For the purposes of this article, I’ll refer to linear narrative as a story with a beginning, middle and end. Think of it as going to the theater to watch a movie. You go into the room and the movie starts. You might be watching “Memento,” a traditional nonlinear screenplay, in which the movie goes forward and backward in time. But as a part of the audience when you see “Memento,” you go to the theater and watch a story, without interruption, regardless of how the story is told. It unfolds for you in a linear fashion.

Likewise, when describing nonlinear narratives, I’m not referring to their timelines but to interruptions of the story experience, as if you went to the movies to watch “Memento” and were interrupted in the middle by a documentary about the film itself.

Interrupting stories

Take a minute to think about a great lecture you’ve attended sometime in the past. What made it a brilliant storytelling experience? Apart from content and the speaker’s ability to deliver a good story, a good lecture is a linear flow of information, with a beginning, middle and an end. Those are the basics of a story; we’re familiar with them from an early age.

Let’s look a little deeper. At the beginning of a lecture, the speaker will introduce a subject step by step. Most talks these days are accompanied by visual aids, with the speaker sharing either the key points of her talk or visual information that clarifies the knowledge that is being shared.

Now imagine yourself in a lecture hall. The room is packed and the upcoming talk is the one you came to hear. The subject is something you are interested in, and the speaker is the best in the field.

The lights go out; the audience is quiet except for a cough here or there. The speaker takes the stage with an ovation.

She begins by introducing her subject. The speaker metaphorically takes the audience by the hand, strolling around. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence – “and so we can conclude that…” – the speaker stops. She then says, “You know what? I’ve just remembered that I have this amazing picture somewhere on my computer that relates to this subject.” She finds the picture and displays it for the audience. It does make sense, and the picture has added another layer of information. But then, after she shows the picture, the speaker starts talking again, right where she stopped the sentence before.

Now imagine that this talk, the one you and the rest of the room were really looking forward to, continues to be interrupted again and again. The speaker keeps throwing in stuff that relates to the subject and the story, but with no regard for the interruptions.

The storytelling would be awful. The narrative would be a mess.

Here’s a graphic visualization of such a narrative:

This example likewise illustrates how we present or consume news on most distribution channels right now. In print, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with them, the presentation and consumption of a story become a nonlinear narrative experience. Pictures, text, captions, etc., all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its nonlinearity.

Consider the following layout of a magazine story. It has some of the content you would expect from a magazine: flowing text in columns, pictures with captions, graphics and a box with a related story.

Every aspect of this story is related to and enhances the information being communicated. But since we are presenting all of this content on eight pages, some compromising must be done. Graphic designers must find the best way to make this story presentable, readable and compelling. Working within the physical boundaries of pages, the text is set in columns and flows from one spread to another without much control over where it breaks from one column to the next, from one page to the next, or even from one spread to the next.

Furthermore, in order to lay out all of a story’s elements, designers must ensure that a graphically “important” element is presented on each spread. This means that the pictures of the story will be placed on the spreads to favor visual enhancement. The same happens with the secondary story and the graphic in our example.

What does this mean for the reader’s linear narrative experience?  Since every bit of the story is laid out across the spreads, pictures and other relevant information will rarely be presented in the best place for the storytelling experience. Readers will have to stop reading the main text to absorb the picture information, or will have to read further until they find a “safe” place to stop reading the main text and thereafter read the secondary story, etc. The narrative is a broken one, and representing it in a graphical way would resemble the previous representation of the bad lecture.

On most websites, sadly, the same nonlinear experience takes place. Sites present stories using a top picture and a scroll-down text column. If the story has secondary pictures and texts, these items are presented alongside the long column of text or, in the case of secondary pictures, by making the top picture a slideshow. Even on the iPad, most publishers approach tablets using a print or a web paradigm.

Optimizing interludes

It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s go back to the first example and imagine a good linear narrative for a lecture. Here’s a graphic visualization of what it might look like:

In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an ideal location. For example, imagine a story about a family facing economic stress. Suppose it includes a video of a family member talking about how having been fired made things worse. In a linear narrative experience, the video would only be presented to the audience at a certain point in the main narrative. When telling about how the family was facing stressful problems not only because they lost their savings but also because a family member got fired, that would be the place to show the video. Think about it as a part of a lecture: “Let’s see a video on why losing her job only made things get worse.”

The main narrative of a story can be imagined as a string of scenes or episodes, like a TV series, where every added item is placed either at the beginning or the end of each episode. Every episode is structured so that it can be interrupted without breaking the narrative thread.

With the story broken into scenes or episodes, you can then place additional material in the intervals. You can break the blocks to have the intervals where you want them – before and after scenes, wherever it makes perfect sense to add the story-enhancing media. Clever tricks exist in television to cope with the temporal “amnesia” that audiences face on consuming a story in sequential blocks. You can use similar solutions to create a linear flow, once you’ve used the spaces between scenes for added material.

Digital narratives

But how can we do this on a digital distributing device? The most important aspect of a story is the subject of that story, the content. It follows that if we want to change the way we tell our stories, we’ll have to start with that basic concept. Every storyteller must first come up with the content. She then will be able to break the story into blocks, or episodes of content – not only for the main narrative, but also for the added material. For each episode, the storyteller must decide on the best technique to communicate her story. In a digital narrative, storytellers aren’t obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each part. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader or moved through without losing the narrative thread.

The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Using a TV series season approach, the storyteller will present her story, one episode after another, in a way that will not break the flow of the narrative, regardless of the technique used for each episode. Each part will be placed after the previous one, at an exact point in the story that best maintains flow. Intervals will be used for added material. Readers will be able to choose the amount of time they take to consume each episode of the narrative.

We need to radically change the way we tell our stories. It doesn’t make sense to keep using old paradigms on new devices. Our main goal is to learn the best way to tell a story and stop using techniques that worked only for one platform (be it text and pictures in print, video on TV or audio on radio). With digital distribution we can mix all these techniques in a way that enables our storytelling. Those of us in newsrooms also need to change the way we plan, produce and present our stories.

Here are a few iPad applications that do a great job nailing this kind of storytelling:

France24’s “Rape in Congo: Peace Violated” is more than a year old. It comes from the early days of the iPad but provides a nice example of a linear narrative. You can see the TV documentary roots of this application, but it also draws from the feel of a magazine.

The narrative begins with examples of rape stories and allows users not only to read information but also to hear, firsthand, stories from the victims themselves. Using strong pictures to set the mood, every now and then readers encounter audio or video. Text introduces each chapter of the story.

Users learn about the rapes, the medical and psychological support given to victims, and the medical and judicial efforts to find and punish rapists. There’s a look inside a court hearing on a rape, a visit to a Congolese jail and, finally, a look at how things are outside the big cities. This application delivers a powerful, terrible story.

The second application I want to highlight is “Money & Speed – Inside the Black Box,” by VPRO (a TV broadcaster) and Catalogtree (a data visualization studio), both from the Netherlands. This app takes us inside the finance world and the fastest and deepest U.S. stock market plunge ever.

“Money & Speed” uses video as its core narrative medium, but what’s really innovative about its storytelling approach is the ability to stop the video and explore interactive data graphics about the stock market plunge. Every time a new data set is discussed on the video interviews, the app allows readers to open and explore it. Yet if someone doesn’t want to explore the data visualizations, the video chapters by themselves suffice to tell the story.

The project that comes closest to the approach I’m advocating is the Atavist, a publishing house for long long-form articles (described as 6,000-30,000 words). The Atavist offers the possibility of enriching a narrative with supplementary text, pictures and videos.

These added elements can be presented in a linear fashion – on a screen by themselves – or within the text via highlighted words. This approach to producing (mostly) text-based narratives allows for a wonderful storytelling experience on a digital device.

Let’s take one of the Atavist’s articles, “Lifted,” as an example: the tale of one of history’s most elaborate heists and the race to unravel its mysteries. The storytelling experience begins with a video of the robbers in action, filmed by surveillance cameras on site. The video helps to set the mood of the story. Swiping the page, the user can start reading the article. Important relevant details – such as a Google map with the locations mentioned in the article – appear when users touch a word in the text related to the information.

