The way we tell stories in print has been mostly the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, the pressure is on to rethink how we produce and present our stories. [...]
Category Archives: interactive narratives
Old story, new media: David Dobbs brings family secrets to the Atavist
We recently talked by Skype with David Dobbs about the mystery that began with his mother’s dying wish. Dobbs’ years of efforts to solve that mystery eventually became “My Mother’s Lover,” which was published last month byThe Atavist.
Dobbs has written at many lengths in several formats: He’s completed three books on science and environmental [...]
What we’re watching: two takes on documentary
Lately, we’ve been pondering the full range of documentary projects. From a storytelling standpoint, “Hell and Back Again” represents one end of the spectrum. The film, which won the documentary award at Sundance this year, tracks a soldier through combat, injury and back home to North Carolina. Watch the brief trailer and see a gallery [...]
The Goggles on “Welcome to Pine Point”: digital narrative chases memory and loss
What if your hometown disappeared, literally vanished from the map? How would you hold onto it? Would the community of people who had lived there continue? “Welcome to Pine Point” is a website that explores the death of a town and the people whose memories and mementos tell its story today. The site lives online [...]
Harvey Smith on environmental storytelling and embedding narrative: “It has to be possible to miss some things to make finding them meaningful”
In a bit of serendipitous surfing last fall, I stumbled onto “What Happened Here?” a presentation by Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch at the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The presentation focused on environmental storytelling and referred not only to gaming, but also to documentary photography, narrative journalism and a treatise on comic [...]
Nonny de la Peña on “Gone Gitmo,” Stroome and the future of interactive storytelling
by Ernesto Priego |
January 3, 2011
I recently talked about journalism and storytelling with Nonny de la Peña, who is a senior research fellow in immersive journalism at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, where she explores 3-D environments for news, nonfiction and documentary. She is also co-founder of Stroome.com, a community that allows online collaborative remixing of [...]
Twitter as story: a work in progress
Stephen Colbert mocking the national Christmas tree’s Twitter account shows that the frivolousness of the plucky social media tool is still up for debate. No doubt Twitter’s popularity offsets some of the mockery, and it has contributed to newsgathering and crisis reporting. But does it have any storytelling potential?
Twitter has been a home for crowdsourced [...]
2010 Online News Association conference awards highlight sites and stories
Want to know what kind of online storytelling is turning heads? Over the weekend, the Online News Association held its 2010 conference in Washington, D.C. Competing with the Rally to Restore Sanity just a few blocks away, ONA attendee numbers did thin out for a few hours Saturday afternoon, but the rally ended well before [...]
Death outside a DC nightclub: TBD uses Storify to create a breaking news narrative
Can social media serve as source material for compelling news narratives? A number of innovative tools and programs have been developed that have interesting à la carte uses or make for beautiful visuals, but it is possible for any of them to carry the weight of a news story as it unfolds?
Over the weekend, TBD made a [...]
What’s the buzz? Monkeying with story in the hive mind
by Peggy Nelson |
October 4, 2010
We have to start with the monkeys. The infinite number of monkeys that, given their own personal typewriters and an infinite amount of time, would produce the works of William Shakespeare. But even thought-experiments involving infinity have their limits.
The idea is not that some monkeys, or maybe even the entire infinity of them, would get [...]
