Submitted by: healinghistories.org

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation recently launched a new interactive documentary project called Healing Histories. This innovative effort showcases authentic stories about communities across the country working to heal racial divides and is illustrative of the future of digital storytelling – a rich, user-driven, interactive experience utilizing a mix of content and media types.

To achieve this media rich experience our developers utilized HTML5’s audio and video capabilities as well as CSS3 and object-oriented Javascript. This enabled a single site to work across desktop and mobile devices with minimal additional programming – previously reserved only for Flash-based sites.

This site is amazing. It’s one of the only really well executed multimedia experiences that I’ve come across. Yes, it has some usability issues, but for the most part I really admire the way that this site pulls a viewer into the emotional experience of the people in the videos and images. Here is a case where the content is greatly enhanced by the the emotional impact of seeing real people speak from their hearts. It’s great.

It’s more of an experience, than website and that’s something for us to really think about: How can we get users emotionally invested? How can content become more than just words? Are feelings more important than fact?

Food for thought.