Digital storytellers
Six professionals on what it means to tell stories using digital technologies
| Estimated reading time: 27 minutes (3-6 min per interview)
I remember the first time I realised I LOVED to read. I was 7 and my father started buying us these Brazilian comic books, “Monica’s Gang” (“Turma da Mônica” in Portuguese), that both my brother and I devoured as soon as we’d get them in our hands. Sure, I had other children’s books at home, which I certainly liked to read. But oh, how I remember those days when, sick at home, my mom would tuck me in cosily in my bed, with a fresh comic book transporting me to a street similar to my very own, where young children such as myself, my brother and my neighbourhood friends would live the most incredible adventures. I admit I still re-read these books every time I’m back to my parents’ home.
My taste in books has then evolved and changed many times over the years and something I’ve noticed is that I’m shifting from physical paper books to more and more online reads. Haven’t you noticed the same? And that’s me (just passed…) 30 ☺ What are younger audiences reading? Do they still read “Monica’s Gang” magazines or are they watching the movies instead, or even using the app released in 2012?!
Now sitting at the Ecsite office, I wonder: the science engagement community has been at the forefront of storytelling, using it in very creative ways to engage visitors in exhibitions and collections. But each day, digital technologies are opening up new ways for telling stories. How are we catching up?
I interviewed six professionals who are deeply connected to storytelling in these digital times. Nuno is a writer and producer in the entertainment industry, Maria and Christoph are museum experts who have been involved in projects exploring the power of digital storytelling, Amelia has studied this subject during her PhD and Danny and Wouter bring very concrete examples on how to tell stories in creative and engaging ways. You’ll hear about digital storytelling, transmedia storytelling, storytelling in the digital age… For this piece I chose not to worry too much about the definitions of these terms (which are far from consensual) and to focus on what it means to tell a story using digital technologies and social media. While definitions get straighten up, be sure not to miss this train and start your adventure by getting some real-life inspiration from these six different stories.
For those in a hurry: you'll find a compilation of examples, tools and videos at the bottom of this article.
Nuno, how did you get involved in storytelling?
I am a journalist by education and I spent a few years in the advertisement world. In the early 2000s I worked on a pilot project set up by Microsoft and the Portuguese TV cable operator to establish the world’s first interactive television platform. This project was cut short, caught on the .com bust! Out of work, I decided to start my own company focusing on my two passions: storytelling and new technologies. With digital platforms exploding in Europe and broadband Internet allowing mobile phones to emerge as key entertainment devices, I figured that the way to tell stories in the future would be by combining them with new technologies.
My first project was Sofia’s diary, an interactive teen diary broadcasted on TV, radio, teen magazines, and online... The key element to the success of this show was the idea to send audiences updates on Sofia’s everyday life with small bits of content shared on different media (even by phone messages). This was transmedia storytelling. For the first time, audiences didn’t need to wait a whole week to watch the show and be back in Sofia’s world. Instead they were being updated on the character’s life all day, each day, via their favourite media channels. And that was the foundation of the work I’ve been doing thereafter.
What is so unique about this digital way of telling stories?
For me, the key element of transmedia storytelling is that, by telling stories on different platforms, you’re not duplicating that story but instead, you’re dividing it into little pieces. Each piece is told in a specific online platform that is appropriate to that element of the story and therefore, each medium gives an increment to a bigger story.
Don't multiply your story across media. Instead, divide it into standalone pieces and disseminate those in the appropriate channels
Of course, that creates a challenge: each story element needs to stand on its own as the majority of the audience might only access one media channel (they might only read the book, or see the movie). Each story needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end and the interesting part is that if you connect all these pieces together (just like a puzzle!) you will see a much bigger tale.
Audience feedback is a crucial part of storytelling
Another key element is the ability to capture and learn from audience participation. As you know, audience feedback has always been a crucial part of storytelling.
Since thousands of years, storytellers would pace or even drive the course of their stories by reading their listeners’ reactions. With digital stories we have real time audience reaction and feedback via social media channels and forums and we use it to improve our narratives.
Science centres and museums have always used storytelling techniques. How could they benefit from transmedia?
With transmedia, institutions can interact with visitors even before their physical visit to the museum (by creating an anticipation feeling) and long after by extending the visitor’s experience.
