跨界经纬学术 | Nicola Dusi, et al.:A Transmedia storytelling system

*文章、图片、视频等素材源于网络，如有侵权，请与我们及时联系！我们一定妥善处理！

A transmedia storytelling system to transform recorded film memories into visual history

Entertainment Computing 21 (2017) 65–7

Nicola Dusi, Ilaria Ferretti, Marco Furini

Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Viale Allegri 9, 42121 Reggio Emilia, Italy

Keywords: Entertainment cultural issues; Visual history; Geolocation Home movies; Film memories

Abstract

The younger generations are very focused on what surrounds them and on what happens to their friends, but they are hardly interested in written-based historical contents. This creates a loss of cultural heritage passed down for generations. In the attempt of preserving memories and of intercepting the attention of the new generations, in this paper we propose a transmedia storytelling system that uses private film memories and modern communication technologies to tell the story of our past. In particular, the system allows people to explore the city through the eyes of amateur film sequences while walking in city streets: we use an archive of more than 500 h of movies shot by private citizens from 1940 to 1989 and we develop a mobile application that links film memories to city places. Through an experimental assessment, we observed that the system engaged different audiences and increased the users’interest about history; in particular, young people, who said to be not interested in history, admitted that the system increased their interest about historical contents. In general, the obtained results showed that a transmedia storytelling system might help fostering historical consciousness, as it is able to intercept the attention of younger generations.

1.    Introduction

In the past, the telling story time was a gathering and happy moment, a time where people shared experiences. Fairytales, fantasy yarn, mythological legends, family anecdotes; no matter what the stories were about, the important thing was the telling story time as it created culture and lasting memories [1].

Today, we live a completely different scenario; we are in the social media era where human relations pass through digital communications, keyboards and networks. We prefer texting rather than talking, we prefer logging in rather than meeting people; we prefer watching the smartphone display rather than look around. To know what surrounds us, what happens where we live, what happens to our friends we just have to look at the news feed wall of our preferred social network. The true social life is being replaced by the social network experience and, if on the one side we know everything about the present, on the other side we known almost nothing about the past. As a result, people, especially the younger generations, are losing a cultural heritage passed down for generations.

To mitigate this "loss of cultural heritage", different studies and projects exploited the wonderful features of social media and of mobile devices to create a system able to provide new dimensions of understanding and engagement of history [2–4]. The system could represent a bridge between history and the modern scenario and can become an appealing alternative to non-visual textbased historical discourses [4–6]. For instance, the use of social media to tell historical events has been investigated by "Facebook 1914", a project developed by the French museum "Musee de la Grande Guerre di Pays de Meaux1"with the goal of recreating history through social media. In this project, Leon Vivien is a WWI French soldier sent to the front to fight against the enemy and he communicates with his family and friends through a Facebook page. In particular, the project recreated a social life around the character (e.g., in addition to the Leon Vivien’s page,2 the project created a page of his wife Madeleine,3 and a page for his close friends). During the eight months of daily messages and images (from the Museum of the Great War archive), the soldier used the Facebook page to interact with his wife and friends. The posting activity ended the day Leon Vivien was killed in a battle. Because of this project, the visitors of the museum increased by 45%. "@RealTimeWWII" is a similar project that used Twitter to present the events of World War II as if they were happening right now. In particular, the @RealTimeWWII account tweets in "real-time" WWII events as they happened on the same date and time in 1944 and will continue for two years.  Other projects focused on the usage of mobile devices and geolocation technologies to bring the past into our days. For instance, Historypin4 is a project designed to connect communities with local history: people can share pictures and stories about their local communities. Streetmuseum5 is a system developed to give a unique prospective of old and new London: hundreds of still images with everyday and special moments in London’s history are available within the system and, while walking in London with a GPS device, the system allows users to view historical pictures and to receive historical information about  the  location  where  they are. OldNYC6 is a similar project developed for the city of New York: more than 40,000 historical images taken from the New York Public Library are displayed on a map to allow people to "discover the history behind the places you see every day". In addition to historical pictures, the Netherlands Architectural Institute used 3D models: the developed Urban Augmented Reality7 application shows how the city once was, how it might have been and how it will look like in the future.

