Interactive vocabulary

EVA DOMÍNGUEZ - 11/02/2005 - 12.50 horas

Words are the gears of a language. Without them, there is no grammar, syntax or reality, if we consider that reality does not exist until it is named. In search of its own identity, the Internet is creating its own language. Some of the pieces of this incipient vocabulary accompany the word Internet in every context, although they do not always refer to the same thing.

Could the Internet be defined by only one word it would be interactivity. Nowadays, individuals interact as never before. Since the arrival of the World Wide Web, the environments are interactive or else non-existent and people are users that interact with other users, with the virtual spaces, with the contents and with the whole world.

Much can be said about interactivity as it is a broad and fairly vague concept. There exist thousands of definitions and efforts to track it. There is no doubt that it is a differentiating element in digital storytelling, that is, in the stories explained on the Internet. However, this does not necessarily mean that all the contents published on the Internet are interactive.

Deconstructing the interactivity
In my opinion, one of the most useful efforts in order to classify the concept comes from Nora Paul and Christina L. Fiebich, from the University of Minnesota, USA. Their paper “Elements of Digital Storytelling” attempts to establish a basic grammar for digital storytelling. The whole concept of digital storytelling has been broken into five categories: media, action, relationship, context and communication.

Media refers to the sort of material used to create the story package, such as photography, audio, graphics or video. Action refers both to the movement required by the user to access the content and to movement of or within the presentation. Relationship is defined as the experience between the digital story and the user; it can be open, when the user is just allowed to read, see and listen to the contents, or close, if the user can also answer to quizzes, choose a path or move some elements.

Context is defined by the authors as the additional contents provided with the digital story. Finally, communication includes the existence and the type of communication channels with the user.

More names than formats
The taxonomy proposed by Paul and Fiebich permits to evaluate the interaction in multimedia works by weighing each category. Interactivity is less ambiguous and more easily measurable. Online presentations can be analyzed from their components. This methodology can be used to analyze all existing digital storytelling in the same way, which does not mean that they all share the same format.

Presentation formats used to display the interactive contents on the Internet also use a wide range of vocabulary to name the same thing. Animated infographics, interactive graphics, digital storytelling or multimedia specials amongst others. These terms are indistinctly used to designate similar or completely different works.

This conceptual Babel is logical since narrative forms are created and developed when named. There are not solid and closed genres. However, when creating a multimedia grammar, a consensus in format names is required.

Genres in digital journalism
Jonathan Dube, from Cyberjournalist.net, proposes a standout classification of storytelling forms being used by major news sites. Among them, he suggests clickable interactions, the most basic form, slideshows, or sequential photo albums, audio stories, or presentations based on oral narrative, narrated slideshows, or audiovisual formats with a voice-over script, animated infographics, interactive webcasts, where the broadcasted video is completed with several types of related information and stories, and multimedia interactives, which combine all the forms already mentioned and some new ones to create a unique way of telling a story.

Therefore, Dube's classification is based on already used elements and their combination. But, what if we would look at the objective of each presentation? This is the criterion followed by Maish Nichani and Venkat Rajamanickam’s proposal in e-learning post.

Depending on the objectives
The authors distinguish 4 different kinds of interactive works being used by online media: narratives, instructives, exploratives and simulatives.

The first ones are a sort of audiovisuals with a voice-over narration (equivalent to Dube’s narrated slideshows). The instructives pretend to show a process or a procedure step-by-step to explain how things work or how events occur. For instance, how a twister is formed.

In the exploratives, the user gives meaning to the content as he/she discovers it, as the human squeleton in Becoming Human. Finally, in the simulatives the objective is to transmit an experience enabling the users to discover the intent themselves. In this sense, MSNBC Baggage screaning is a game that represents the baggage control of an airport.

Described taxonomies pretend to classify the basic vocabulary of the Internet. They are just a starting point since, as every new and living language, it is in constant evolution.

English translation by Begoña García