Imagine you’re planning a city trip, what is the first thing you do? Yes: you go online, reserve your flight, book your hotel, and check out what’s there to see. You’ll come across an interesting science museum and you’ll go to their website. If the website is attractive enough, you’ll get curious. Some websites (see Van Gogh Museum's) will immediately immerse you in a narrative. They’ll put you in contact with characters and their stories. Your experience will start there (weeks or even months before your physical visit to the museum). Some museums could even use some sort of gamification at this point, perhaps a scavenger hunt that would continue with your visit. Gamification can really spice up experiences and give the visitors a sense of mission [more about the power of games in a previous Spokes article].
With transmedia, institutions can interact with visitors before and after their physical visit to the museum
An app that would recognise what you have read/experienced in the website could be a valuable bridge between your experiences at home and at the museum. During the visit, transmedia can give context to the exhibitions you’re seeing and provide you with extended information. And at the end of your visit, this same app could motivate you to share your experience with friends and family and tease you with the things you haven’t experienced yet. With such tools, institutions would be creating a visitor journey map that starts pre-visit and continues after they’ve left the museum.
All this sounds exciting and a very logical next step. But it sounds out of reach for many science centres and museums on a tight budget…
An option could be to charge visitors extra for this experience. Many visitors will already pay for expensive audio tours or staff-guided tours.
It is always an investment, but in my opinion, this extra cost could easily be offset by increased visitor engagement and marketing opportunities that such an app/game/interactive website could bring.
How do you start planning a transmedia story? What things do you need to consider?
The first step is to establish your goals. Nobody should be doing transmedia just because it’s cool and others are doing it. This approach could really be useful to reach the needs of your organisation: do you want more visitors or do you want a community of more engaged visitors who will keep returning?
Think of the needs of your organisation: more visitors in general or a community of returning ones?
Then you should think of how to create a relationship with your target audience and which kind of tools and digital platforms could help you reach your specific goal. It’s easy to first think of popular platforms such as Facebook, however these are not always the ones that will best reach your target audience. Take our example: we launched Beat Girl on Pinterest! At the time this wasn’t a popular platform, but that’s where young women were, and they were the ones who really connected with our main character and made the project a hit.
Beat Girl was first launched on Pinterest
And finally, in any transmedia narrative, be sure to create deep characters, with a background story, with flaws, struggles and aspirations, with whom your visitors can connect. And if you can, introduce gamification, it’s a great way to reach out to and engage younger audiences.
Amelia, tell us about yourself.
While pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies, I studied museums and became interested in how technology affects them. Soon after, I also became interested in the rise of social media: museums were embracing social media as a supposedly democratizing tool. But I found this a very reductive view. Therefore I took on this subject as my PhD dissertation: could this new type of media do something different from the status quo?
While doing my PhD, I already knew I didn’t want to be a professor and I wanted my research to be grounded in practice. I got a job at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC while writing my dissertation and I ended up involved in the re-design of their website, making videos, etc. I then got a new job as Assistant Professor at the George Washington University, in the Museum Studies Program, and taught classes related to technology. After a while I moved back to LA and I got my current job as Web Content Strategist at the Paul Getty Trust.
There’s no such thing as digital storytelling
How do you define digital storytelling?
This buzzword first got my attention while I was still in DC. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as digital storytelling. This is only a convenient term to refer to a bunch of experiments. The boundaries of what storytelling is in the 21st century are being pushed by digital media. Bringing “digital” to the equation extends old questions and creates new complexities. For example, we believe stories are engaging ways to guide visitors in a museum, but museums as a field in the late 20th century have generally supported more free-form visiting experiences. How can we make better use of the former as an engagement strategy? We need to encourage our audiences to understand that a story doesn’t represent knowledge but is a device for knowledge building. Our stories should spark further questions and promote critical thinking. The term “digital storytelling” is technologically deterministic and gives digital way too much power in relation to its effect on storytelling in general. I therefore prefer the term “digital age storytelling”, a term I borrow from the Peabody Awards’ recognition of the New York Times’ “Snow Fall,” because it doesn’t suggest that “digital storytelling” is a cohesive set of narrative conventions that are defined by the medium in relation to storytelling.
A story doesn’t represent knowledge but is a device for knowledge building
Transmedia storytelling can be an example of digital-age storytelling. It uses several platforms to tell one story or to sketch out a storyworld. And it doesn’t even have to be digital: movies, books and comic books, etc. will all give you small avenues into a bigger world and each encourages the audience to explore other platforms to get a larger picture of the story.
