Carolina Digital Storyboard

Principal Investigator

Joyce Rudinsky, UNC communication studies, RENCI domain scientist for the arts and humanities

Collaborators

Ben McFadyn, Elon University
Mike Shoffner, RENCI
Shelly Crisp, North Carolina Humanities Council
Luke Miller, Graduate Student, School of Library and Information Science
Saba Kawas, Graduate Student, Art and Design, NCSU
Nick Graham, Carolina Digital Library, UNC

Project Description

The Digital Storyboard will be a collaborative, public interface enabling users to search, browse and interact with digitized historic documents and images. The storyboard will take the form of large, touch-screen monitor intended for display in shared spaces such as libraries, schools and museums around North Carolina. Users will interact with the historic materials through a custom interface designed specifically for this project.

Many historic materials have already been liberated from archives through the widespread digitization of library and archival materials. The Digital Storyboard will, in its initial release, draw from two digital libraries:

• Documenting the American South, a large UNC University Libraries collection of primary source documents about the American South, including slave narratives, early Southern Literature and early histories and descriptions of North Carolina.
  
• The North Carolina ECHO Statewide Digitization Program, hosted at UNC-Chapel Hill. This new but already extensive collection will come online in fall/winter 2009 and will include digitized materials from libraries from around the state. The early collections within the program will include city directories, yearbooks, maps and postcards.

Rudinsky has assembled an interdisciplinary, multi-university team including a representative from the North Carolina Humanities Council to ensure the creation of an engaging, accessible and useful tool that can be adapted by others seeking a similar model for sharing valuable stores of information in digital archives.

This project will move the exploration of our documentary heritage beyond the computer screen and into a common space where people can work together to explore and share their personal and community histories. Using the Digital Storyboard, users will be able to search and browse the digitized materials by taking advantage of the existing metadata assigned to each document or group of documents in the digital libraries. Users will also be able to add their own comments and tags, which the interface designed for the storyboard will encourage.

Having users contribute their own stories and interpretations of the historic materials is an important objective of this project. To that end, the team hopes to produce more than one digital storyboard and will make the storyboards portable and therefore able to be moved throughout the state.