Andrew White
Director, Libraries and Web Services
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Mei Si
Associate Professor, Cognitive Science Department, Cognitive and Immersive Systems Lab
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Narrative and dialogue are good ways of engaging people and helping people understand and memorize information. Yet evolution, innovation, and history are typically documented in a chronological manner, with their associated processes set sequentially through a series of highlighted events filtered from a myriad of interactions that ultimately lead to the culminating event. Institutional archives consisting of photographs, drawings, manuscripts, and physical artifacts are often sorted and cataloged using similar chronological methodologies. In this project, we demonstrate a digital platform for people to create and share multimodal interactive stories. In particular, this demonstration will show how restructuring the metadata and presentation layer for digital library archives can enhance the research and narrative connections latent within archival collections. The demonstration will also illustrate the power and flexibility of agent-driven multimodal storytelling.