The use of still picture is interesting and popular, but to further enhance the understanding of the past we must move towards movies [7]. Indeed, according to Jenkins [8], the combination of historical video and modern technologies will likely provide a transmedia storytelling system based on layering, diversification, and interconnectivity of media. This system would create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience where, ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story and thus it would deepen audience engagement by map- ping history and by providing a different point of view [8]. For example, we may think of a father who, for years, films his daughter playing in a town street or in a public park. No doubt, the father is interested in his daughter, but the film shows also the changes of the urban space around their daily lives. Therefore, home movies are an incredible source of information, as they contain different views of the same place (e.g., the city) and, thus, they represent a human geography made from the glance of filmmakers [9].

One may think that a burden in the realization of this transmedia storytelling system is the availability of historical videos, but according to our experience, it is not. Indeed, the production of personal videos is not a novel phenomenon. People always loved to shot videos and these film memories provide new and particular visions (e.g., geographical, historical, sociological, etc.) of the society. For their wealth of content, these films are becoming the foundations of the so-called, urban cinematic, an approach that merges the disciplines of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning with film studies, with the goal of exploring the potential of cinema as a tool to investigate the communal narratives of cities [10].

Motivated by the need to preserve the past and to present it in the modern scenario, by the importance of visual documentation, and by the need to intercept the attention of the new generations, we design a transmedia storytelling system with the goal of creating appealing alternatives to written-based historical discourses. In particular, the idea is to create an innovative form of understanding the past by exploiting modern communication technologies and by giving new life to private film memories. The goal of our system is to engage different audiences in specific ways and on multiple levels, allowing them to walk through history. For instance, the older generations can relive their past, whereas the younger generations can try to understand how the  city was  at  the time of their parents or of their grandparents; historians can watch a past period; urban planners can see how the city has evolved; sociologists can understand the way of life in the different districts of the city.

To test our idea, we focus on the town of Reggio Emilia (171.000 ca. habitants), where there is a large archive of home movies. The archive is the result of different initiatives undertaken in recent years by various institutions,8 which put together a special working group to enhance movies shot by private citizens. In particular, the archive is composed of more than 500 h of private films shot in different formats (9.5 mm/ 16 mm/8 mm/Super8) by more than 200 filmmakers. We selected and edited these 500 h of video material to produce 120 clips with a time length that varies from 30 to 60 s. Then, we attached GPS coordinates to these clips and we designed and developed a multiplatform (i.e., Android OS, iOS, HTML) application that places these clips on a map and allows people to walk in city streets to watch how these roads looked like in the past. As a result, people can explore an unusual Reggio Emilia through the eyes of amateur film sequences (now historic). For instance, when in a particular place, people can see how this place looked like in the sixties (or even in the WWII), how people lived this place and can read some "backstories" about that place. This gives them a different perspective of that location.

To evaluate the system, we asked for voluntary participants. We were contacted by 116 voluntaries that run the application and answered to a questionnaire. Through a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) test, we investigated many different aspects, including the participants’ satisfaction, the ease of use, the perceptiveness, the engagements, etc. In general, results show that the system affected the interest about history and, in particular, it received the attention of young people who said to be not interested in history, but admitted that the system increased their interest about historical contents. Therefore, according to the obtained results, the development of a transmedia storytelling system is able to intercept the attention of new generations by transforming written-based historical contents into an enjoyable alternative.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we overview studies and proposals in the area of digital storytelling; in Section 3 we present details of our transmedia storytelling system; in Section 4 we show and analyze results obtained during the experimental assessment carried out to evaluate our proposal. Conclusions are drawn in Section 5.

2.    Related work

The introduction of user-friendly social applications amplified the historical community civic engagement [11] and public historians are increasingly embracing modern communication technologies to open new dimensions of understanding and engagement of historical contents [12]. In particular, according to Klaebe et al. [4], digital storytelling can offer an engaging insight into our collective social history. For these reasons, many researchers investigated the effects of digital storytelling when applied to historical contents and, in the following, we briefly review some recent studies.

Bentely et al. [1] had the idea of connecting older adults to their children through the sharing of location-based video stories. To this aim, they proposed a system that enables family members to create and collect geolocated video messages: parents record and locate a video message and their children can use a mobile device to track down and view the video in the location it is associated with. Results showed that location-based video stories could enhance relationships and create feelings of togetherness over a distance.

Bujari et al. [13,14] proposed to automatically modify the story of a trip by identifying interesting places to visit in the nearby of an itinerary. The developed system combines data associated to Flickr geotagged pictures with information provided by WikiLocation. A user study showed that users deeply appreciated possibility of dis- covering interesting places located in the nearby of a given itinerary.