The story is written in chapters (episodes), and between these chapters at strategic points, users are presented with pictures related to the previous chapter. In “Lifted,” the storytelling is enhanced with videos, related texts and pictures. Users can also opt to hear the author narrate the story.

The final app I want to share is “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore,” by Moonbot Studios. A simple kids’ story about people who love books and the way books return their love, this application offers a digital narrative approach that goes beyond what is usual on iPad book apps. Each page is filled with a big picture and some text. Most of the pictures offer interaction and animation.

Furthermore, sometimes users must interact with the picture and discover small “secrets” in order to turn to the next page. At other times, such as with a playable piano, the interactivity on a picture is there just for user enjoyment and does not directly advance the narrative. This moving story is filled with wonderful illustration and animation, and is one of the greatest examples of thinking outside the box when it comes to digital storytelling for the iPad.

The fact that a few storytellers have taken advantage of digital opportunities to structure great linear narratives that flow – narratives whose possibilities we could only have imagined in the past – should encourage us all to rise to the possibilities of these new platforms.

Pedro Monteiro is a graphic designer who has worked in the publishing business for more than 14 years, mostly at the Portuguese newsmagazine Visão. Named one of Businessweek’s 21 Heroes of Data Visualization in 2009, he blogs at Digital Distribution and is a consultant with Innovation.

Monteiro would like to thank Barry Sussman for his edits, Vasco Ferreira for his “lecture” insight, and Joana Maciel for her assistance with this article.

Dobbs has written at many lengths in several formats: He’s completed three books on science and environmental topics. He’s contributed similarly-themed pieces to The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine. He blogs for Wired at Neuron Culture. But for this particular story, he ended up turning to the new world of long-long-form publishing, working with Atavist co-founder Evan Ratliff to realize his 12,000-word account of a World War II affair kept secret for five decades. In these excerpts from our talk, he discusses the long struggle to find the right way to tell his story, what rich media added to his words, and the importance of a unifying question.

Did you ever pitch “My Mother’s Lover” to some of the traditional outlets you’ve written for, or did you know you wanted to do something new with it?

I didn’t know right away, because when I conceived of the story in February 2002, there were not these alternate outlets – there were only conventional print options. My first thought was to write a book about it. I had just finished “Reef Madness,” my third book, and this story grabbed my attention – this story about my mother and her secret World War II lover.

I ran it past my agent and my editor at Knopf. My editor wasn’t wild for it. My agent said, “You should do this book someday, and if you have to do it now, you should do it now.” But as a career thing, it didn’t quite seem right. So I didn’t pursue it then, but I kept doing the research off and on, partly because most of the people involved were quite old, and I was afraid all the sources would pass away.

Then more recently, I pitched it in different forms to a couple places. I pitched a story to Wired that was mainly about the recovery outfit of the government, which is now called JPAC – they’re the ones that go find the bodies of dead soldiers going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. So it was going to be a story about that, with my mother’s story used to hang some human interest on it. They didn’t quite bite.

I sent a 7,000-word memoir to the New Yorker, and they chewed on it a little bit but ultimately passed. Both of those were in the last three years or so.

Was this your first experience doing something not only non-sciencey but also this personal?

It was the first time I’ve written something really personal at this length. It’s not the first time I’ve written about something other than science, because I really first started writing about science eight years ago, and wrote mainly about environmental things before that. I’d written other kinds of stories, but this was definitely a different sort of thing.

Not to suggest that your other work doesn’t make use of storytelling, but this piece relies very heavily on narrative. You have to recreate your mother’s relationship with her lover as well as her relationship with you. Did you have to develop any techniques or skills you hadn’t used before?

I wouldn’t say skills, but I had to approach writing differently. I always try to put a huge weight on story. I think hard about voice, about distance from the story, and about structure.

In a sense, the problems here were very similar to the problems I faced in writing long articles about science. I think readers will carry a lot of weight in a piece about science if the track in front of them is alluring, if the story is interesting. I think the problems were the same sorts of problems I’d dealt with before: What is the right distance for me to have from the story? What do I leave out?

That’s always the hardest thing to decide in a story. There were tons of things that I left out of this story.

You mentioned in an email that the digital long-form format permits some alternative narrative strategies. What strategies were you thinking of in terms of that?

I wouldn’t say it affected my writing strategies hugely. There were places where I could lean on things. There were some freedoms there – a few things you wouldn’t have to describe as much as you would have to normally, but I didn’t try to take advantage of those in the writing.

The story ended up in two formats. It ended up on the iPad, which is a very rich multimedia experience and can add a tremendous value – and does in this case, I’d like to think. But it’s also in a Kindle single, which is a more conventional format. So I had to write it basically as a story that would have a few photographs along with it, but not a whole ton. And in that sense I had to write it as I would for just about any print publication. The value added by the iPad was extra-textual, if you will.

For our readers who won’t have seen the story on the iPad, can you talk about what that rich media included?

The Atavist has its own software for creating these stories, its own kind of content management system. What it does is that you can open a story on an iPad and just read it clean text all the way through. It’s very easy to read. You swipe sideways to move one chapter to the next. You slide your finger up to read down on the page. But there’s a little button on the screen that lets you turn on the extra elements, like the timeline and bios for characters.

The larger thing is that it allows for as many photos as you want. There’s a passage that describes two kinds of planes – a B-17 and PBY – that the rescue crews used. My mother’s lover was a flight surgeon in World War II, in rescue crews that got airmen who had been shot down out of the Pacific. They would land on the water and pick them up or drop a boat to them. I can describe those planes in the text, but in the iPad version, you can punch some links and see pictures of the planes, or in one case link to a web page that shows pictures of how the B-17s can survive extraordinary damage in the air and still keep flying home.

Dobbs' mother with her lover, Angus

What the Atavist does that I like a lot is put photographs or some visual element between chapters. When you swipe to go from chapter 1 from chapter 2, you have a picture there, or if you want, a video or dynamic illustration. In this case, most of the between-chapter elements are just photographs.

But at one crucial point, about halfway through, I describe these rescue crews of my mother’s lover, whose name was Angus. They found a film, a training film for one of these rescue services – squadrons, they were called. The Atavist folks also found a separate audio file from an oral history, in which one of Angus’ squadron mates, someone who was in his squadron, described the history of the squadron and some of the things that happened in it, including an attack by Japanese soldiers on the squadron’s barracks on Iwo Jima.

So they laid that audio over the training film, and I find it creates a powerful element right smack in the middle of the story. I’ve described in the text the sort of dangers that the crews underwent, and what their experience was like as they followed MacArthur’s forces across the Pacific toward Japan. But on top of that textual description, there’s this little movie they made, with film from one source and audio from another. It’s only about three minutes long, but the mix is very powerful in bringing home to the reader in a visceral way, if you will, what was going on out there in the Pacific.

So here’s a love story about a man who is lost in the war and in a lot of danger. I made a decision not to play up that part of it too much but just get it in there. The film sort of amplifies that in a graceful way and also gives the reader a break right about halfway through a 12,000-word story. These are the kind of things about these enhanced e-books that could really be used in a neat way in all kinds of stuff, including science writing.

They were the ones who found this film and the audio for the rich media, so there was a little bit of a collaboration there?

Very much so. I enjoyed that aspect of this going in. It did feel a little bit more like a collaboration, not to exaggerate it too much. My main job obviously was writing the piece, and I did that pretty much the way I always do it: which is alone in a room, ruminating, trying different things and sharing it with a few friends to get feedback, and then after fixing it, sending it to the editor.

That leaves out a couple things. One is that Evan [Ratliff] is an extremely good long-form writer himself. And knowing that, and knowing that they did one piece at a time, I had the luxury of going over several different options for the story with him. I sent him two previous forms of it: a book pitch that I had written but had not shopped, and the 7,000-word story I had sent to the New Yorker. He knew the material, and we discussed different ways to approach the material. It was very complicated. I thought of six different ways to structure and tell the story.

Once I sent it in, they were extremely active in putting together the multimedia package. I think it’s one of many strengths they bring to this. I had looked, but I had never found the things they had. I found a lot of things but not that stuff.

How would you characterize the structure you ended up using versus the ones you discarded?

