Abstract:

Organizations, families, institutions evolve a shared culture and history. In this work, we describe a system to facilitate conversation and storytelling about this collective past. Users explore digital archives of shared materials such as photographs, video, and text documents on a tabletop interface. Both the software and the interface encourage natural conversation and reflection. This work is an application of our ongoing research on systems for multiple, co-present users to explore digital collections. In this paper, we present a case study of our own group history along with the software extensions developed for this scenario. These extensions include methods for easily branching off from and returning to previous threads of the exploration, incorporating background contexts that support a variety of view points and flexible story sharing, and supporting the active and passive discovery of relevant information.