Procyk and Neustaedter [15,16] proposed a location-based game to support the telling and sharing of family stories in order to enhance knowledge of places among family members and close friends. The system asks players to tell past experiences (e.g., the birthplace, the favorite gathering place, etc.) and to locate them on a map. Then, family members or friends can access to these records by traveling to the physical location of the specific record. In this way, the player’s present moment in a particular space is augmented by the personal story of another person.

Shen et al. [17] focused on visual storytelling and presented a video editing system to help authors in the process of scene com- position in order to tell a story. Indeed, the user retrieves prere- corded videos by typing free-text stories and, by interacting with the system, he/she composes the temporal ordering of shots, sequences, and scenes.

Adabala et al. [18] focused on cultural heritage and designed a framework to enable immersive guided walkthroughs as well as active exploration. In particular, the framework integrates different representations of heritage elements (either tangible or not) into a holistic entity with the goal of producing a compelling and engaging narration. Results obtained through a Mean Opinion Score showed that users liked the digital heritage concept and preferred to learn history using this approach rather than the one that uses classic history books.

Klaebe et al. [4] focused on the residential urban development and investigated the role of locally produced and locally relevant contents in the establishment of meaningful social networks of urban residents. Results showed that digital storytelling could contribute to create community through the merging of personal memories.

Harkema and Nygren [19] focused on content discovery with respect to library image collections. In one experiment they used a postcard collection tied to the local community and put the images of these postcards on a map using the historypin platform. Results obtained showed that this approach has the potential to encourage community use and engagement, particularly with regards to making connections between content, history, and location or sense of place.

Although different in methodologies and goals, these studies highlighted that modern technologies can help linking our current society to its history. This motivates us to design a system able to link our present with our past, where the present means modern technologies and the past means film memories. However, it is to note that our goal is not to propose a simple video browsing system. Indeed, we want to design a system able to link film memories with current locations; able to show users how life was in the past by comparing current and historical real life scenes; able to exploit modern technologies to increase the interest around history; able to create a history experience by means of connecting historical and current contents with locations. According to Jenkins, these characteristics can be achieved through the design of a transmedia storytelling system [8], which is a system that uses current digital technologies to interconnect different media, to unfold a story by creating a unified and unique entertainment experience, to increase audience engagement by providing different points of view of a story.

3.    Our transmedia storytelling system

The goal of the transmedia storytelling system is to create an enjoyable alternative to written based historical contents. Indeed, motivated by the importance of visual documentation and by the need to intercept the attention of the new generations, the system aims to create an innovative form of understanding the past by exploiting modern communication technologies and by giving new life to private film memories.
Thanks to the connection between film memories and city places, the houses, the roads and the glimpses of the past come back to life. Furthermore, by re-contextualizing these films [20], the world that belonged to our parents and grandparents merges the current world to form a cultural semiosis world, where cultural memory overlaps and forgets, loses and finds himself with the result of producing culture [21]. Indeed, the system allows people to enter into a "participative" world, open to hundreds of different life moments and of different people’s perspectives [8,22].
It is worth noting that our proposal is not a simple system for browsing home movies, but it is a system that uses home movies to transforms the simple network of streets into a network of affective relations, personal memories and social history. Indeed, thanks to the usage of GPS technologies and of modern communication devices and technologies, old and dusty moving images are brought back to life and are put on specific city places. By watching them, people can compare the present and the past scenario, can access to a real fragment of life of other people from the past and, therefore, can access to different time and space cultural layers.
To build the system we first need to collect the recorded film memories and then we have to design and to develop the actual system. In particular, as shown in Fig. 1, there are four different steps to follow: (i) clips selection, (ii) clip geolocalization, (iii) system design and, (iv) system development.

3.1. Clips selection

To find recorded film memories in the city of Reggio Emilia, we relied on the "Home Movies Archive",9 an initiative that collected films preserved by Italian families, with the aim to take care of the immense patrimony that they represent. This archive has more than 5000 h of digitalized home movies shot all over the Italy, and 500 h of them are shot in the area of Reggio Emilia (the town of our Department) from 1940 to 1989. These movies, usually with no audio, have been digitalized from different film formats (9.5 mm/16 mm/8 mm/ Super8), and have contents that vary from daily life to collective rituals, from work to leisure. If on the one side, the films show the city changes through intimate and authentic memories of the last century, in a suspended atmosphere between dream, desire and reality, on the other side, the archive is composed of short and long films, of films with meaningless or interesting content, of films with shaking or steady pictures, of films with few long shots and of films with many short shots. Therefore, it is not reasonable to directly use these films.