Are there good examples of “digital age storytelling”?
Yes, many! There are screen-based experiences that combine text, animations, videos, images… Look at the Wellcome Collection digital stories. The Van Gogh Museum is another good example: they incorporate storytelling throughout their website. Many other museums have been incorporating storytelling into mobile applications.
How do you even start planning a story using digital tools?
As I’ve mentioned before, the digital component adds a layer of complexity. You therefore need a very good reason to use digital media to tell a story: can you maintain it over time? Does it really serve your audience? Start by collecting and studying examples of storytelling experiences you think are successful. Consider if your project needs to convey an entire narrative arc, or if just incorporating storytelling techniques, like crafting a character, will make your project more lively.
Also draw on the advice and experience of the extensive museum network, which is generous with advice about storytelling, visitor research and engagement techniques.
And can you do it on a tight budget?
There’s always a cost with digital media, even if using free social media platforms. You’ll need to make a plan for production and maintenance, including investing in paid and trained staff.
What would be your advice to anyone wanting to tell a story across digital media?
My advice would be: read more about storytelling techniques in general, take some workshops focused on telling stories, look at models, and investigate how to use different media not only to guide your visitors, but also to encourage them to ask questions about the story or stories you’re trying to tell.
Maria, what is your background?
I’m based at the University of Glasgow and my post is a joint one, funded half by the Hunterian Museum and half by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) where I’m a lecturer at Museum Studies. One of HATII’s research areas is digital heritage and my own research focuses on the use and evaluation of digital tools for interpretation. I am also responsible for developing The Hunterian’s Digital Strategy. You can see how the two parts of my post complement each other and make it a very interesting job. The idea of using digital tools to tell stories has always been an interest of mine.
The Hunterian Museum is a cultural partner in a project on digital storytelling. Could you tell us more about it?
Indeed we are partners in the Horizon 2020 EMOTIVE project to which we brought both our international research expertise in evaluating digital cultural heritage, as well the real cultural heritage context of the Hunterian Museum as one of the two cultural case studies of the project. In our collection we have impressive Roman artefacts from the World Heritage site of the Antonine Wall, a monument cutting across Scotland that used to be the most northerly frontier of the Roman Empire. Our team has studied this collection and the findings show us interesting information about the life of Roman soldiers at the frontier and their interaction with the local population. With this project, we wanted to understand how to tell stories using digital tools and how to create a deeper empathetic engagement with our visitors. Life at the frontier involved conflict, migration, family life struggles, surviving: all universal problems that users can easily connect to. But different visitors have different knowledge levels and interests: how will they react when they look at the collection, how can we trigger deep engagement and emotion in different sets of people? Storytelling and digital storytelling could be the answer and we wanted to research these questions in a real museum environment.
This February we ran our first EMOTIVE project Experience Design workshop and we invited, besides the project partners, scientists, game developers, interaction designers, content specialists, and cultural heritage interpretation experts. This workshop was a prototype for designing experiences. We are currently working on the scenarios and the different stories and aim to create the digital prototypes after that, but this was the first stage to see what the user requirements would be. The digital tools we plan to create later (VR, animations, etc.) would need to match the needs of our visitors. In order to do that effectively, we used 5 personas (fictional characters based on our visitor studies research). For example, one persona was Mary, an older educated, retired history teacher from Scotland, visiting the museum with Annie, her bored teenage grand-daughter who is quite artistic and highly engaged on social media. Two different profiles, whose emotions would be triggered very differently and who would probably engage in different ways with the collections and exhibition themes. The experience from the workshop showed us that a modular storytelling strategy might be more appropriate: we realised that by creating multiple snapshots of information, via different platforms (digital and non-digital, onsite and offsite) that can be put together in diverse ways to create a bigger narrative, we could engage many different profiles of visitors.
The first EMOTIVE project Experience Design workshop with the project partners, scientists, game developers, interaction designers, content specialists, and cultural heritage interpretation experts.
Multiple snapshots of information, in different platforms, put together to create a bigger narrative, can engage different profiles of visitors
For instance, another of our Hunterian EMOTIVE personas was Calum, Annie’s younger brother who couldn’t come to the museum, but also wanted to be engaged in the museum experience remotely. Via online tools, he could ask his sister about what was going on, allowing us to explore hybrid visiting scenarios, combining both onsite and online.