The problem with this story was, do I start at the end? Do I start in the middle? Do I start at the very beginning? What’s the main nugget of the story? Is it a love story, in which case you can stop just after the war ends, because all you really need is an epilogue? That’s not the story I told.

Is it mainly a memoir? Yes, it’s mainly a memoir, but … I think every good story has a main strand or a question that’s driving it. So what unifies these different stories that I was thinking about telling? The thing that unified the stories was chasing Angus. People trying to find this one guy, my mother’s lover.

There’s a story about a son trying to reconstruct his mother’s past. There’s a story about my mother wanting to return to Angus. The story begins with my mother surprising her six children by asking to be cremated and have her ashes returned to where her lover is in the Pacific Ocean, because he was shot down toward the end of the war. There’s her, looking for Angus, to return to him. There’s me trying to figure out who he was. There are his children, whom I ran into but didn’t know existed at the start of the story – they’re trying to figure out who he was. So all these things are going on, and ultimately they’re placed in a structure that is fairly conventionally chronological, within a frame.

It opens with a funeral, my brother spreading her ashes in Hawaii. Then there’s a slight backtrack. After that, it goes back to a roughly chronological account, starting with when she was a baby and growing up and then quickly getting to how she met Angus, their time together and then what happened after that, what the reverberations of his disappearance were. And that doesn’t end until the very end of the story, with an action that ends the story, an action taken by me.

There’s a moment in the story where you go to California expecting to find something, and it’s not there. It’s a lovely moment, because it really got me wondering what would happen next. It underlines that not only is historical information hard to come by, sometimes even the facts we think we have are wrong. It gave a wonderful sense of just how complicated this chase was.

That’s why I put that episode in the story. You think you finally have something in your hand that you’ve been looking for a long time, aaaaand… no. It slipped away again. I think all of us who write heavily reported nonfiction, we experience it all the time, but that doesn’t go into the story. What you put in the story is when you finally found it. Or if you didn’t find it, it just doesn’t show up at all.

In this case, it can go in and sort of be an actual event in the story that helps underline the central problem of the whole story that is my mother’s lover. How hard it is to grasp these things, how you’re trying to pin things down and it’s very difficult. This man in particular, Angus, proved elusive to just about everyone.

Is there anything else you want to say about the narrative challenges of writing the story?

I did find it a particular luxury to have a choice of length. Usually, if I get an assignment from The Atlantic or the Times Magazine, they have a range in which they want the thing. They’ll say, “We want five, and you can write it at eight [thousand]. If we love it, we’ll run the longer version.” So there’s a range, but it has fairly distinct borders.

The Atavist said, “Take as much room as you want; just make it the right length for the story.” It really freed me up because I could choose any narrative strategy I wanted, and not have to discard it due to reasons of length.

For more, check out an excerpt of “My Mother’s Lover,” or read a longer talk with Dobbs about his story over at The Open Notebook.

A more experimental approach to delivering documentary, “HIGHRISE” is a multi-city, multi-year project recording “the human experience in global vertical suburbs.” Under the direction of documentarian Katerina Cizek, “HIGHRISE” uses layered images to recreate 360-degree views of participants’ living spaces, and offers audio of them talking about life in apartments and projects from Beruit to Phnom Penh and Chicago to Havana. Viewers can scroll through people or places, and click on rooms in a virtual highrise to find the apartment of a real person somewhere in the world. See the trailer or visit the site.

Even simple talking-head video posted by Amnesty International on the 25th anniversary of disgraced ruler Jean-Claude Duvalier’s 1986 flight from Haiti underlines the power of the human voice in storytelling. Since Duvalier recently returned home, it’s worth noting video’s instantaneous ability to remind viewers of just what life was like prior to his departure (via @PulitzerCenter).

And on the lighter (and interactive) side, “The Johnny Cash Project” is a crowdsourced tribute to the Man in Black – or, as the project’s site calls it, a “global collective art project.” Working within a framework of images and using a tool on the site, participants create their own portraits of Cash, which will eventually be included in a music video (via @MediaStorm).

An image from Danfung Dennis' "Hell and Back Again"

How did you come to this project? What kinds of things have you done in the past?

Shoebridge: We used to work at a magazine called Adbusters. We were the creative team there for five or six years and tried to push the visual storytelling thing as much as we could. Adbusters was a nice place, because you would work on conceptual stuff as well as art, and sort of combine the two things and try to make that narrative flow as much possible – the words and pictures feeding off of each other.

After that, we did a book called “I Live Here” with a couple of other folks. It was a fairly intense, big project of telling stories from four corners of the world – again, in a much more interesting, different way than what we had seen up till then. And then after that, we’ve done interesting story-based projects, or what we think are interesting story-based projects, or kooky art things and stuff like that. And then we ended up doing this as our most recent project.

Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge

What is The Goggles? Is it just the two of you?

Simons: We’ve been together for about 12 years as a creative team, a small firm. We actually do have other people help us, but up until recently, we’ve been a two-person team that produced different kinds of media, from art to a lot of print stuff. We’ve been working on some television scripts, a lot of campaign activism, and projects like this.

Where did the Pine Point project come from?

Simons: From us. We always have a dozen or more projects on the go. We stumbled across a website called “Pine Point Revisited.” Pine Point was a small town in the Northwest Territories that I had visited as a kid. I was about 9 years old and going to a hockey tournament, and it was the first place I went alone without my family. So I just looked it up one night when I remembered that I had been there, and it was gone. It wasn’t even on the map anymore. It had been removed from the earth in 1989. That was our starting point: what happened to this town?

The “Pine Point Revisited” site was made by one of the former residents. It had a real wealth of visual assets and tons of photos, and people who had lived there had contributed video and badges and all sorts of artifacts of the town. You could tell there was a deep-rooted community there. This was more than just a tribute to a town. There did seem to be a secondary or deeper community that was still existing.

That’s where we started from. How was this community preserved in this way that housed memory and what was the story behind why the town disappeared?

You mentioned this trip you made when you were 9. There were some other memories of your own that get woven into it – I remember you come back to your own past at one point in the story with the space junk. How did you approach the question of how much to make yourself part of the story?

Shoebridge: That was a back-and-forth as far as where the narrative voice would come in, and whether there would be a narrative voice. We started out actually not having Mike’s voice as the primary thing, and then as we moved further in and the more personal the story became, the more we realized it would be beneficial to just tell the story from that point, to give it a good beginning and also to give the readers somebody to compare themselves to. In the way that we like to identify with narrators, we felt this was a story people could identify with. We felt like having a person attached to that voice would help them do that.

Narrative can be a wide term. How did you think of this as a story?

Shoebridge: I don’t know if we were thinking of it in technical terms. I think we just told the story how we thought we could tell it. How it became what it is now was a function of the organic process. Because we wrote it together, and there are many of my experiences as well as Mike’s experiences woven into this single thing, I don’t think it’s a journalistic document. We think that it’s more part memoir for people growing up at that time and feeling things about what memory was to us, what tangible objects meant to us, and how memory gets flaky but interesting and romantic. Sometimes concrete and sometimes evocative.

For us, we kept writing the story around that and tried to keep it as intimate as possible. Because we were creating the visuals as part of it, we had the luxury of not having to hand it over to a cinematographer to realize the story. We were able to say, “This is where a picture would do better than words, and this is where words would do better than pictures.” And then to include sound as well. We were building the narrative room that we felt the story could take place in.

Most people agree there has to be some kind of transformation in a story. And the town is gone, so obviously there’s this really big change in the background. But I thought when you brought in where these people are as adults, it was so interesting, because even though we don’t see them change across the story, there is this sense  of what’s changed.  Did you know right from the beginning that you would include this information about where they are now?

Simons: I think we did. We had this sense of that sort of update that people get from people in their past and their hometown. That’s what we were trying to give, more a snapshot update of “here’s what happened to that person.” This idea of being introduced to them at a certain period of their life and then having a lot of time passing without having any detail or context is what we were trying to achieve.

This is where they are now. And people do fill in what they remember these people as. Everybody has these assumptions and remembers people from high school or their youth, and then all of a sudden they get an update 20 or 30 years later. Sometimes it informs where that person ended up, and sometimes it doesn’t. For people who know them, they still have that reference point of where the person came from.

