Storytelling through Digital Scholarly Editions

Storytelling is the interactive art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story, while encouraging the listener’s imagination [1]. It is a powerful process that implies to build a bidirectional relation with the public, that is therefore elevated from the role of a mere viewer, to the one of engaged audience. Storytelling has gained a central role also in scientific communication, now that there is  ample evidence that it can be a powerful way to nurture engagement with science too.[2]

Digital scholarly editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and practice.[3]. But can digital scholarly editions be seen as a way to communicate to a larger public and engage with an audience that is not necessarily part of the research community? In our experience, the digital publication of a scholarly edition is not a mere digitization of a printed scholarly edition, but a specific publication made of a set of digital tools, specific contents and functionalities. It can become a powerful instrument for collaboration among researchers and practitioners and a sound dissemination medium.

We have developed a web solution called Muruca that supports from one side the needs of research teams of collaborating together and delivering scholarly publications in digital format, and at the same time the need to increase visibility of the research outputs. Thanks to this demo we present how Muruca can enhance storytelling in scientific communication. In order to do so we are going to tell you a story:  the tale of tales, that can be experienced by accessing Muruca Racconta  http://murucaracconta.muruca.cloud/en 

Muruca Racconta (Muruca Tales) is a digital edition related to fairy tales, that extends from Ancient Egypt to the present day, and geographically from the Euro-Asian to the South American area and has been developed to present all the possible functionalities of the Muruca framework. 

The project includes a page dedicated to fairy tales, with the possibility to view the original and translated text (when present), one page dedicated to the reasons, or the morals contained in each fairy tale, and one to the paths that allow you to follow a particular narrative theme.

Moreover, the project offers the possibility to visualize chronologically and geographically the fairy tales with a dedicated timeline and an interactive map. Tales are defined according to metadata and morals classified in the Thompson index [4] to create correlations among them. 

The main functionalities of the Muruca solution can be summarized as follow:

Data entry

• Create “records” for each work with its metadata, like in physical libraries

• Associate transcriptions and images or other multimedia. 

Content publishing

• Possibility to add editorial contents to the public interface

• Possibility to add bibliographic sources

• User centered and scientifically valid data visualization tools

Enhanced search functionalities

• Consultation tools allows to filter your data or make really refined searches

Visualization of TEI transcriptions

• Integrated with TEI-Publisher 

• Fullsearch tool on texts

Data model and  Preservation

• Flexible data model definition

• API in JSON-LD format

• Integrated with Zenodo

REFERENCES

[1] National Storytelling Network https://storynet.org/what-is-storytelling/ 

[2] Dahlstrom, M. F. (2014). ‘Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (Supplement 4), pp. 13614–13620. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320645111

[3] SAHLE, Patrick. 2. What is a Scholarly Digital Edition? In: Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices [online]. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016 (generated 25 février 2022). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/obp/3397>. ISBN: 9782821884007

[4] https://sites.ualberta.ca/~urban/Projects/English/Motif_Index.htm