Can you do all this on a tight budget?
Parts of it, yes. EMOTIVE plans on developing authoring tools for cultural and creative industries. I can also quickly tell you about another project I was recently involved in, very low budget: it was based on the Travellers’ Tails project and the related temporary exhibition “The Kangaroo & The Moose” that we put together at The Hunterian, around a painting which travelled to our museum. For this, we created a digital trail exploring stories that are still engaging users on our web platform even though the exhibition is now closed. George Stubbs painted the earliest representation of a kangaroo in Western art. The Kangaroo painting was commissioned by Joseph Banks who took part in James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in the eighteenth century. The painting was going to be sold to a private party but the public successfully appealed to keep it in the public sphere with a campaign organised by Royal Museums Greenwich. As part of the project, the Kangaroo painting travelled around the country, so everyone could see it and in each city, the exhibition was adapted to the local collections. At the Hunterian Museum we have another painting by Stubbs: The Moose, commissioned by our founder, William Hunter. The two depictions were exhibited in the Hunterian Art Gallery, but we also have a very interesting permanent collection kept at another location with anthropological, zoological, and paleontological collections which we wished to connect to the same story. And here digital tools were of great help. We created a digital trail with multiple short digital stories, to highlight the objects, connect them to each other and to the exhibition themes and make it easier to find them in the space. We put these stories on a website which can also be used as an app, still being visited today. So yes, you can do transmedia on a budget, but it is important that you know your collections, your users, and what you want to achieve when you embark on this.
What would be your advice to anyone wanting to tell a story across digital media?
To museums that haven’t started on the digital interpretation path yet, and are afraid to do so because of budget constraints, I would say: don’t underestimate the skills you already have in house. If you’re in the cultural sector, maybe you aren’t doing it digitally yet, but you do know storytelling techniques, how to engage your visitors, how to highlight interesting facts about your collections, etc.
Don’t underestimate the skills you already have in house
These are all valuable skills and experiences. Now you need a bit of time to learn about the digital tools and experiment. Start small, explore partnerships, listen and observe your users. And finally, don’t forget to give back: be open, go to conferences, post on blogs and share your struggles as much as your successes with the professional community.
Christophe, what is your story?
I’m the Head of Education at Cité de l’Espace. In our team, we develop activities for the public and I was working on how to deliver content to visitors via mobile tools. We were busy building an app with geo-localisaton to help visitors discover our exhibition space when the coordinator of the Horizon 2020 project CHESS, the French firm “Diginext”, approached us. Two museums got involved in the project as end user partners: the Acropolis museum in Athens (archaeological, filled with what we call “mute” objects) and Cité de l’Espace (a science centre with many interactive objects). The aim of the project was to use mobile devices to develop engaging stories at the museums.
In this project we applied an end-user approach: from the beginning we wanted to know how scenarios and applications would meet visitors’ needs. So we ran an ethnographic study: a researcher from the University of Nottingham’s “Mixed Reality Lab” (one of the CHESS partners) spent a week at each museum observing visitors’ behaviour (their way to take decisions, where they stopped to take pictures, how long they’d queue, what they’d do in restaurants, what they’d look for when searching for information, etc.). We would need to know how to meet their needs when building possible scenarios. For instance, if we know visitors often stop at a certain location to take a picture, we would include this activity in the scenario. We also used the method of the persona to profile visitors and build adapted scenarios. At Cité we had two personas: Luca, a 10 years old boy and Céline, a mother whose main concern is the education of her children but who is also looking to be surprised herself.
We created two personas: Luca, a 10 years old boy & Céline, a mother looking after her children's education but who's also hoping to be surprised herself
Finally, we had to choose the mobile devices we wished to use. At first we wanted to use them all, but in the end we focused our project on developing an app for IOS, compiling images, videos, augmented reality modules etc. Via the app, users could visit the museum through the diary of an astronaut. One of the exhibition objects was a space rocket whose reality could be augmented via the app: visitors could then see what was inside the rocket. The story also included moments in which users had to do something physical, like some sort of activity, which proved to be very engaging.
In the beginning of the project we gave our visitors iPads with the app installed. But later we involved classes that offered themselves iPads to their pupils. Because we were targeting school groups, we involved the teachers in writing the stories. Evaluation done by University groups showed very good results in the engagement of school groups.