We wanted to give it a nice clean break and then have a look at them 20 or 30 years later without anything between.

There’s this implicit change over time: a beginning and an endpoint. But there’s a lot of information in the gaps. The gaps feel really important. It sounds like that was intentional.

Shoebridge: I think that’s a lot of what it’s about, in a way. The gaps in the memory and what we choose to fill them in with. In the case of Pine Point, there was point A and point B, but no point C – or a point in between those two. It existed for a while and doesn’t exist anymore. People have filled that space up with their own beliefs about who they were. Nobody can go back and check on that. What was this town like? Was it really this amazing place? For them it was, but there’s no proof of that, other than in memories.

Did you call it a liquid book, or is that a term someone else coined?

Simons: Other people have tried to come up with a term for it. People are excited about it. They thought it might be a new form of storytelling, something they hadn’t seen before. So that was a name other people attached to it.

It was new to us, this kind of interactive documentary, but we didn’t find anything else that we could reference for this, except for, obviously, books and film. But nothing interactive – nothing with the written word, audio and visual. So I think that’s what’s been exciting people the most so far. What is this thing? What we’ve been told is that they’re not used to having this emotional response from a website.

Shoebridge: Because we were book guys, we kept a lot of the old handmade book-like things, in keeping with that medium-is-the-message concept. We tried to emphasize what each medium does well. Keeping the words as writing rather than voiceover narrative was something we wrestled with at the start, but I think we’re happy we kept it as words.

For us, it’s that kind of internal narrator. You can have a different conversation with yourself. And reading is a more active experience than listening. I think we’re happy we did that, but we haven’t seen multimedia projects where writing is the number one thing you’re seeing, and everything else informs that.

Are there any projects that might not have inspired it in form but might have inspired it in spirit?

Simons: We were reluctant to get involved in something like this. There are lots of great interactive websites, and there’s lots of great information online. It’s just that we hadn’t seen a project like this that we could use as a reference. So I think we were just taking our collective experience and trying make something with it.

For us, the interactivity needed to be there, not just technical achievement or being able to click on something and make it wiggle or move around a page. For us the interactivity had to move the story forward as well. We had to apply our own rules and sense of how we thought a story should unfold online. We resisted a lot of the typical interactivity you find that tends to be, for us at least, a lot more flash and form over substance.

You had this idea, this memory of yours that you wanted to do something about. What were the practical arrangements from there? How did it come together with the National Film Board?

Shoebridge: We proposed it to them. It was something that we had an idea about – we were toying with this idea of the death of the photo album. We’ve been interested in what’s happening with print and tangible memory-containing devices, things like books. We were playing around with ideas, and we pitched this to the NFB, and they helped us produce the story over the long haul.

Is this something you’d like to do more of, or do you feel like, “That’s our interactive thing, and that’s it”?

Simons: We’d be interested in trying more. We’re already working on some initial ideas for other projects. I don’t think we’re necessarily moving in this direction; we also tend to jump around from project to project. It was an interesting challenge for us, and there’s maybe a couple more we could do. For a website, there’s no market – in the sense of selling it – so you do need somebody to finance it and sort of believe in it.

Shoebridge: But we do think there is potential for monetization of this as a new form, as a kind of book. You could see books becoming something like this – obviously not all books. And not all publishers would get how to do it. But as a sort of rich-media storytelling, we’ve discovered something, we think, and we’d like to do more of it.

Is there anything about the Pine Point project that people wouldn’t know from watching it that would be useful for them to know?

Shoebridge: The thing for us that we’re happiest with is that we stuck to what linear “narrative” has done for so long: that beginning, middle and end. Because we stuck with that, that’s the thing that worked the best for us. People want to be told stories, they want to be engaged.

When people think of digital interactive media, one of the first things they say is “It’s going to have multiple entry points, and you can go wherever you want to.” And sure, you can deliver certain kinds of information like that, but it’s not super-great for stories, at least in our experience. You can skip ahead, if you want to, you can go four chapters ahead, but you can also do that with a book.

We’re hoping that we’re keeping people engaged and keeping each section as interesting as possible. For us, I think that was the key. We had to break it into chunks, because that’s how it had to go. We wanted people to be engaged, so using media like writing meant that you have to read it to experience it. You could flip through it and kind of experience it, but if you don’t read it, you’re not really getting engaged.

And then breaking it into pieces like a magazine. If you flip to the middle of the magazine, it’s still intriguing, you still want to keep going through it. For us, I think we tried to pull as much old-media logic into a new media form as we could.

Simons: The challenges and limitations were things that we had never considered before, like the loading up of information. Part of the more bite-sized pieces of the story were dictated by how much information we’d be able to technically upload onto someone’s computer so it didn’t crash, while still keeping it seamless and moving. We were presented a lot with technical challenges that we didn’t know about or care about before we got into this world. So some of those things did inform how we had to deliver the story. I don’t think it changed the content, but certainly the experience was altered by limitations of the media.

What kind of reception have you gotten?

Simons: it’s been really good. The thing that was very exciting for us was that we had great reception from writers and publishers and literary folks. Those were the people we sent it to before it was launched, to get feedback on the story and how they responded to it.

Writers were excited by the possibilities of a new form of storytelling. They were excited by being able to participate in this form. We think that before, they felt excluded and not interested, like a lot of other creative people. The gatekeepers for this kind of media were the Flash teams and the people who put it together; they were generating a lot of the content. That excluded a lot of writers, creative people and filmmakers. Where I think now the reception even from filmmakers is that there might be a place for them to tell similar kinds of stories online without having to be the kind of interactive Flashy website that Paul was describing.

That’s what I think has been exciting – and also the emotional response. It’s the best emotional response we’ve had from our work. We’ve had a lot of people say, “I didn’t know a website could make me cry.” We weren’t sure how it would be received in the U.S. It’s a very Canadian story –we thought – but we weren’t sure. We’ve had great feedback from all over the U.S. Some of our strongest feedback has been in France. It surprised us it how well it was received.

Shoebridge: And it’s across the spectrum, too, from people who don’t look at this kind of media at all, to people who build this kind of media, to people who build other kinds of media. So we’re really surprised and pleased with that. People who go through the whole thing seem to quite enjoy it, but the challenge is getting people to do that to begin with.

It’s a commitment, right? It’s 15- to 20-minute commitment on a single thing. People are used to spending time on the Internet but not particularly on a single thing. It’s not like when you pick up a book or movie, where you know what you’re getting into. They all have a defined amount of time, whereas this, you don’t know. Even if people say, “Oh, it’s a 20-minute thing,” nobody’s told you that before about a website. So for us, there’s a bit of a leap there. We’ve never done anything like this. Its newness helps it but also hurts it in a way, because people don’t know how to consume it.

Simons: We’ve talked with publishers in New York and in Toronto about the potential of this kind of storytelling. I think at first they were cautious and suspect of even giving it a shot. But people who have looked at it have been interested and excited, so they want to explore more and open the discussion. That was something we had no idea would come from this.

It’s hard to imagine news organizations spending the kind of resources on game design that commercial developers do, but in efforts such as Nonny de la Peña’s “Gone Gitmo” and Wired’s “Cutthroat Capitalism,” storytellers are already exploring how game experiences can intersect with journalism. And the Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives site includes hundreds of projects that give the audience a hand in events (though some are simply multimedia).

All of which makes Smith and Worch’s presentation to their commercial-designer audience relevant. Their distinctions between what film does and what games do, their thoughts on players’ relationship to the game environment, and their ideas on enriching interactive narrative deserve some pondering.

I decided to call Harvey Smith with some questions. What follows is a summary of the notes from their conference presentation, followed by comments from Smith related to the idea of nonfiction or reality-based games. It’s heady stuff, but worth a look for anyone thinking about how stories work in different media.

Smith and Worch contrast gaming with fictional exposition, arguing that gaming requires the player to take a role in interpreting information, building a story of “what happened here.” While a lot of stellar narrative nonfiction also leaves room for readers or viewers to interpret events, they suggest that gaming takes it to another level entirely.

Surroundings help create and reinforce the identity of the player. Signs of violence and looting may suggest to a player that future violence will happen, or that the player will be called on to perform similar behaviors. Lab-rat-type mazes will probably make the player feel, well … like a lab rat.

