Heritage presentation through interactive storytelling: a new multimedia database approach

This paper discusses the rationale for—and describes the methodology of—a new system of interactive storytelling being developed by the Ename Centre for Public Archaeology Heritage Presentation in Belgium. Based on 5 years’ experience with multimedia heritage presentation systems, both on-site and in museum contexts, this approach to the presentation of history and archaeology enables visitors to create their own ‘stories’ as they explore the information contained in a database. The collaborative virtual environment in this case is the visitor’s exploration of a historical monument through a series of interactive panoramas and navigation options that allow the visitor to weave archaeological facts and historical information to larger narratives. Because the visitor can follow a number of different trajectories (of time, space and theme) through the monument, and can freely switch trajectories, hundreds of different narratives are possible. The creation of these interactive stories has a larger educational purpose. It has proved to be a uniquely flexible medium for the communication of personalized, interest-oriented, and user-driven heritage information for the general public. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.