Fig. 1. Steps to develop our transmedia storytelling system.
The goal of this phase is to select informative films from the  500 h of digitalized home movies and to produce clips that repre- sent the town center of Reggio Emilia and its outskirts with a time length suitable for the mobile scenario. With respect to the video length, according to the Wistia10 analysis, we decided to set the maximum length at 60 s. The selection phase produced 120 clips, shot by 44 different filmmakers in 80 different city places. By analyzing the 120 clips, we have identified six different themes and six dif- ferent routes that recur frequently in films shot by amateur filmmakers. The themes are:

Family rituals: weddings, newborns, religious activities, etc.

Everyday life: walks, public works, etc.

Cityscapes: public gardens, squares, buildings, etc.

Public events: political/religious meeting, rallies, folk festivals, etc.

Sports: football matches, cycling races, city marathons, etc. Educational activities: school trips, schoolchildren in the city, etc.

The routes are:

The historical route: movies shot in places located on the routes suggested by many current and past travel guides. By fol- lowing this path, users can visit some of the most characteristic and historical places of the city.

Theater area and public gardens: movies shot in the most vis- ited places by Reggio Emilia citizens.

The Via Emilia: movies shot on the route that crosses the city from the southeast to the northwest. This street is an ancient Roman street and the city was built around this street.

The boulevards: movies shot on the avenues that currently sur- round the historic area of the city. Today, these avenues are very busy roads, rarely used by pedestrians, but once, these avenues were the borders between the city and the countryside, the per- fect place for walking, playing and for doing outdoor activities. Compagnoni district: movies shot in a particular district of the city, built in the late 50s by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia. It was a neighborhood isolated from the rest of the city and devel- oped to host low-income families. As shown by the movies, the neighborhood soon begins to be experienced by the inhabitants and, with the enlargement of the city, it becomes an integral  part of Reggio Emilia.

Rosta Nuova district: movies shot in a residential district built in the early 60s.

Both the selection and the production of video clips have been done in a manual way. Indeed, the tested automatic video summa- rization techniques to short the videos [23–26] did not produce satisfied results and therefore we preferred the manual approach.

3.2 Clips geolocalization

To geolocalize all the 120 video clips we asked for help to the filmmakers and/or to the protagonists and then we used GPS coor- dinates to connect the produced clips to city places. This link provides users with different points of view (e.g., historical, sociological, urbanistic, anthropological, etc.) and is fundamental for the transmedia storytelling system as it creates a connection between present and past time, between recorded film memories and reality. For instance, the clip reported in Fig. 2 might be observed from the anthropological point of view (e.g., a girl learn- ing how to ride a bike), but also from the urbanistic point of view (e.g., the building on the background was the city hospital, today replaced with a residential building). Similarly, Fig. 3 shows a  scene of life in front of the San Rocco palace and allows users to appreciate the difference in the urban space, to learn that this area was drained in the late ’50s, to understand how people socialized, how they moved, how they dressed, etc.

3.3 System design

The transmedia storytelling system is designed primarily for the mobile environment. As a result, ease of use, lightness and scalabil- ity are three important features. To meet these features, the system relies on external platforms to stream the video and to geolocate the clips. Fig. 4 shows how the system works: the clips are not embedded in the app, but they are streamed from YouTube; simi- larly, the map is not embedded in the app, but the system uses Google Maps to show places where movies were shot. This makes the system light and scalable.

Fig. 2. Clip geolocalization: the localization of a clip with a girl riding a bike allows to compare the town area in 1955 (left) and nowadays (right). Source: Saccani R. (left), Google Street View (right).


Fig. 3. Clip geolocalization: a town block as it was in 1940 (left) and how it is today (right). Source: Tirelli Prampolini G. (left), Ferretti I. (right).


Fig. 4. The designed transmedia storytelling system: to keep the mobile application light and scalable, the system uses GPS technologies to locate the mobile device, Google Maps to locate contents on a map and YouTube to stream the clips.
One may think that the design choice to stream videos in a mobile environment can create problems to users and can discour- age them from using the system. But in reality, the access to the Internet in urban areas is no longer a problem thanks to the advances in networking technologies (e.g., LTE connections) and thanks to the increasing availability of Wi-Fi hotspots. For instance, the town of Reggio Emilia provides free Wi-Fi in all public spaces and, therefore, the requirement of the  Internet  connection  does not represent a burden for the usage of the system.Finally, it is to note that, although GPS equipped devices are more and more used [27–29]), the system does not require the presence of GPS devices. Indeed, people can tour streets to see  how these places looked like in the past regardless  they have  or not a GPS equipped device. However, it is worth noting that the GPS availability facilitates the system usage as  it  exactly shows  the user’s position on the map.

