This interdisciplinary course addresses how principles of textual, visual, oral, and place-based storytelling challenge and enhance the conceptualisation, construction, and experience of digitally- created worlds connecting to real-world places, locations, and landscapes. Applying principles of storytelling to digital worlds across multiple situations, platforms, and environments (built and natural) will help define and innovate the shape of these worlds. Focused on the underlying belief that technology and narrative create a feedback loop, with one mediating  the other, this unit will be based on iterations of ideation, conceptualisation, and prototyping to integrate critical insights that will push on the boundaries of established beliefs and the regulated time-space we live by, in the connectedness of datafied space and localised place.

Unit I: Telling Stories: From the Analogue to the Digital

This unit was developed by Susan Schreibman and Marianne Ping Huang with the assistance of Esther Kamara and Stephanie Ochiel.

This unit introduces digital storytelling, beginning from its analogue roots, and quickly moving into digital modalities for storytelling and meaning-making. Concepts such as Aristotle's theory of narrative from Poetics, McLuhan's 'The Medium is the Message', and Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizomatic Narrative, It does this through case studies of maps as narrative and performance as narrative.


Unit II: Snowfall and Other Multimodal Narratives 

This unit was developed by Susan Schreibman with the assistance of Stephanie Ochiel.

This unit explores new forms of digital narrative in general, and longform journalism in particular, through the case study of an article entitled Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek published in The New York Times in December 2012. This unit focuses on a variety of narrative types and concepts, including multimodality, remediation, interaction, and how these features have changed and developed with advances in internet and mobile technologies. Snowfall provides the occasion to explore multimodality through such features as parallax scrolling and the idea of creating a cognitive container to keep the reader present in the story and the reading space.


Unit III: Museums and Digital Storytelling

This unit was developed by Emilie Sitzia with the assistance of Yannis Prosalentis and Stephanie Ochiel.

What is different with storytelling in museums? What opportunities does digital storytelling afford for museums? This is what we will explore in the unit Museums and storytelling. We start by exploring changing notions of museum narrative, audiences, and storytelling. We will ask ourselves ‘what is a museum for?’ and we will identify storytelling as one of the museum’s core functions. How have museums shifted terms of authority over time? How has the notion of museum audience evolved through the centuries? How has the shift in audiences lead to a shift in museum narrative? The second part of the unit is about spaces of engagement. We will ask ourselves  ‘Where is the storytelling?’ in a traditional exhibition space?  We will investigate various spaces of engagement and the place of digital storytelling in this context. The final part focuses on analysing how storytelling works in museum space (real and digital). Various analysis tools are presented to analyse storytelling in museums. Two hands-on exercises will help you apply these tools in different contexts. In the final assignment of this unit, you will put all your newly acquired knowledge and skills to create a storyboard or wireframing of a digital/audio narrative for an existing (online) exhibition.


Unit IV: Phygital Heritage: Design, Interaction, and Evaluation

This unit was developed by Eslam Nofal.

This unit presents how heritage information can be communicated to visitors in more engaging, educational and meaningful ways. The approach of “Phygital Heritage” is introduced, which entails how heritage information can be disclosed via simultaneous and integrated physical and digital means. The unit consists of three lessons; the first lesson introduces the approach of phygital with a detailed argumentation about why this approach is promising in the field of heritage communication, ended with a proposed model of phygital heritage. The second lesson presents four scenarios (i.e. in-the-wild studies), in which interactive phygital prototypes were designed and deployed in real-world heritage and museum environments to explore how the seamless integration of digital technology into physical reality facilitates the communication of built heritage. The third lesson focuses on the evaluation of phygital heritage, deploying a mixed-methods evaluation methodology in order to assess the communication of heritage information and user engagement, concluded by an evaluation framework of phygital heritage.


Unit V: Audio Narratives

This unit was developed by Joeri Bruyninckx with the assistance of Stephanie Ochiel and Esther Kamara.

How can we use sound to tell stories for digital media? Audio nowadays is carried in a large variety of narrative formats, from radio dramas and podcasts, to audio guides, sound installations, sound walks and game soundtracks. This unit aims to acquaint you with the conceptual and practical tools to analyze and listen critically to these narratives, by attending specifically to the various affordances of location-based audio. In several hands-on exercises, you will help apply these tools to concrete examples. In the first of three lessons, we explore the notion of ‘audio narrative’, to consider how audio reinforces but also challenges some of the narrative strategies you have become acquainted with so far. The second lesson situates locative audio as part of a genre of locative media, and considers how sound is used to blend physical and digital spaces, integrating environment, location, mobility and the listeners’ own agency. In the final lesson, we explore the scholarly tradition of sound studies for a lineage of concepts that can aid us to critically examine how place-based audio narratives may reframe our awareness and understanding of our sonic environments