Comparing Spatial and Temporal Storytelling Platforms

Over the past few weeks I have been called upon to serve judgement on tools useful to share digital stories using objects with time and location metadata. It has ‘forced’ me to re-engage with a few recent suspects in this arena: TimeMapper from the OKFNLabs, TimelineJS and StoryMapJS from Knightlab and ESRI’s Story Maps. All are fine platforms, each with particular strengths and particular applicabilities for different tastes. All provide a means for taking existing digital objects (accessible online) adding or collecting some metadata about the objects and gluing them together with textual narrative. They present new and engaging means of conveying stories that may have existed in other media and most importantly for the digital humanities scholar – doing so with little or no need for coding or programmatic intervention – let the storyteller tell the story.

I have been sharing these tools with a widely ranged audience for the past few years as means of sharing their research outputs. One of the challenges in using any of these tools is ownership of the data and the ability take the output from the platform being used and host it in your own environment.

What I hope to accomplish in this short post was to demonstrate each tool intern by applying the same basic dataset and exploring the result generated from each.

I have a great tale. As Digital Humanities Coordinator for Queen’s University in Belfast, we were graced over the past few weeks with visits from multiple delegations from China. Special Collections at Queen’s holds a significant portion of the arcives of Sir Robert Hart. Hart was born in Portadown, Ireland in 183?. He graduated from Queen’s at the age of 16 and shortly thereafter joined the British consular service in China. After short employment he joined the nascent Chinese consular service and became one of the formative forces in the establishment and proliferation of the indigenous service. He kept copious diaries and lived through an exciting period in the history of China and of the world. Queen’s is privileged to hold some fascinating artefacts that share fascinating insights on his life and this period. Special Collections at Queen’s have digitised a goodly selection of these artefacts and in collaboration with other institutions have sought new an innovative means to share these and attempt to extract the stories they beg to share.

Recently the staff in Special Collections have diligently augmented and made more widely available these artefacts tapping into ContentDM, Omeka and other digital collection management and narrative devices. In so doing they have created the foundation for greater exploitation of this rich collection and to due honour to the remarkable life story of Sir Robert Hart.