3.4    System development

To make the system usable, we use the Ionic framework11 to develop a mobile application for the two most widely used mobile operating systems (i.e., iOS and android) and to develop a HTML ver- sion for those who prefer using a Web browser. Instead of focusing on the implementation details, which goes outside the scope of this paper, in the following we describe the two different storytelling modalities developed to discover historical contents: personal and preset.

        3.4.1  Storytelling through personal modes

The personal mode gives users the complete freedom to choose what to watch by accessing to all the clips located on the map, or by filtering them according to filmmaker names, places and pro- duction year.
Maps. Users can access to the entire set of video clips and can play them out by selecting the specific pin on the map. As shown in Fig. 5 (left), users can observe where clips were shot and, by clicking on the pin, a screen-shot preview with some basic information (e.g., clip title, filmmaker name and production year) appears. When clicking on the screen-shot preview, the playout begins and, as shown in Fig. 5 (right), additional information (e.g., title, filmmaker name, production year, original film format, location in the nearby and clip description) about the clip are shown.


Fig. 5. Storytelling through personal modes. When clicking on a pin (left), some basic information appear on the map and when playing the video (right) all the video details (title, description, filmmaker, production year and original film format) are shown.

         3.4.2 Storytelling through preset modes

The preset mode gives users the possibility to follow specific routes or to deepen specific themes.

Themes. Home movies have peculiar stylistic features and themes that tend to repeat themselves. As mentioned, we have identified six themes (i.e., “family rituals”, “everyday life”,“ci- tyscapes”, “public events”, “sports” and“educational activities”) and users can filter the clips according to these themes.  After the selection, the system shows in the map only the pins related to the clips that belong to that particular theme. Fig. 6a shows an example of everyday life.

Routes. As mentioned, we identified six different routes where movies were shot (i.e.,"The historical route", "Theater area and public gardens", "The Via Emilia", "The boulevards", "Compagnoni distict" and "Rosta Nuova district") and users can filter the clips according to these routes. After the selection, the system shows in the map only the pins of the clips related to that particular route. Fig. 6b shows an example of "The Via Emilia"route.

In addition to the browsing mode showed in Fig. 6, users can also browse the preset modes through a map interface. Fig. 7  shows two examples: Fig. 7a shows how the "Everyday Life" theme appears when choosing to browse the theme through a map inter- face; Fig. 7b shows how the "Via Emilia" route appears when users browse this preset route through a map interface. Note that, in addition to the locations where movies were shot, Fig. 7b also highlights the path of the considered route.

4  Experimental evaluation

To evaluate our proposal, we asked for volunteer participants through emails and social network platforms. We have been con- tacted by 116 people (55 male and 51 female, with ages from 16  to 70 year-old and with a moderate computer science literacy), half of them live in Reggio Emilia, while the other half comes from outside Reggio Emilia. Participants’ details are reported in Fig. 8.

     We asked participants to use the system (either through mobile app or Web) and we gave them a link where to find an online questionnaire about the system. The questionnaire aimed to investigate both the experience with the system and the perception of historical contents. In particular, the main goal of the experimental evaluation is to investigate if the system intercepts the attention of the new generations and if it makes historical contents more appealing to them.

4.1    Participants’ experience

To investigate the participants’experience with the system, we asked them to rate the following questions using a Likert scale  from 1 to 5:

Q1: Rate your experience with the system" [1 = Not easy at all, 5 = very easy].

Q2: "Is the system just for people passionate about history?"     [1 = Absolutely Not, 5 = Absolutely Yes].

Q3: "Is  the  system  for  young  people?" [1 = Absolutely  Not,  5 = Absolutely Yes].


(a) Theme                                       (b) Route

Fig. 6. Storytelling through preset modes: a theme mode example (a); a route mode example (b).


(a) Theme on the map           (b) Route on the map

Fig. 7. Storytelling through preset modes on the map: example of a theme (‘‘Everyday Life”) showed on the map (a) and example of a route (‘‘Via Emilia”) showed on the map (b).

Q4: ‘‘Is  the  system  for  senior  people?”  [1 = Absolutely  Not, 5 = Absolutely Yes].