What next?
Our next step in the field will be to co-create space narratives with pupils, in the frame of a new Horizon 2020 project called “Stories for tomorrow”, whose coordinator is the University of Bayreuth in Germany. We’ll give students a space-related topic (Mars exploration), and let them discover how to design a story using both virtual (e.g. VR, sound effects, video…) and “real” (e.g. 3D printing) tools, to improve “deeper learning” in science, maths, mixed with arts and narrative skills development.
Teenagers at Cité de l’espace, France, engaging with the exhibition via the app. Copyright: Cité de l’espace
What would be your advice to anyone wanting to tell a story across digital media?
Get to know your visitors’ behaviour
Get to know your visitors’ behaviour (not only what they expect from the content but also from their day at the museum); take time to learn more about storytelling and transmedia; be careful not to put too many virtual contents and tools: real action activities are needed for a deeper engagement, and don’t reinvent the wheel – there are many great projects you can base yourself upon.
Danny, tell us more about yourself and how you got involved in storytelling.
I have worked in digital in one capacity or another here at Wellcome Collection since 2009: I’ve done a variety of things, from running the website, commissioning games and all kinds of interdisciplinary projects about science-based exhibitions. If you know the Wellcome Collection, you’ve certainly realised that it’s quite atypical for a museum, being strongly rooted in both science and art. We have a rich digital archive of visual resources and our goal was to bring it all together to bring our visiting audience towards a deeper connection with our collections. We took two actions: on one side, we created a reading room, a physical library turned into an exhibition space; and on the other we designed digital stories, online, widely accessible to all.
An ‘online exhibition’ shouldn't be the equivalent of a physical one
A common mistake people make when creating an ‘online exhibition’ is to make the equivalent of a physical one, with the same walls, labels and limitations. We tried to avoid this but still took the same objective: to invite our audience to engage with our “stuff”. Our goal was to create a new kind of experience all together. We therefore commissioned two stories: Mindcraft, about the birth of hypnotism and mind-control, and The Collectors, about six very different collectors, who collected for knowledge.
And that’s how I got involved in storytelling!
Mindcraft: a Wellcome collection digital story about the birth of hypnotism and mind-control. Copyright: Wellcome collection
You’ve done website-based stories. Would you now go transmedia? What’s the logical next step after these edgy stories?
My feeling is that going full transmedia, making stories that cross boundaries in the web is expensive and time-consuming and quite hard to get an interesting impact from. It’s a very ambitious project for museums. Our multimedia approach was cheaper and though our digital stories were custom made, to those on a tight budget, there are many off-the-shelf tools, such as Shorthand and Atavist that help you quickly build your stories at accessible prices.
People loved the digital stories, but here were two problems: on one hand they stood alone and didn’t really link to anything else in our collection, and on the other hand, we lacked the resources to make new ones. So in fact, they didn’t really help create a long-lasting digital audience. Our next step will then be to commission more stories in smaller but connected narratives, slightly less immersive, and release one chapter a week on our new website and promote them via our existing social media, our database of contacts, etc. We hope this new way will help us gain readership, for more regular content.
What would be your advice to anyone wanting to tell a story across digital media?
My first advice would be to assess the impact you want to have, who you want to reach, why are you doing it. And encourage your team to explore the real power of digital media (beyond mimicking analogue forms in a digital way), to experiment with what digital storytelling can do on its own terms, not just as part of an exhibition or another curatorial initiative.
Experiment with what digital storytelling can do on its own terms
As storytellers, museums are in competition with all other cultures or voices these days, such as the Internet sphere, where many other people are telling stories too. It’s worth thinking about your relationship with this world and how to use your museum brand to differentiate yourself and make the web the starting point to all the other things you do.
Wouter, what is your story?
I’m a computer scientist by background who followed a course on arts, media and technology at the Art Academy. There I specialised in music technology and started building interactive installations. A colleague of mine (now my business partner) already worked with Dutch science museums (e.g Naturalis, the Natural History Museum in Leiden) and after his graduation he got a big assignment for which he asked for my help. After such great collaboration we decided to continue to work together. Our company’s mission is to explore the boundaries of technology combined with creativity. We now develop multimedia, games, mobile apps and virtual reality applications for science centres.
Which storytelling projects using digital technologies have you been involved in?
