RegioBioGraph
What can a village archive tell us — and how should it tell it? Interactive narratives that turn local history, biographies, and old footage into stories visitors can steer.
- Year
- 2020–2023
- Role
- Interactive narrative design, Research
Somewhere in a small town in Lower Austria there is a shoebox. In it: photographs of a wedding nobody alive remembers, a postcard from 1931, a few metres of film of a parade. Thanks to digitisation, thousands of these shoeboxes are now online — in citizen-science archives like the Topothek — and they all ask the same awkward question: now what?
An archive is not a story. It’s a pile of possible stories. RegioBioGraph set out to find narrative forms that can pull a story out of that pile — combining the language of film (montage, pacing, the cut that makes you feel something) with interactive data visualisation, built around real biographies and their regional context. The visitor asks a question; the system assembles an answer out of media and data, and tells it.
The result was a prototype “RegioBioGraph”, tested where it belongs: in a local history museum, with actual visitors, who are refreshingly unimpressed by anything that doesn’t work.
My part was the storytelling end of things — designing the interactive narratives and researching whether they actually help people understand history, rather than just clicking through it. That question — does this make anyone wiser? — has followed me ever since, and it’s at the heart of the doctoral project I’m preparing now.
Along the way I co-edited the volume Digitale Strategien zur Erschließung prekärer Bestände (V&R unipress, 2024) and co-wrote its chapter on RegioBioGraph. Funded by the Gesellschaft für Forschungsförderung Niederösterreich.