It is to note that questions were mandatory and that we did not provide any guiding phrase for the scale with the exception of val- ues 1 and 5 (i.e., we simply defined what corresponded to 1 and to 5): participants were let free to define their own judgment about 2, 3 and 4 scale levels.

Fig. 9 shows the results obtained through the mean opinion score investigation. In general, participants had a good experience with the system as the average evaluation is very high (4.6); similarly, participants think that the system is well suited for senior people (4.2). It is interesting to note that participants think the sys- tem is also well suited for young people (3.6). The lowest rate has been obtained when asking if the system is just for people passion- ate about history (3.3), which is positive, from the system point of view, because it means that participants think the application is for people in general and not just for a category of them.



Fig. 9. MOS results. Q1: "Rate your experience with the system"[AVG = 4.6, ST.  DEV = 0.8]; Q2: "Is the system just for people passionate about history?" [AVG = 3.3, ST.DEV = 1.3]; Q3: "Is the system for young people?"[AVG = 3.6, ST.DEV = 1.1]; Q4: "Is the system for senior people" [AVG = 4.2, ST.DEV = 0.9].

4.2  Participants’ perception of historical contents

To investigate if and how the system has influenced the percep- tion of historical contents, we asked participants to rate the follow- ing questions using a Likert scale from 1 to 5:

Q5: "Did the system help you understanding how was life in the past?"[1 = Absolutely Not, 5 = Absolutely Yes].

Q6: "After using the system, are you more interested in the history of the city?" [1 = Absolutely Not, 5 = Absolutely Yes].

Q7: "Are you interested in historical topics?" [1 = Absolutely Not, 5 = Absolutely Yes].

Q8: "After using the system, have you changed your way of looking at the urban landscape?" [1 = Absolutely Not, 5 = Abso- lutely Yes].

     Also in this case, questions were mandatory and we did not pro- vide any guiding phrase for the scale with the exception of values 1 and 5.



According to the results obtained and presented in Fig. 10, the system changed participants’ perception about historical contents as it helped them to understand how life was in the past (4.2) and it made them more interested to history (4.1). It is to note that, after using the system, many participants changed the way they look at the urban landscape, but the system mainly affected the interest about history than the way of looking at the urban land- scape. These results are encouraging,  but  to  better  understand  the effects of the system is necessary to deepen the  analysis. Indeed, we want to understand the effects the system produces on people passionate about history and on people who are not interested in history. To this aim, we create two different datasets: one contains data coming from participants who rated question Q7 (‘‘Are you interested in historical topics?”) as 1 or 2; the other con- tains data coming from participants who rated question Q7 as 4 or 5.
The former dataset (i.e., people interested in historical topics) is composed of 34 people, whereas the latter (i.e., people not inter- ested in historical topics) is composed of 66 people. Note that par- ticipants who rated question Q7 as 3 were not considered.
Fig. 11 presents results filtered according to the interest in his- torical topics. In particular, Fig. 11a shows that the system increased their interest about historical contents (4.3) and helped them to understand how the city life was (4.2). Fig. 11b presents similar results obtained by analyzing people not interested in his- tory: the system increased their interest about historical contents (4.1) and helped them to understand how the city life was (3.6).
Fig. 12 presents results filtered according to the age of the par- ticipants. In particular, Fig. 12a shows that the system increased  the interest about historical contents in young participants  (4.4) and helped them to understand how the city life was (4.2). Similarly, Fig. 12b shows that the system increased the interest about historical contents in adult participants (4.1) and helped them to understand how the city life was (4.0). By looking at the two sets of results, it is to note that young people are less interested in his- tory than adult people (3.2 vs 3.6). In general, we found these results very interesting, as they  show  that  the  system  was  able to intercept the attention of young people with respect to historical contents.



Fig. 11. MOS results. Q5: ‘‘Did the system help you understanding how was life in the past?” [(a): AVG = 4.3, ST.DEV = 0.6; (b) AVG = 4.1, ST.DEV = 1.2]; Q6: ‘‘After using the system, are you more interested in the history of the city?” [(a): AVG = 4.2, ST.DEV = 0.7; (a): AVG = 3.6, ST.DEV = 1.2]; Q8: ‘‘After using the system, have you changed your way of looking at the urban landscape?” [(a): AVG = 3.6, ST.DEV = 1.0; (a): AVG = 3.1, ST.DEV = 1.0].



