EUROSEAS WORKSHOP

Ms Céline Dillmann from ETH Switzerland attended the EuroSEAS workshop “Listen to your Eyes” held 30 May- 1 June, Milan, Italy on behalf of our project ASEM/2014/052 and in collaboration with SCMN/2012/075.

EuroSEAS Workshop 2018: ‘Listen to Your Eyes’: Multimedia Web-Based Storytelling for Researchers, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan

Books and articles are traditionally the scholar’s main product. Many scholars collect audiovisual materials but this is often considered secondary, or inferior, to the ultimate outcome of research: written texts. At the same time, academia is conservative when it comes to the form in which both texts and images are presented. For this workshop, we invite scholars in the field of Southeast Asia to experiment with the crafting of arguments through web-based multimedia storytelling and to combine various forms of media such as text, photography, film, drawings, and sound in an innovative and experimental narrative form.

Date and venue:

Date: 30 May – 1 June

Venue: "Riccardo Massa” Department of Human Sciences for Education, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan

Setup

The three-day workshop was given by Martijn van Tol, a journalist who produces interactive documentaries such as Refugee Republic (2014) and Ed (2017) and who founded Scrollytelling, a web based multimedia storytelling tool used by several newspapers and television broadcasters.

We will start on Wednesday afternoon with an introduction on how to tell compelling interactive multimedia stories for a broad online audience. We will also look at and deconstruct successful and less successful examples of interactive stories and become familiar with some basic do’s and don’ts in creating these narratives. Participants will then briefly introduce their own material and discuss the question of what storylines are most suitable for a translation into an interactive multimedia form.

On Thursday and on Friday morning participants will create an interactive multimedia story while receiving direct feed-back from Van Tol. The goal is not to finish these projects entirely during these three days but rather to experiment with the blending of text, image and sound. Participants will be able to continue working on their projects after the workshop.

On Friday afternoon participants will present their projects to each other. Marjaana Jauhola (University of Helsinki) and Erminia Colucci (Middlesex University London) will act as discussants.

What are we going to make?

Imagine telling a story and creating an argument, on the basis of your own research, that looks like this: The Fighter. We will work with Scrollytelling software which has a particular form and a defined set of features (see the Scrollytelling website for more examples).