Integrating Multimedia into Exhibits

This page provides guidance on selecting and using multimedia tools to enhance forgingUS exhibits through interactive storytelling.

Your role at this stage: Whether you're a contributor suggesting multimedia elements in wireframes, a content editor planning section layouts, or a developer implementing interactive features, understanding when and how to use multimedia resources ensures they genuinely deepen understanding rather than simply add visual appeal. The presentation below helps you make strategic decisions about which tools best serve your narrative.

What you'll find here:

• Multimedia Resource Guide presentation – Complete framework covering the difference between exhibits and multimedia resources, decision trees for choosing the right tools, and detailed guidance on geographic, temporal, audio, visual, and relational storytelling formats.

• Tool recommendations – Specific platforms organized by what question you're trying to answer (geography, time, sound, data, relationships).

• When to use guidelines – Clear criteria for determining if multimedia meaningfully advances your narrative.

• Guiding principles – Accessibility requirements, contextual placement strategies, and narrative transparency standards.

Key principle: The narrative comes first. Multimedia resources extend, deepen, and complicate exhibit narratives—they don't replace them. Always ask: Does this tool meaningfully advance understanding in a way that prose cannot, or is it simply a more visually appealing way to present information that could be written?

Tool categories covered:

• Geography – ArcGIS StoryMaps, StoryMapJS, Gigapixel for migration, trade routes, spatial relationships.

• Time – TimelineJS and platform-based timelines for causality, chronology, and historical momentum.

• Video & Images – Educational explainers, annotated images, image hotspots for complex processes.

• Sound – Annotated audio, audiograms, and Soundcite to humanize texts and restore orality.

• Data Visualizations – Tableau, D3.js, static infographics for quantitative evidence.

• Relationships – Sunburst family trees for genealogical connections and power structures.

Remember: These tools are most effective when geography, time, sound, data, or relationships are essential to understanding—not just illustrative. Multimedia resources work best when paired with contextual explanation and strategically integrated into the scrolling narrative flow, rather than as standalone galleries.