At root, Worch and Smith suggest that environmental storytelling involves the player making connections: “What we’re talking about here is subtext, which transforms simple scenes into something with a deeper meaning.” While all stories have subtext, Smith and Worch say that in games, subtext emerges differently. While print and film direct the audience’s gaze and focus its attention, Smith says, “In games, we explore.”

The pair illustrate their point with photos from a book by Robert Polidori. The first image is two goldfish that almost seem to float in the air, but on close examination look to be stuck to a screen door or window. Each subsequent image pulls back on the view and examines other perspectives – a muddied room with furniture topsy-turvy, a damaged house, a devastated neighborhood, and then a wide-angle overhead picture that shows a flooded, pulverized landscape. The series of photographs are taken from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and their accumulation into meaning mimics the kind of narrative experience that games offer, in which player exploration both yields and shapes a narrative. According to Smith and Worch, environmental storytelling “fundamentally integrates player perception and active problem solving, which builds investment.”

So a central question of the narrative is to create a desire in the player to find out “What happened here?” But all players may not answer the question the same way – clues left in game environments can be interpreted differently. Why is interpretation more compelling than exposition? Smith asks then answers the question:

What that really comes down to is the fact that environmental storytelling is active. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget showed that play, discovery and interaction are key to learning. This active approach to learning creates participation, which breeds investment. Students and players alike bring their own experiences, so the act of interpretation gains personal meaning.

“Active” also means that the story isn’t shoved down the player’s throat – quite the opposite, discovery is self-paced. The player is pulling the narrative. This leads to a familiar world, which is self-reinforced, more complete, and more immersive.

The concept behind this is the Law of Closure. As humans we have an innate need to categorize and fit visual elements into a larger framework. To do so, we draw conclusions. Scott McCloud applied this concept to visual storytelling in “Understanding Comics”: “What’s important is what happens between the panels.”

Smith and Worch urge developers who are creating a setting to “think about how the elements connect. A single prop can transform the scene … In good environmental storytelling the elements combine to a larger picture, but have individual significance as well.” To keep the story coherent, they suggest having environmental elements draw from the main premise and echo the larger setting. The premise generates the events of the story, and the events remind players of the premise. “Every anonymous environmental storytelling moment wastes the opportunity to say something about the game.”

Talking with Smith by phone, I asked him about challenges and ideas particular to nonfiction settings. I mentioned a few examples, including “Peacemaker,” a game that allows users to play as Israeli or Palestinian leaders, requiring them to manage an escalating crisis. Smith was not familiar with the game but said that factional setups might be ideal for generating powerful narratives: “That strikes me as a really great way to give them an implicit understanding of why the conflict exists and what the motives are. It’s sort of a stealth way of putting a player in the shoes of another faction that they normally might pass judgment on and not understand at all.”

He repeatedly noted the difference between a “push narrative” and a “pull narrative” – both of which are embedded in a story but unfold very differently.

If you walk into a room and a character pops up and says, “Hi, I’m going to be your ally, and I’m at the edge of this ruined city, and I’ve been trading with these people. If you take this gem over to the edge of the city, I’ll give you some gold,” that’s an embedded narrative.

But you can also embed narrative not in a push way, but in a pull way. If I leave a body in a cave and put some monsters in the cave wandering around, some rocks on the ground near the body, and a  hole in the ceiling with a shaft of light coming down, and the body has prospector gear, things that you might find on a miner, the player might look at that and say, “Oh, this guy was mining, and he fell through the hole and they killed him. I might need that equipment.” That’s still embedded narrative; the designer still places those elements. But instead of the designer pushing it to you through a conversation, you pull it from the environment yourself.  You walk past it, you observe the scene, and you infer what happened. Or you might miss it. That’s the thing.

Discussing the temptation to prioritize newsworthy elements in a nonfiction game and force viewers to encounter them in a certain way, Smith noted that there’s a tradeoff. You may want to herd players through certain experiences, but it often works best if you let them get there themselves. He explains:

That’s the classic insecurity of interactivity: Things might go badly. If you set up some systems where the player can’t fail, and everything is very protected, it’s not a game anymore. It’s boring, in fact. It has to be possible to make bad decisions in order to make the good decisions meaningful. It has to be possible to miss some things to make finding them meaningful. You have to trust your players. Depending on execution, you can be successful at providing those details to the player while making it likely that they’ll find them.

Sid Meier is one of my heroes, and he says, “A game is a series of interesting decisions,” or something to that effect. I would add to that: a game is a series of interesting decisions in an emotionally meaningful context or situation. You can do a lot with a little. You don’t have to simultaneously make the most elegant artful, state-of-the-art game ever and also get your point across. The main reason for trying to adhere to some of this is that the experience is more powerful. The more it feels interactive, that the player authored it based on the outcome, the more powerful and memorable it is.

For more, see the full presentation, which includes images from games such as “Doom” and “Bioshock.” It’s not particularly graphic but might not be ideal for the tenderhearted.

I met de la Peña in London last summer and was particularly curious to hear her thoughts on “Gone Gitmo,” an immersive storytelling installation built as a virtual Guantanamo Bay prison. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, “Gone Gitmo” was constructed inside Second Life and appeared in prototype at the Bay Area Video Coalition. Users who enter the project experience a virtual detention inside the prison camp, with documentary footage embedded to create spatial narrative. De la Peña and I connected again last month via Skype to discuss her work. The following are excerpts from our conversation.

You have explained that the main idea of immersive journalism “is to allow the participant, typically represented as a digital avatar, to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story.” Immersive systems give the participant “access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions, that accompany the news.” How would you explain your main motivation to explore immersive journalism?

Immersive journalism really comes from understanding that there is a growing use of virtual and gaming platforms in which individuals are extremely comfortable with a virtual body. Using that as a starting point, I began to consider what that might mean for nonfiction. In the same way documentary grew in parallel with fiction film, I believe immersive journalism (which can also be considered as immersive documentary or immersive nonfiction) has an appropriate potential using new technologies. My journalistic work has often considered human rights issues, which makes it more likely such issues will be reflected in my immersive journalism work.

However, there are some very interesting questions that arise. For example, does the fact that the stories are accessed through a virtual body mean that they are necessarily subjective experiences? How do we ensure “objectivity?”

Our director of the journalism school at Annenberg, Geneva Overholser, really feels that transparency is the key here. If we can point to our sources, provide excellent research and be open to comment and criticism, immersive journalism can live up to its potential. In a sense, it’s simply about applying traditional journalistic principles to the new technologies.

Your work, as you say, is interrogating the phenomenology of narrative journalism. It seems to me that 3-D animation still presents a barrier to verisimilar storytelling in a way that “live action” or photographic realism does not…

I am not sure that is true. I think that “experience” can have value, especially given stories that are inaccessible. For example, Gitmo is off limits to most citizens and press, so we’ve made it accessible. You can read all you want to about the carbon markets, but when you literally follow the money, does that make the story better understood? And yet, the video released in the Baha Mousa case is extraordinarily disturbing, but when we built our piece in Mel Slater’s lab, that video had not yet been released. I would suggest we did a pretty good job considering that the information came from International Red Cross data and interrogation logs.

Now, what is the role of realism?  If the graphics get better, will the experiences become more comparable to the realism of video now? Mel’s work has shown that the video graphics don’t have to be great to work. Still, the last piece I saw in his lab on understanding violence used extremely good audio and dialogue (as well as very good voice actors). In terms of current technology, one thing I can say: If the audio is bad, forget it.

Yet that exact same premise holds true in documentary filmmaking. If you have bad lighting but good audio, the drama can still be pronounced. Without good audio, even the best sequences can fail.

So orality and sound still play a major role in storytelling…

Yes.

Are you concerned by the possible ethical implications? The proximity with video games, even serious games, the connotations of 3-D animation…

I am always concerned about ethical implications. I think the history of the use of propaganda makes it clear that we have to be ever vigilant.

I’m thinking of the widespread discourse of the first-person shooter for instance, in video games. Will people want to be in the place of the perpetrators? How would a journalist go about that, how to control the script?

