The Hero’s Journey - Template-Based Storytelling for Ubiquitous Multimedia Management

Professional communities in research domains including much fieldwork and mobile multimedia acquisition such as the domain of cultural heritage management lack support to create, access, organize and share multimedia within their communities. Digital storytelling is an excellent means to share knowledge represented by ubiquitous multimedia in communities. However, it is not easy for those professional communities to tell and share good digital stories, since they are amateurs in storytelling in many cases. This paper proposes the application of professional story templates to enhance (non-linear) digital storytelling with a template engine allowing users’ collaborative design, adaptation and mashing up of story templates. A prototype of the template engine YouTell TE was integrated in a community storytelling platform. A set of case studies demonstrates the usefulness of this approachadsf