New publication: Digital storytelling and the concept of the “modern” museum

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Antonia Liguori

Dr Antonia Liguori was invited to write the afterward to the new book written by the Italian archeologist Elisa Bonacini Museums and Forms of Digital Storytelling, originally published in Italian by Aracne Editrice and now translated into English.

The research illustrates multiple experiences and strategies adopted in museums and in the world of cultural heritage in the field of digital storytelling to guide the future design of narrative digital solutions. Its aim is to provide as complete a picture as possible of the different solutions set in this specific sector of the field of cultural communication, their uses, and the accessibility of culture. It identifies and analyzes 14 types of digital storytelling: oral, written, video, visual, animated, interactive, Immersive, Social Media Storytelling, Participative, Generative, Geo–Storytelling, Multimedia Mobile Storytelling, Crossmedia and Transmedial storytelling. Finally, a new vision of the museum is proposed in which, beginning with the antiquarian and nineteenth–century vision of museum collections, develops into what should be defined as a connected museum or museum of connected narration.

Here the first lines of the postface:

The time has come for subversive storytelling (Zipes, 2016)

Storytelling is by its nature rooted in the past, influenced by the present and projected towards the future. It is so in its form and content, and digital technologies exponentially expand its channels of diffusion, broadening its horizon in the spatial dimension and accelerating its impact in the temporal dimension.As I write this afterword, with my mind still in full swing after reading the stimulating reflections and flawless reconstruction of this rich and profound book, my eye falls on a Twitter notification that pulls me into a “legitimate” distraction. That distraction, in reality, proves to be decisive in finding a thread to follow in these few lines that can give voice to my idea of using Digital Storytelling as a participatory tool to build “a justfuture” and to my expectation of finding in Museums that “social space” in which to preserve the stories of the past, listen to and represent the stories of the present, collaborate with local and global communities with ambition to imagine new stories and build a better future together. For everyone.