Content in Motion | Curating Europe’s Audiovisual Heritage Conference, December 3-4 2015; www.euscreenxl2015.eu The presentation focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transmedia storytelling in media history. The massive digitization of historical sources and their online availability have a deep impact on the practice of doing history in the digital age and require new forms of historical research and storytelling. Drawing from studies in digital storytelling and multimedia narratives, this lecture aims at exploring new forms of non-linear historical storytelling online. In addition, it will address tensions between disciplinary traditions and a lack of scholarly recognition of new genres and formats of online scholarship.

1. Andreas Fickers / Université du Luxembourg
Transmedia Storytelling
&
Media History
Challenges and Opportunities

2. Structure of presentation
• What is historical storytelling?
• State of art of storytelling in media history
• Challenges and opportrunities of transmedia
storytelling and mono platform storytelling in
media history

3. Historical Storytelling
• Myth of „objective“ storytelling in history has been
destroyed long ago...
– Ranke‘s concept of historicism „to show how it really was“
= aim to „understand“ the „essence“ of past times
– Auguste Flaubert on the profession of a writer: „Il faut
boire des océans et les repisser“ (À Louise Colet, 8 mai 1852, Correspondance,
éd. Jean Bruneau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1972-1998, t. II, p. 86)
– John Pemble: „Writing history is like drinking an ocean and
pissing a cupful“ (Quoted in Venice Rediscovered (1995) pp. 82-3.)

4. Historical Storytelling
• Doing history = act of creative storytelling about
the past, of subjective interpretation, yet based
on the methdology of source criticism, problem
based questioning, evidence-based
argumentation, and double reflexivity
• Historian is actively involved in the sense-making
process: historical thinking as mental re-
enactment of the past

5. • „Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in
the past, and at the same time it is the re-doing of this, the
perpetuation of past acts in the present. Its object is therefore not a
mere object, something outside the mind which knows it; it is an
activity of thought, which can be known only in so far as the
knowing mind re-enacts it and knows itself as doing so. To the
historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not
spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his
own mind; they are objective, or known to him, only because they
are also subjective, or activities of his own.“
Roger Collingwood: The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1946, p. 218
Historical Storytelling

6. Historical Storytelling
• Historycal narratives are based on
„information“ / „evidence“ re-presented in
„sources“ or „documents“:
• sonic (oral testimonies, sound recordings),
• written (texts),
• visual (paintings, photographs, moving images),
• physical (material remains, landscape, nature)

7. Historical Storytelling
• „sources“ or „documents“ incorporate / express
epistemological or ideological „indexes“:
– Paul Otlet: documents as „in-forme“ (indexed information)
– „Documents as evidence are ontological entities whose
evidentiary origins lie in their belonging to taxonomic or
indexical regimes or to looser discursive or conversational
regimes (...) ‚Facts‘ occur through the infrastructuralization
of documentary techniques and technologies not only into
scientific and professional activities, but also as mediating
devices in everyday life“.
– Ronald E. Day, Indexing it all. The subject in the age of documentation,
information, and data. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT 2014, p. 4f.

8. Historical Storytelling
• Academic historical storytelling is „factual
storytelling“ based on scientific / professional
conventions:
– Specific formats (book, article)
– Academic standards (references, footnotes,
bibliography, citations etc.)
• Yet, remaining tensions between „facts“ &
„fiction“ in historical storytelling – history as
„retrospective prediction“ (Carlo Ginzburg)

9. Challenge of media historical
storytelling
• Narrative conventions of both sources (letters,
diplomatic notes, photographs, home movies)
and of historical narratives (books,
documentaries, exhibitions)
• Content and form are intrinsically intertwined!
What kind of history is told depends on the
medium of storytelling: book, film, radio
documentary, novel, internet homepage...

10. So far…
• Academic media historiography = re-telling of
the past in form of written narratives (books,
arcticles)
• Based on linear narratives:
– Based on chrono-logical conventions
– Beginning and end (periodization)
– Mostly from past to present
– Either synchronic or diachronic perspectives

11. So far…
• Mainly mono-medial stories
– Histories of film, newspaper, radio, photography,
television, telephony, ...
• Few „integral“ approaches
– Historicising the „mass media ensemble“ and the
intertextual / intermedial interconnectedness of
media

12. Challenges of new media history
• How to do research on media in an intermedial
perspective?
– Questions of conceptual framework, methodological
approaches, multimodal media literacies
• How to tell this integral media history?
– Through multi-platform or transmedia storytelling?
– Through „database histories“?
– Through multi-media narratives?

