Strategies. Newcomers from ten cities participated in three-day workshops and contributed their immigration stories to the project, creating a two to five minute digital story that shares their immigration experience in a personal way. What is of interest here, is that DS may broaden the scope of oral history records as a tool to tell alternative stories, using digital media to record, collect, and disseminate very personal contributions to the broad immigration experience. My objective in the present paper is to explore a sample selection of these stories, specifically, the manner in which the subjective positioning of the narrators reverberates through language. Different issues are addressed, among them, the linguistic resources through which positive and negative evaluations are inscribed in the texts and the ways in which personal orientations are negotiated with the putative reader/listener. The discussion is supported by examples from the stories collected that are illustrative of the personal dimensions represented in the sample collection analysed rather than representative of the immigration history in Canada.