To further deepen the analysis, Fig. 13 only considers partici- pants not interested in history and filtered them according to their age. In both cases, the system increased the interest about histor- ical contents and helped the understanding of how the city  life was. However, young people were more affected by the system  (4.6 vs 3.8 for the interest  in  historical  contents,  and  4.5  vs  3.9 for the understanding of how the city life was). We found these results very interesting because they confirm what we were hoping for; namely, they confirm that the use of a transmedia storytelling system and of an enjoyable alternative to written based historical contents is capable to intercept the attention of the new generations.

Finally, we asked participants what category of people may be more interested in the system and if they would like to have the application in the city where they live (this latter question was asked to participants who used the system but did not reside in the city of Reggio Emilia). Results, reported in Fig. 14, shows that participants think the application is not for a specific category of people (although they think“tourists” would benefit less from the usage of the system) and also shows that participants would like to have the application in the city they live (81% vs. 19%).



Fig. 14. Participants’ opinion about the categories well suited for the application and about the possible availability of the system for the city where they live (here we considered participants living outside the city of Reggio Emilia).

5.  Conclusions

In this paper, we proposed a transmedia storytelling  system that uses private film memories and modern communication technologies to tell the story of our past. The main motivation was to intercept the attention of the new generations. To build this sys- tem, we used an archive of more than 500 h of movies shot by private citizens from 1940 to 1989 and we developed a mobile  application that linked film memories to city places. During the experimental assessment, we observed that users appreciated the system. In particular, the MOS test highlighted that young people, who declared to be not interested in history, stated that the system increased their interest about historical contents. Therefore, results showed that a transmedia storytelling system is able to intercept the attention of the younger generations as it can make historical contents more appealing.
As future developments, we are planning to improve the inter- activity with users by allowing them to suggest routes, themes and places, to improve the social aspect by allowing users to comment and tag videos, to improve the submission of video material by allowing users to upload past and present videos. Furthermore, since the experimental results showed that the system is able to make historical contents more appealing to the younger genera- tions, we will do our best to promote the use of this system in schools.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Emilia Romagna Region and Reggio Emilia Town Hall. The system was realized thanks to a research developed by Home Movies-Archivio Nazionale del Film di Fami- glia and Unimore - Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia (RelabMedia). Authors wish to thank Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, Relab/DCE Universiy of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Agenzia di Informazione e Comunicazione della Regione Emilia-Romagna, BraDypUS Communicating Cultural Her- itage, ‘‘Reggiani per Esempio” (Comune di Reggio Emilia), Paolo Simoni, Erika Vecchietti and all the voluntary participants of the system evaluation.

References

[1]F.R. Bentley, S. Basapur, S.K. Chowdhury, Promoting intergenerational communication through location-based asynchronous video communication, in: Proc. of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, 2011, pp. 31–40, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2030112.2030117. <http://doi.acm.org/10. 1145/2030112.2030117>.

[2]Wendy Slagle (Ed.), Reviews of Oral History Online, Oral History Rev. 32(2) (2005) 89–100. arXiv:http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/2/89.full.pdf

+html,doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ohr.2005.32.2.89.<http://ohr. oxfordjournals.org/content/32/2/89.short>.

[3]S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, J. Unsworth, A Companion to Digital Humanities, Wiley Publishing, 2008.

[4]H.G. Klaebe, M. Foth, J.E. Burgess, M. Bilandzic, Digital storytelling and history lines: community engagement in a master-planned development, in: 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM’07), Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design Pty, Limited, Brisbane,QLD, 2007. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/8985/>.

[5]D. Allan, Mythologizing the nakba: 1948 narratives in the production of collective identity and cultural practice among palestinian refugees in lebanon, in: 13th International Oral History Conference: Memory and Globalisation, Rome, 2004.

[6]D. Rosner, M. Roccetti, G. Marfia, The digitization of cultural practices, Commun. ACM 57 (6) (2014) 82–87, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/ 2602695.2602701. <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2602695.2602701>.

[7]N. Dusi, I. Ferretti, M. Furini, Playthecityre: a visual storytelling system that transforms recorded film memories into visual history, in: 2016 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communication (ISCC), 2016, pp. 85–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISCC.2016.7543719.

[8]H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide, NYU Press, 2008.

[9]K. Anderson, S.J. Smith, Editorial: emotional geographies, Trans. Inst. Brit. Geogr. 26 (1) (2001) 7–10, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1475-5661.00002.

[10]L. Roberts, Film, Mobility and Urban Space. A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2012.

