The Well Told Story: Digital Schomburg

The Digital Schomburg has a number of digital exhibits that provide excellent models for our own digital storytelling. I want to highlight two exhibits hosted on the same page, titled, “Black Power! The Movement, The Legacy” and “Ready for the Revolution: Education, Arts, and Aesthetics of the Black Power Movement.” The exhibits are presented as pre-organized/ordered set of images and associated text. Users can also examine photographs/archival materials outside of the curated exhibits in the “Items” section. This is a simple, user-friendly storytelling model that is still comprehensive and intriguing.

I also want to highlight the Digital Schomburg’s Emmett Till Project. The site includes a home page and tabs across the top, indicating the various storytelling tools users can experience. This site is less of a storybook and has more flexibility for users to decide what information they want, the order in which they will encounter it, and the format through which they will experience it.

These two models provide different takes on the notion of “storytelling”–while Black Power and Ready for the Revolution exhibit their content using more of a story book format, the Emmett Till Project attempts to include various kinds of storytelling methods, including archives, commemorative posts, and podcasts. We could potentially incorporate elements of both of these models in our WordPress.