Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Narratives enable the formation of personal and community identities, and the construction of meanings. Although increasingly popular, digital storytelling still faces some critical challenges: creation of content on tangible and intangible heritage, classification and re-use of existing documents and clips, cooperative and coordinated production of new content. Moreover, for effective exploratory paths and a more analytical approach to browsing material, contents must be set in the overall perspective of the narrations, to ensure coherent and effective narrations. Finally, validation and dissemination of related outcomes must respect scientific standards. This chapter describes a prototype of a web application supporting multimedia narratives. So far, it implements the engine for creating and managing the activity ‘networks-of-stories’, to create nonlinear and open multimedia narrations. It has tools that: support educators, also in contrasting learning difficulties, in developing inclusive and collaborative educational practices; support museums' curators; facilitate crowd sourcing; create a personal web repository of contents and connections; share contents to be published, if approved by the administrator; create a network of contents and applications, at different levels for different users and specific needs. Our web application has two key innovative functions: recording and retrieval of users' activities; narratives presented through a set of related clips (videos, albums, texts) are seen in a conceptual map.