I have gotten a lot of pushback on the Gitmo piece that we did not tell the story of the soldiers there. But as studies like the Stanford Prison Experiment make clear, giving people the role of the soldier can create some pretty intense scenarios. We decided it wasn’t appropriate for this project although we would be absolutely happy to have their experiences recounted in some way on the site. I would agree that the first-person shooter has to be considered carefully and ethically, but it would be a knee-jerk reaction to just shut down this avenue of storytelling based on that issue. For example, check out what happened with the Columbine game at Slamdance.

Would you say that in these exercises of immersive journalism or storytelling, the user, though he or she experiences situations physically, retains a level of passivity?

Very good question. The fact the user can move through the story raises a lot of issues. I have an earlier paper, when I was just starting to sort out the ideas about immersive journalism, which discusses such passive moments as the “embodied edit.” In “Gitmo,” that would be when we move the user along the “story” by teleporting them from place to place within the build. However, there are many moments when the user makes the decision where to go; still, they are within the context of the “news report” that is clearly consistent with reading about a story or watching it on TV.

A key aspect of your immersive journalism project is the blurring of boundaries between different fields, and one of the main elements in immersive experiences may be what you called the embodied edit. And Stroome allows users to remix, which is a form of editing…

Yes, considering how stories can be told differently in this new wave of technology. I consider immersive journalism still under development, but Stroome is about trying to give users a way to start telling stories today, collaboratively, journalistically and from different perspectives. For example, rather than write a letter to an editor or call up a TV station to dispute veracity, the audience member could just remix the story, telling it the way they see it.

Do you think that’s where journalism is headed, to giving users/readers the tools to re-tell the stories?

Once again, I quote Geneva (although I understand she borrowed it as well): The group formerly known as the audience, they are participants. Whether as sophisticated producers of content, or if they commit an “act of journalism” by capturing key footage on cell phones, Stroome supports both approaches.

How receptive do you think the major players in journalism are to this new form of storytelling, one open to empowering “the group formerly known as the audience”?

I think they are finding it very difficult. Even J-schools. I heard one major dean complain: “We are training professional journalists, not citizen journalists!” So they still aren’t recognizing how much this has all blurred. However, as Julian Assange explains in the “Wiki Rebels” documentary, at first he turned all of the data loose hoping that it would get vetted by the public, but ended up having to turn to journalists to analyze and distill and present to the public. However, what we are offering at Stroome offers really nice pillars of ways to collaborate and support. It is designed to consider how content is discoverable and not overwhelming.

And it is curated by a community and enabled by a specific platform…

Yes.

So, what you are suggesting is an important redefinition of the role of the nonfiction storyteller and therefore of the press…

Yes. In some ways both ends of the spectrum achieving the same goal. In one, similar editorial control present with news orgs now comes with having to design and build a 3-D immersive space. In the other, Stroome opens the landscape to all. Yet both focus on user participation with journalism that is unique to our technological present.

Where do you see written journalism going in this landscape?

We will always need good analysis.

Perhaps as ancillary material for the immersive or audiovisual experiences?

Yes, I agree. And sometimes the immersive component will be ancillary to the text.

—–

[Ernesto Priego is researching comics and narrative as a Ph.D. candidate in information studies in the U.K. at University College London. He has written previously for Nieman Storyboard on the death of Harvey Pekar, manga memoir and on comics as narrative journalism.]

Twitter has been a home for crowdsourced fiction, sometimes with involvement from storytelling superstars. Neil Gaiman launched a Twitter story more than a year ago in partnership with BBC Audiobooks America. Even before that, comic bloggers and artists over at Monkey on My Back solicited text for comics via Twitter, and then created the visuals to complete the story. More recently, the Toronto International Film Festival has joined with Tim Burton to launch a Tworror story that is currently being crowdsourced to completion.*

We’ve previously noted conceptual artist and Storyboard contributor Peggy Nelson’s development of a “Twitter movie.” And a few users, such as @VeryShortStory, have created truly minimalist stories in 140 characters or less on Twitter:

On the nonfiction side, news organizations are learning how to use Twitter not only as a newsgathering tool to troll for sources or to find specialized information but also to curate tweets for a kind of snapshot of a moment in time. (See The Washington Post’s coverage of victory and concession speeches after the November elections.) These collected tweets tend to reflect a series of opinions or to recreate the experience of a community without necessarily telling a story in which there is movement from A to B.

But in October, TBD used Storify to show how curated tweets can engage the devices of fiction – suspense, forward motion and characters – in a story that unfolds close on the heels of real events. Images paired with tweets reconstructed the first hours of confusion after a death outside a nightclub in D.C. This TBD piece may be a game-changer in showing the narrative potential of social media.

So what are the differences between the fictional and the nonfiction storytelling on Twitter? The self-consciousness of doing crowdsourced fiction in a fixed time period tends toward action narratives – or maybe that’s ACTION! NARATIVES! – without much breathing space or opportunity for future readers to enter the story by making connections themselves. As contributors compete for the attention of project curators, their tweets tend to drive stories toward ever more improbable and outrageous outcomes.

The encapsulated nature of shared Tweets does lend itself to projects audiences are used to reading in book form with minimal text-per-page ratios, like children’s stories and adventure comics. But it will likely take a while to suss out how to apply Twitter to stories that need a slow-building, longer arc.

Crowdsourcing tweets that already exist seems to have more immediate potential for nonfiction storytelling. Curating tweets in the wake of news events fosters creation of a story with less self-consciousness in the voices that emerge. And the real-time nature of Twitter preserves reactions from newsmakers and audiences to events, sometimes before they’ve been swamped by a common interpretation or spun out of self-interest. Twitter’s conversational language provides some of the material for the natural trivia that can make fiction work (humorous asides, what’s for breakfast, what’s on TV), fleshing out the action and surprises necessary to any story.

If Twitter continues to build its user base, journalists will have an expanding pool of  millions of voices and characters on hand with individual stories authors can weave into a larger nonfiction narrative. We’re not there yet, but as more and more people get used to watching news unfold via feeds, it’s easier and easier to imagine.

And as for that Tim Burton project, it ends today. If you don’t read this post in time to contribute yourself, you can at least find out how the story ends.

—

*Hat tip to Megan Garber at Nieman Lab for pointing out the Burton project to us.

Here are a few of the 2010 award winners we’ve covered previously on Storyboard (and below, some stories that are new to us):

“Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining,” from Yale Environmental 360, won for small-site Online Video Journalism. See our June Q&A with filmmaker Chad A. Stevens.

“Law & Disorder,” from ProPublica, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Frontline, won a Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism. Read our February post about a Frontline-sponsored symposium on the future of digital storytelling, including “Law & Disorder.”

“My Story, My Goal,” from the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami, won the Online Video Journalism student award (in July, we noted the “Where Every Pregnancy Is a Gamble” story from this project).

“Bottoming Out,” from The Las Vegas Sun and the Greenspun Media Group won an award for Online Video Journalism. Here’s our March look at the video for the project, with comments from Scott Den Herder, who combined citizen footage with his own to create a narrative.

And other winners of interest to storytellers:

“King of the Sarasota Flip,” a semi-narrative part of the package “Flipping Fraud,” from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, won the Knight Award for Public Service.

“William and the Windmill,” from The Toronto Star also won an award for its Online Video Journalism. Creativity, ridicule and perseverance come together into a compelling and energetic short format.

“We Choose the Moon,” an interactive 40th anniversary project from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, Domani Studios, The Martin Agency, AOL, AOL News and AOLSHOUTcast, reconstructed the 1969 lunar landing using archival audio and images that narrate from launch to touchdown on the moon. The project won an award for Multimedia Feature Presentation.

[For more from ONA 2010, take a look at some tools for digital storytelling, or see the full list of sites and organizations that won awards.]

Over the weekend, TBD made a good bid for answering that question “yes” when it comes to Storify, a platform featured in September by Megan Garber over at Nieman Lab. As Garber notes, Storify was founded by former AP reporter (and Hacks/Hackers founder) Burt Herman, along with developer Xavier Damman.

