Week6: Organizational Storytelling

Generally speaking, information is easier revealed and remembered by storytelling than by just listing. For example, “Jim felt too sick to attend the meeting later that morning. After three hours of unanswered email and phone and pager message, he finally got a message that the meeting is postponed until next week.” (Gershon and Page, 2001) We can know the character, the detail and the back story through the brief story. Audience can easily got the information by framing the scene in mind. However, according to the journal “What storytelling Can Do for Information Visualization”, if these information are revealed by describing in points, it would hard to remember.

The article “The Elements of Good Storytelling” from Kimberly Appelcline is easy understood and read. She illustrates how to tell a good story with five basic elements. I am doing my personal project containing documentary videos this quarter, what I am really concerned is how to attract audiences’ attention and keep them to constantly view your story. For instance, how to make conflicts and contradictions in your story is a way to encourage audiences to pay attention to your product, but creating an interactive storytelling interests me. As a picture-orientation person, I think pictures more impress me than words do, so I think not only text but also pictures facilitate audiences remembering information when designing website.

Furthermore, after reading this article, it provides me an overview to explain how to apply organizational storytelling to content creation. Also, I would like to know how these principles applies to digital content creation or online advertising. I will make an example for the next post.

References

1. Gershon, Nahum. (2001) What Storytelling Can Do for Information Visualization. Communications of the ACM . 44 (8), 31-37. Retrieved April 28, 2007, ACM Digital Library from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=381641.381653.

“Storytelling allows visualization to reveal information as effectively and intuitively as if the viewers were watching a movie. A well-told story conveys great quantities of information in relatively few words in a format that is easily assimilated by the viewers.” This article explains how to present information into visualization with some principles.

2. Schneider, Oliver. (2003) Storyworld Creation: Authoring for Interactive Storytelling. WSCG. Retrieved April 29, 2007, from http://wscg.zcu.cz/wscg2002/Papers_2002/D67.pdf.

It talks about the approach to authoring of non-linear stories applying to related work such as computer games. It introduces how to design an interactive storytelling in digital format.