[11]J.E. Burgess, M. Foth, H.G. Klaebe, Everyday creativity as civic engagement: a cultural citizenship view of new media, in: Communications Policy & Research Forum, Sydney, 2006. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/5056/>.

[12]M. Frisch, J. Abraham, J. Suchanek, P. Dean, Media reviews, Oral History Rev. 32 (2005) 89–100.

[13]A. Bujari, M. Ciman, O. Gaggi, C.E. Palazzi, Using gamification to discover cultural heritage locations from geo-tagged photos, Personal Ubiq. Comput. 21 (2) (2017) 235–252, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0989-6. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0989-6>.

[14]O. Gaggi, Discovering local attractions from geo-tagged photos, in: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC’13, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2013, pp. 730–735, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2480362.2480502. <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2480362.2480502>.

[15]J. Procyk, C. Neustaedter, Gems: the design and evaluation of a location-based storytelling game, in: Proc.of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2014, pp. 1156–1166, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/ 2531602.2531701. <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531701>.

[16]J. Procyk, C. Neustaedter, Gems: a location-based game for supporting family storytelling, in: CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2013, pp. 1083–1088, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468550.

<http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2468356.2468550>.

[17]E.Y.-T. Shen, H. Lieberman, G. Davenport, What’s next? Emergent storytelling from video collection, in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2009, pp. 809–818, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518825. <http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518825>.

[18]N. Adabala, N. Datha, J. Joy, C. Kulkarni, A. Manchepalli, A. Sankar, R. Walton, An interactive  multimedia framework for digital heritage narratives, in: Proc.   of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia, 2010, pp. 1445–1448, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1873951.1874240.

[19]C. Harkema, C. Nygren, Historypin for library image collections: new modes of access for unique materials at the university of saskatchewan library, Partnership: Can. J. Libr. Inform. Pract. Res. 7(2). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10. 21083/partnership.v7i2.1970. <https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/ article/view/1970>.

[20]N. Dusi, M. Federico, M. Furini, Movieremix: having fun playing with videos, Int. J. Computer Games Technol. (2011), http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/ 857371.

[21]Y. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Indiana University Press, 2001.

[22]J. Carmigniani, B. Furht, M. Anisetti, P. Ceravolo, E. Damiani, M. Ivkovic, Augmented reality technologies, systems and applications, Multimedia Tools Appl. 51 (1) (2011) 341–377, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0660-6.

[23]M. Furini, F. Geraci, M. Montangero, M. Pellegrini, On using clustering algorithms to produce video abstracts for the web scenario, in: Proceedings of the IEEE Consumer Communication & Networking 2008 (CCNC2008), pp. 1112–1116.

[24]M. Furini, Fast play: a novel feature for digital consumer video devices”, IEEE Trans. Consum. Electron. 54 (2) (2008) 513–520.

[25]M. Furini, On ameliorating the perceived playout quality in chunk-driven p2p media streaming systems, in: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2007), IEEE, New York, NY, USA, 2007, pp. 1679–1684, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2007.281.

[26]M. Furini, F. Geraci, M. Montangero, M. Pellegrini, STIMO: STIll and MOving video storyboard for the web scenario, Multimedia Tools Appl. 46 (1) (2010) 47–69, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-009-0307-7.

[27]M. Gerla, D. Maggiorini, C. Palazzi, A. Bujari, A survey on interactive games over mobile networks, Wireless Commun. Mob. Comput. 13  (3)  (2013)  212– 229, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/wcm.2197.

[28]M. Furini, V. Tamanini, Location privacy and public metadata in social media platforms: attitudes, behaviors and opinions, Multimedia Tools Appl. 74 (21) (2015) 9795–9825, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2151-7.

[29]M. Furini, Users behavior in location-aware services: digital natives vs digital immigrants, Adv. Human-Comput. Interact. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/ 2011/678165.



总编：凌逾

责编：柯彤彤

往期精彩

跨界经纬学术 | 功利与理性碰撞下的“中国趣味”——东印度公司对瑞典文化与社会思想的影响

跨界经纬书评 | 凌逾：环球小说暗涌

跨界经纬学术 | 朱寿桐：中国现代艺术文化的结构形态

关于投稿：投稿邮箱kuajietaiji@163.com。

要求：提供作者个人简介100字左右，照片1-2张。

关于赞赏：三分之一作者稿酬、三分之一编辑酬劳、三分之一公众号运营。

【跨界经纬】  第1747期

关注跨媒介  跨学科  跨艺术

跨地域  跨文化理论及创意作品