An exploration of multimedia storytelling for narrating past personal experiences from large-scale multimodal lifelogs.
Orison is my thesis system and allows for the construction of digital narratives from personal lifelog content. It was designed to import, index, manage, and author large scale lifelog collections into personal digital narratives. It was designed to work with three multi-year multi-modal archives developed to support my doctoral work.
The storytelling tool, dubbed Orison, was fully implemented having all of the expected behaviors and functionality of a media-editing tool from single click installation, to export and import of completed works.
The software was designed based on initial probative and exploratory studies with the scrapbooking community and the method of digital storytelling enabled closely resembled that observed in these studies: album based two-dimensional layouts. Additionally, the tool’s workflow was intended to closely match their observed patterns and practices of work, albeit in a digital environment. Three primary actions were identified: locating information for inclusion in a layout (browsing); the arrangement of content into a working layout (composition); committing that layout to an album and situating it appropriately (placing). There are three major sections within the application, each relating to one of these functions. Each section is given a unique aesthetic ‘flavor’ which aimed to reinforce its goal. For example, the working space in which compositions are arranged, called the scratchpad, has a rough worn background while the album placement area has a more clean and finished appearance.
The tool was been deployed within DCU to several long term lifelog collection users, as well as with over 100 media editing students at Arizona State University to explore the mediated use of these collections with motivated third parties