Storify allows users to drag and drop items from various social media sites, then add material, images or links to the mix. On Friday, TBD Social Media Producer Mandy Jenkins used it to narrate conflicting accounts of events outside a DC nightclub that had resulted in a death early that morning. I saw Jay Rosen’s Tweet about the piece over the weekend and called Jenkins this morning to talk about her approach. Here’s what she had to say about choosing Storify:

I like playing with new toys on the Internet, but we hadn’t found the right story where we thought Storify would really work. After working on the DC9 story all day – I run our Twitter accounts, but our whole staff was contributing to that all day long — we saw how it had changed and how we really needed to make sense of that, not just for our readers, but for us. Getting everything out there in timeline order, between all the other media outlets, what we were doing and what our readers were doing and how the story had changed throughout the day – I’d originally just billed it as an experiment, but then we realized it looked pretty nice, and we thought we’d publish it.

…

We were getting so much feedback all day long: “All we’re getting are these tweets from all these different sources that are not really making a lot of sense.” The story kept changing, and I really wanted to reflect that element of it, because the local Twittersphere was in a state of panic/confusion all day.

As the Tweets and images in the TBD story unfold chronologically, it’s easy to follow all the twists and turns of events—the surprises that change the story. The scattershot perspectives lead to a lot of context and multiple views being presented, in a kind of Rashomon style but with a  a real sense of forward motion as new information clears up mistaken impressions or reporting. The story becomes more and more complex, but in distinct steps, with links on many of the tweets for readers to get more details. It really is worth a visit to check out the full DC9 piece—the story captures the confusion nicely while letting revelations unfold across time.

I mentioned to Jenkins how dramatic those plot twists felt, and she noted that she intentionally tried to capture the feeling of chasing the story that day:

A lot of people were out of work for the day, but they were following this. That’s what they were seeing, too. They weren’t necessarily able to go and read every update we had on the site. I know from our perspective and what some of the other media outlets were doing was trying to get the latest info we had out there: “Okay, this is the latest twist, and if you want to see how it’s all developing, you can read the full story. But this is the latest information.” And a lot of people were just piecing things together that way. It made for a lot of confusion if you were only following one piece or another. So that was the whole idea: to show what that experience was really like, because it was nuts.

While it can clearly be useful to create a short-term tick-tock, as TBD has done, I can imagine how Storify might be also be expanded to recreate a longer series of events. Storify might also be helpful for stories that take the long view, traditional narratives done after the fact when more of the story is known. As for whether or not she thinks it’s a new approach to storytelling, Jenkins says,

I think it really can be a new way of doing this. This was something we could never really do in a basic textual narrative that we usually would write, just because we could have a quote here and a quote there, but we’d still have work in everything else to make it make sense, whereas it’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have to include all these outside elements. But when you’re bringing in all these other voices, this is a really great way to incorporate that and have it not be confusing, and to have it look really nice. And it’s giving everyone exact credit. You’re not mixing up quotes. Readers aren’t saying, “Well, who’s that guy again?” This is their tweet, this is their picture, this is their comment. This is the news as it happened.I hope we can use it again more in the future. I really think it’s got a lot of potential.

…

I think that it was hard to pick, at least out of this particular storyline, the best thing, because I really wanted to put everything in there. Much like writing a story the old-fashioned way, if you want to call it that – this quote was great, or this little detail, but in order to make the bigger picture make sense, you have to prune stuff away. That’s what’s kind of funny. It takes the same exact reporting and curating and story-crafting experience; it’s just a totally different way of doing it. You’re not writing it all yourself, you’re just piecing together a giant puzzle.

For some very different examples of Storify in action, check out NYU Studio 20’s East Village restaurant project, Tim Carmody’s quest for special Twitter followers, and The Washington Post’s Twitter roundup on the resignation of DC Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

The idea is not that some monkeys, or maybe even the entire infinity of them, would get together in an infinitely large conference room and compose the works together in an infinitely long meeting. Nor is it that one monkey, at one point, would manage to type “to be,” while another monkey, infinitely far away, would eke out “not to be,” and the whole corpus would somehow get cobbled together by an editor monkey, whom we must introduce for the purposes of this example as, “William Shakespeare.” No – the idea is that within these nested infinities there would occur a span of time during which the whole thing would be typed out, with a very little wiggle room; “Romeo and Juliet” might appear before “Titus Andronicus” this time, but if the “Quality of Mercy” speech were assigned to The Dane by mistake, the monkeys would have to start over.

This is the situation we’re in now, in terms of global thought-experiments. We’re the monkeys, many with access to more than one keyboard, on which we spend, if not an infinite amount of time, then far too much (as the current complaint goes). And our numbers, while not infinite either, are certainly greater than one single genius. And if none of us can be said to be the definitive next William Shakespeare, certainly the coherent production of even the most casual blogger far outstrips our cousins Bill, Willy, Skip, and the Shakester over there on the other branch of the family tree.

The hive mind—really?

Although within the heart of many a blogger beats a hope: the hope that one can be, if not Shakespeare 2.0, then maybe something better, something more. Maybe we can’t all go it alone? Maybe we should consider getting a conference room to host one of those infinitely long meetings?

And of course that’s exactly what we’ve done with the Internet.

Or so we say; sometimes in awe, sometimes in fear. We don’t usually phrase it in those terms; we tend to use a different biological metaphor, that of bees, and the hive. We’re all part of the hive mind now, the buzz of individual thoughts and signals the world over finally collected in one place, in cyberspace; the activity and speed of information and noise forming new patterns against old; the dances of innovation performed atop the accumulated hexagons of knowledge; the bees conducting their bee-activities in such a way that patterns are seeming to form at the hive-level. It is – almost – as if the hive itself has started to think. Some say it has. Some say not yet, but soon; or at least, inevitably.

The hive mind, we are sure, won’t need an infinite amount of time to rewrite Shakespeare. It will post “Hamlet” as a casual comment to a news feed, it will collate “Richard III” out of Twitter; the sonnets will be a moment’s distracted multitasking while it composes works the magnitude and significance of which we can hardly guess at: “To infinity, and beyond!” And we’ll all be a part of it. Because we already are.

That’s one story, anyway. But we live in an era of multiple narratives; one is not enough. Let’s listen to the buzz about some of the others.

The idea of the hive is both terrifying and compelling – terrifying in that we don’t want to lose our individuality, yet compelling in that we often yearn to be a part of something larger than ourselves. These contradictory desires are both old and deep in us. Different eras may have striven for one over the other, or have had different levels of awareness about the pushes and pulls, but the struggle predates the biological metaphors we use to explain it, and it certainly predates any informational metaphors we’ve come up with since.

The new frontier: private publishing and public conversation

I don’t think the hive is minded. I’ve sat in enough meetings to know that fruitful collaboration is the exception, not the rule. But – something is happening; something is different about our era, and that something hinges directly on our technologies of storytelling.

Much digital and real ink has been spilled about the implosion of traditional publishing and the explosion of online publishing. Our options to get the word out are more numerous than ever. No longer must we storm an imposing, mystifying bastion with linguistic slings and arrows; now we have but to open a browser to post our views to the world. Long or short, as graphic novel or in serial commentary, through avatars or on a family Facebook page, we can publish almost anything to the digital world, where it may slouch off in search of its eventual audience. Or, more likely, where it may wait patiently in the corner, an unfading figure of 1’s and 0’s, seldom found, rarely missed.

What we’re seeing is actually a little bee-like. It’s a collapse of the boundaries between public and private storytelling, not only in publishing formats, but in the nature of the discourse in both spheres. Conversations, largely the realm of private life, have tended to be exploratory, sometimes trivial, often open-ended: an ad hoc space comprised of any number of participants, and often no audience. Whereas publications, inhabiting the public sphere, have tended to be consistent, thematic, and longer, meant for distribution at a distance or through time, resistant to dialogue (you can write your glosses in the margins, but the primary text doesn’t usually write back) – and packaged to sell.  “Tend to be:” of course some conversations form neat rhetorical packages, and some literature is as open-ended as it can manage – but overall these two sets contain enough members for the general comparison to hold.

But with the rise of Web 2.0 technologies like blogging, IM, Facebook, and Twitter, we have experienced not so much an explosion of traditionally-formatted “publications” from everyone (although we have experienced some of that) so much as the public promulgation of conversations – exploratory, sometimes trivial, often open-ended – with the caveat that those conversations now have stronger imperative and broadcast components than the term has previously implied.