13. Transmedia Storytelling
• “A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media
platforms with each new text making a distinctive
and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal
form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does
what it does best—so that a story might be
introduced in a film, expanded through television,
novels, and comics; its world might be explored
through game play or experienced as an amusement
park attraction”.
• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide. New York Univ. Press (2006), pp. 95–96.

14. Which media does what best?
Novel (1929) Radio Play (1930) Film (1931) TV Series (1980)

15. Intermedial media historiography
• „Urban Soundscapes“-project: city of Berlin sounds very
differnt in novel, radio play, (sound) film and tv series!
• Narrative conventions frame the possibilities of staging
sound:
– Novel as „silent“ and „blind“ medium offers most rich, dynamic,
varied acoustic re-presentation of the sound of Berlin!
• Through „kino style“ (montage), thick sonic descriptions, „O-Ton“-like
soundmarks (Berlin dialect), onomapoetic interludes
– Radio play, sound film and television series reframed story due
to narrative conventions and technological limitations (main
subject of the novel changes: from city to Franz Biberkopf)

16. Intermedial media historiography
• Is written text therefore the „best“ narrative
format for integral media history?
• No, but using the narrative possibilities and
conceptual liberties & creativity of transmedia
storytelling requires multi-modal literacies:
– media literacy: understanding narrative
conventions of different genres / formats / media
– digital literacy: creating non-linear, parallel story
lines, sophisticated platform design, possibly
interactive / participatory elements...

17. Intermedial media historiography
• While classical writing enables / favours single
authored narratives, transmedia storytelling
can only be realized as a team effort (multi-
vocal narrative)
• Advantage: „democratization“ of storytelling
– „Database histories“

18. Steve Anderson: database histories
• “histories comprised of not
narratives that describe an
experience of the past but
rather collections of infinitely
retrievable fragments,
situated within categories and
organized according to
predetermined associations.”
(p. 122)

19. Example of database history: National Film & Sound
Archive / Australia
http://nfsa.gov.au/collection/documents-artefacts/

20. Mono platform storytelling
• Example: Radio Luxemburg project
– One platform multi-media storytelling
– Combination of different sources (text, audio,
audio-visual, objects...
– Three different visualization strategies
– Linked storylines / three semantic levels

21. JuxtapposeTimelineStorymap
Biographies
- Objects
- Places
- People
- Programs
- Institutions...

22. Mono platform storytelling
Challenge of VIEW:
• How to integrate different media (textual,
audio, audiovisual sources) in a classic
academic format of storytelling (article)
online?
• How to go beyond using such sources as
„illustrations“ – how to make them part of
storytelling and historical argumentation?

23. Mono platform storytelling
• Some tentative ideas:
– Adapt online screen reading to classical reading
situation; e.g. a page to page presentation, no
scrolling...
– When sources are presented / discussed: need for
a layout that enables a full immersion /
concentration on the medium specificity:
• Audio (reduce visible elements; possibly offering
transcription in case of foreign languages...)

25. Mono platform storytelling
• Some tentative ideas:
– Adapt online screen reading to classical reading
situation; e.g. a page to page presentation, no
scrolling...
– When sources are presented / discussed: need for
a layout that enables a full immersion /
concentration on the medium specificity:
• Audio (reduce visible elements; possibly offering
transcription in case of foreign languages...)
• Video: automatic switch to full screen presentation of
video; enable annotation;

26. Conclusion
• Academic historical storytelling will (hopefully)
include more audio/visual sources
• Internet will become the main platform for
factual / historical storytelling
– Re-contextualising archival material (database
histories)
– Re-publishing secondary literature
– Hosting digital born content

27. Conclusion
• Historians (as factual storytellers) will need to
invest in media and digital literacy
– Understand narrative conventions of audio/visual
sources
– Critically reflect on „authenticity“ and „evidence“ of
digitized sources
– Invent / develop new narrative strategies and formats
for factual online storytelling
– Deal with the „paradox“ of „actualization“ and
„contextualization“ in media based historical
storytelling