A cool example of a collaborative project we’ve recently been involved in is now live at the Natural History Museum of Tilburg. It’s a multimedia exhibition called “Bos” (which means “forest” in Dutch) and it has a very remarkable feature: the exhibition changes with the seasons! Content, lights, projections, all changed with the arrival of the winter and will change again when spring comes. The story is about a tree who has always lived indoors but who wishes to know the forest and learn about the outside world. Young children, aged 4 to 8, have a mission: help the tree grow and get ready for a life in the forest. We use a mix of gamification, interactive projections and physical activities to teach kids about nature. Children help the tree by completing a series of assignments and with each assignment they get a reward: a bird, a spider, a leaf… which are placed in a virtual representation of a branch that children then give to the tree to help it grow. This exhibition has many layers of interaction, a big deal of gamification, and above all: it tells a story.
Bos is a multimedia exhibition in Tilburg, The Netherlands
How do you even start planning such project? Can you do it on a tight budget?
It all starts with a concept and a lot of brainstorming. We need to get the content right but also determine the different types of applications that will make this narrative a fun digital and physical experience. Transmedia was the key element for “Bos” to create a flexible immersive space that would appeal to a young audience. We made storyboards and schematic diagrams and got started on the design, animation, prototypes, etc. The project took about 9 months to be concluded, and will take us a bit of work each time the season changes!
Another way to use transmedia in the museum/science centre is through an app, which can bring extra stories to complement the visitors’ experience of the exhibition. An app can engage visitors before they arrive at the museum and can be a very nice tool on location, reacting to the user’s environment. In my opinion it can enhance the experience even more when the environment also reacts to the app!
Creating a transmedia story isn’t as expensive as you’d first think. A big part of the project is to develop an engaging story and museums are already very skilled in content creation.
What would be your advice to anyone wanting to tell a story across digital media?
Start from the core of your story, from the visitor's experience, and your goals
Start from the core of your story, from the experience you want the visitor to live, and your learning goals. Only then choose your media. Many people want to do something with a new technology like virtual reality and try to find content to pair it with. In my opinion, this doesn’t work. Your goals and story come first and then you find the right media to express them.
GET INSPIRED
Van Gogh Museum's website - immediately immerses you in the museum's exhibitions rather than losing you to logistics.
VanGoYourself, a digital exhibition inviting you to recreate famous paintings. Give it a try!
Sending our curator on extreme adventures - a curator ventured into cold, heat, darkness and oxygen deprivation. His #ExtremeCurator adventures gave audiences a first-hand look at the effects on the human body in just a short period of time. You can see the results of the challenges on their blog.
Tate social media action was a great way to connect with younger audiences. Their 1840s GIF Party was a digital mass participatory project that invited members of the public (especially the Tumblr community) to transform selected artworks from the 1840s gallery at Tate Britain into animated GIFs.
Travellers tails website, as described above by Marie Economou, is a digital trail with multiple short digital stories, to highlight the objects, connect them to each other and to the exhibition themes and make it easier to find them in the space. The website can also be used as an app.
Three impressive digital stories
Wellcome collection digital stories, nicely described by Danny Birchall himself in this The Guardian article
Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, is an iconic and award-winning digital story by The New York Times about the 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche.
Bear 71, by the National Film Board of Canada’s is a fully immersive, multi-platform experience. Participants explore and engage with the world of a female grizzly bear via animal role play, augmented reality, webcams, geolocation tracking, motion sensors, a microsite, social media channels and a real bear trap in Park City.
Tools
Shorthand & Atavist were advised by Danny Birchall. They allow you to create beautifully designed stories with integration of multiple media.
Online course
Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Digital Storytelling - this Coursera course introduces educators to digital storytelling and explores ways to use digital stories to enhance students’ learning experiences. Open to anyone with an interest in digital storytelling.
Must-watches
Our interviewee Amelia Wong discusses storytelling in museums, the nature of story, and what digital means for the former – providing a foundation for thinking about story in general and digital storytelling more specifically.
6 TEDx Talks On The Power Of Storytelling - nice compilation of TEDx talks by Museum Hack.
And some good reads
Immersive storytelling is everywhere and there’s no going back by Melanie Arrow, presenting four great and quite recent examples of immersive storytelling
Sarnis, P., & T. Svenonius. (2015). “The X, Y, and Z of digital storytelling: dramaturgy, directionality, and design.” Museums and the Web 2015. Consulted December 13, 2015