In other words, the attributes of publishing, its public and exhortative nature, have become distributed and more accessible to individuals; while the private pursuits of flexible, wide-ranging and exploratory dialogues (amongst any number of real or potential participants) have become correspondingly unbounded and public. This publicly private behavior would not, perhaps, be out of place in a hive, should bees speak as they dance.

The spider plant as a story model

But as the previously private becomes public, it dresses up for the camera. Because they are recorded in some way, Web 2.0 conversations are accessible across distance and time. And this relative permanence brings other public pressures to bear – the pressure to not only say what you mean, but say it well: to perform, as well as to speak. The well-crafted repartee of the 18th century has become the well-typed tweet of the 21st. Our socially-networked storytelling resembles not so much earnest pamphleteering as interlocking, animated, virtual salons. With the added benefit that unlike the salons of old, our virtual salons are open to everyone, not just the elite, and they are everywhere, not just corralled together in the fashionable end of town.

Maybe you think you don’t have time for a salon – you have your family, your job, the kids have sports, etc.  But actually, you are already in one, and probably several. Whether in the grocery line or on the sidelines, you are making time for our virtual salons every time you log on to Facebook or Twitter, or check your favorite blogs, online news sites or RSS feeds. You’re making time every time you comment, you’re making time every time you post. You are making time every time you read or skim or even just “check in.”

Stories in these new spaces don’t necessarily look conversational, while conversations in these new spaces don’t necessarily look like dialogue. For example, a Twitter list may be used to compile first-person reports from trouble spots. As happened in Iran last year, in Mexico Twitter is functioning as both a reporting strategy and a collection of first-person accounts, gathered and published in a way that neither limits the reporters’ access, nor endangers them or their sources.

An idea might be taken up and elaborated, a point might be argued, an assumption might be identified and supported (or undermined and mocked). The “Hitler meme” videos repurpose a clip from the German film “Downfall” as light (or heavy) social commentary, by altering the subtitles on the scene where Hitler realizes he has lost the war, to reflect current complaints, such as getting blocked from XBox, or pizza delivery. Many of these videos, despite the public approval of the director of “Downfall,” have been recently blocked by Constantin Films. The blocking in its turn has been challenged under terms of Fair Use. As of this post, “Hitler Plans Burning Man” is still viewable on YouTube.

Andy Rehfeldt’s music videos, by comparison, function as both gentle mocking and digital stage, repurposing existing material by combining it with original work into a piece that’s both art and critique, musical performance and media commentary. Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” inhabited a similarly doubled space, but in that instance the originality was in the editing.

With each of these changes the story transforms into many stories, each capable of spawning their own many, like a spider plant; each one a potential many in its turn.

As well there are some activities that were designated as “housekeeping” in the old model, that move forward to become an essential part of storytelling in the new. Things like cultivating relationships, posting to these conversational spaces as well as to deadline, growing and feeding your networks, are no longer just the realm of the marketing department, but an essential part of the stories we tell.

One recent example is Tim Maly’s “50 Posts About Cyborgs” anthology, timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the term “cyborg.” For this collection Maly asked disparate bloggers to cross-post to his blog during the month of September 2010, on any interpretation of the theme that they wished. In addition to collating a substantial body of interrelated work, the project also brought far-flung writers into closer contact, providing a possible stage for future community and collaboration.

Another way of integrating reader engagement into the creative and editorial process is used by Longshot Magazine (profiled recently on the Storyboard) an occasional publication that solicits submissions from its potential readership via Twitter and the web.

The shift to more conversational models is not without its perils. When everything is a potential topic it’s easy to drift; when everyone is a potential author it’s difficult to know who to read. Perhaps the most glaring issue, though, is the money. Or lack thereof. Most of these examples depend on providing content for free. How do you package a conversation? How do you charge for it? Attempts made to monetize the conversational platforms instead – selling ads on Facebook and Twitter; charging for previously-free online news sites – have met with varying degrees of success, mostly not very much. It is here that the private and interactive nature of conversations reasserts itself — we may accept being “sold” on TV, magazines, or even parts of the internet where we are more used to passive consumption, but we don’t want to be sold in conversation. It is increasingly urgent that we find a solution that values authors. However, potential solutions, almost certain to be different from what we’ve been used to, may yet be revealed by further analysis of and experience with the current storytelling landscape.

Illustration from "Cocky the Fox"

One approach is demonstrated by James Parker’s serialized novel “Cocky the Fox” on HiLobrow.com, which tweaks a 19th century literary format to show us the money, or at least some of it. The cost was crowdsourced to its potential audience using Kickstarter, thus both funding the project and pre-testing the commitment of the readership. Sixty-five backers contributed over $4,000 to make the project happen, before a single chapter had been published. These virtual “shareholders” may have a more acute interest in following the narrative, their investment, to its conclusion.

Money questions aside, the current storytelling space itself may look like a mad scramble overall, but it is possible to start to trace themes and variations through posts and social networks, and identify new insights as they emerge and mature. Themes and variations, that is, with the caveat that none of these is the ultimate theme or the “real” story: all are variations, and all are real; each one more like skips of a stone, with every touch of the surface sending out its own ripples and promulgating its own stones and leaps. Each one can be both primary text and a gloss on something else, switching roles in the navigation as another point is hit.

The round robin of author to audience

Like the spheres of public and private, and the categories of primary and gloss, the roles of author and audience also blur and shift. Authors and readers aren’t types of people, they are behaviors, which we all manifest at some point or another, sometimes together. And these behaviors become performative, as conversations involve a wider social sphere – a text in social networking is in part a performance, with authors and text sharing the stage. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century writer, wit, and author of the famous Dictionary, has been reincarnated as a Twitter feed, in which he reacts to current events in the written style of his day. Slightly more recently, Al Capone’s trial was reenacted in Miami on its 100-year anniversary as a combination of performance piece, live documentary, and historical interpretation. And readers easily gain the spotlight in their turn. There’s nothing about uploading a video mashup, or planning a reenactment with your local community theater, or starting a virtual magazine with content submitted from your thousands of friends on Twitter, that bars anyone from assuming the mantle of authorship.

Though we’re buzzing about interactivity, both as a measure of popularity and as a potential indicator of the hive mind, it is not the answer to everything. The new openness of the system does not mean that every aspect of storytelling has opened up to the crowd, nor that it should. Just because we can all be authors of something, does not mean that we should all be authors of everything. By which I mean, we take turns. We tend to do this, but it is also very beneficial to storytelling that we do. I write something, you read it; you write something, I read it. She performs something, we applaud. We form a band, they listen. There is an essential role performed by listening, by receiving, by appreciating and critiquing; we should not be in a hurry to discard the receptive half of the equation. If we’re all yelling all the time then no one is listening, no fact or artistry is conveyed; it is bedlam, or perhaps its opposite, as all the noise cancels out the possibility of communication. A message not received is no message at all. We need to maintain our flexibility in this dance, to lead sometimes, and then to follow. We can all be each for each other without opening up the authorship of every piece, to everyone; without condemning every flower to be swarmed by every bee.

But if that’s the case, aren’t there some people who just have more to offer, while others seem to mostly enjoy listening? The old publishing model at least gives lip service to this idea – despite the many, many, many books printed every year, the idea is that the creative genuises will explain it all to us, and we’ll kick back and read about it. Or watch it on TV. (And actually it’s not so important that we read or watch as that we buy the package containing the ideas.) But this model does us all a disservice. Many people have something significant or insightful or quirky or interesting to say, and there is plenty of space that needs to be filled by their saying it.

Let’s head back to the TV. Here in the land of cable we have hundreds of channels – we need all those individual stories. If we only designate a few as worth broadcasting, then most of the time, “nothing” will be on. The internet, of course, is even more vast. In the early days of TV, they used to point the camera at the studio clock once they ran out of news and comedy. And they did run out. Do we want to be staring at that clock for an eternity, hoping not to blink and miss the minute a genius pops in to deliver a soundbite? Do we want to sit in endless committee, arguing over whether “to be or not to be” is actually a question? Or would we rather get busy with some typewriters, and inform and entertain each other with our stories in turn?