We have developed three storytelling tools to create and publish multimedia, multilingual and accessible digital cultural heritage projects. A way to involve communities in the co-creation of narratives.
SO-CLOSE project’s main focus was on forced migrations in the past and present, as well as the contexts, agents and victims of the processes that lead to forced migrations. It is the result of collaboration of NGOs, cultural institutions, scholars, IT specialists and representatives of local communities from Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden. Through our work on this project, we aimed to contribute to social cohesion and the fight against refugee marginalization or exclusion by allowing people to find similar life stories, using innovative digital and artistic tools as as an intermediary.
As technological partners, we were in charge of designing and developing the storytelling tools based on state-of-the-art research and participatory methodologies.
The interactive story map, the immersive web doc and the participatory virtual exhibition are designed to leverage the technological restraints of creating and sharing digital narratives, allowing non-expert users to deploy projects and populate them with custom-made content. In other words, storytelling tools aim at providing space for diverse narratives to emerge and spread in the digital sphere.
Overall, users can create projects based on journeys, chapters or exhibitions, use modules that can be selected, shuffled and repeated, populate them with their own content – including 360 videos, images and 3D models – and carry out crowdsourcing calls (authoring and content management system). The projects are published online, with integrated features for accessibility, interactivity and data interoperability with other repositories (publishing interfaces).
Results obtained:
- Research on state-of-the-art of digital narrative co-creation
- Development of the storytelling toolbox: interactive story maps, immersive web docs and participatory virtual exhibitions
- Design of an authoring system that allows non-expert users to create and publish content in different ways
- Development of by-default accessibility and interoperability features
- Integration of a variety of media players for videos, 3D models and 360° content
- Support of cultural institutions in developing methodologies for digital co-creation in the field, collecting media, digitizing them and archiving them. Also recording the first remote interviews in times of the Covid-19 quarantine
- Training of cultural institutions for an autonomous use of the toolbox
Projects produced with the digital narrative tools:
- Web doc – It could be you! [ca, es, en], © 2021 Museu Memorial de l’Exili, Catalunya
https://so-closetools.eu/webdoc/museuexili/en/home/
Educational tool to connect the experiences of people exiled in the past with those of people exiled today. - Virtual exhibition – Displaced voices [en, gr], © 2021 Archives of Contemporary Social History, Athens
https://so-closetools.eu/virtualexhibition/displaced-voices/
Greek women, political exiles, in the 1940s and the 1950s, Greek refugees at refugee camps in the Middle East during WWII, and Syrian and Afghan refugees in camps for refugees in the Greek islands after 201. - Story map – Many roads, many stories [en, it], © 2021 Monte Sole Peace School, Marzabotto
https://so-closetools.eu/storymap/scuoladipacemontesole/
A dialogue between the memories of local communities and the current experiences of exiles, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.