Interactive multimedia ethnography

Abstract

Digital heritage archives often lack engaging user interfaces that strike a balance between providing narrative context and affording user interaction and exploration. It seems nevertheless feasible for metadata tagging and a “joined up” workflow to provide a basis for such rich interaction. After outlining relevant research from within and outside the heritage domain, we present our project, FINE (Fluid Interfaces for Narrative Exploration), an effort to develop such a system. Based on content from Wendy James' archive of anthropological research material from the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands, the FINE project attempts to use structural and thematic metadata to drive exploratory interfaces which link video, images, audio, and text to relevant narrative units. The interfaces also benefit from the temporal and spatial variety of the collection to provide opportunities to discover contrasts and juxtaposition in the material across place and time.