What does it mean to do literary journalism in the age of interactive multimedia? This question has sparked my imagination ever since the late 1980s, when I wrote about the scientists and engineers at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories who created much of the technology that allows journalists to zip story packages — combining images, text, data and video — around the world on beams of air and light.
In recent years, progress in video game technology and narrative theory suggests the possibility of tools that allow journalists to create immersive, multi-threaded non-fiction narratives. With such tools, a latter-day John Hersey could allow readers to wend their own ways through the stories of the protagonists of a complex tale such as Hiroshima amid a dynamic tableau of sites, sounds and contextual data about the city and the atomic bomb that felled it. I’m not talking about clicking through a Web site — I’m talking about fully realized stories, with character development and a clear, evocative narrative.
Toward that end, I am collaborating with a computer scientist, Dr. Ursula Wolz, to create just such a set of tools. Our goal, over the next three years, is to create a Web-based content management system with a back-end interface that allows storytellers to populate a database with clusters of content, along with a script that organizes the content elements into multiple story lines. Artificial intelligence agents, applying knowledge of narrative structure, will help ensure narrative coherence as readers traverse the story lines.
The user interface for our proposed system will present the reader with several entry points into the story, each corresponding to one of the narrative threads. The reader will be able to choose to follow a single storyline, transition to other storylines, or click around without paying attention to our structure at all. We also expect to allow readers to link to, comment or share portions of the presentation.
We have no desire to supplant existing forms of literary journalism. Rather, we hope that this system will offer literary journalists and documentary makers new ways of engaging audiences with complex, topical narratives. The crucial tests of the value of our idea will be whether it’s technically elegant, whether it supports storytellers in realizing their visions, and whether readers find the resulting stories interesting and informative.
Achieving our goals poses exciting journalistic and technical challenges. We are meeting these challenges by working with a prototype feature story that is rich in available media and narrative possibilities. It’s a profile of Nancybelle Valentine, a retired fashion industry executive whose life story raises issues related to race, gender and economic history. Elder Nancybelle, as she is known to the members of the church to which she currently devotes much of her time, is also a woman with a rich family history, a strong personality and distinct take on a range of topical issues.
In order to structure the database and create the programming logic between the content elements, I am categorizing the content I’m using and defining relationships between content elements. I’m doing this by creating hyperlinked spreadsheets that catalog the content by their place in the various narratives. This requires me to define the “master plot” governing each narrative thread.
Furthermore, I’m drafting a script for each thread that provides an introduction and smooth transitions between the elements in each storyline. It’s a fascinating exercise that requires me to report the story, think through the structure of four storylines and abstract that structure into a meta-narrative that works for all of the storylines.
Finally, the structure that I abstract must have journalistic integrity and make sense for other writers doing other kinds of stories. When the project is finished, writers should be able to simply enter their items into the database and write the script. As more writers use the tool, we’ll refine it.
This process requires me to think carefully about the aesthetics and ethics of my narrative choices. As a print-based journalist, I’ve also had the challenge of thinking about the best way to tell these stories through multiple media. I’m working through the process online in a blog, The Nancybelle Project. And here are my spreadsheets, in progress (Windows only). As this project takes shape, we’d love to hear feedback and ideas from the Poynter Online community.
NOTE: Guest contributor Associate Professor Kim Pearson teaches journalism at The College of New Jersey. E-Media Tidbits editor Amy Gahran invited her to tell the Poynter Online community about this research project.
