This week, The Guardian newspaper launched a piece on Leaving Gaza. It is a powerful example of online storytelling that creatively embeds original material. It is worth looking at this piece more closely to see what we may learn for digital storytelling on museum and heritage websites [1].
‘Why must you tell this story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.’
Pixar’s rule #14 of great storytelling.
Leaving Gaza tells the story of Palestinian friends Nahed, who lives in the US, and Hamada, who lived in Gaza at the time of the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis with a further 250 taken hostage last October. You navigate their story simply by scrolling.
It gets personal straight away: we are reading WhatsApp messages the two friends exchange. It’s personal not just because of their content, but because most of us will check in with our friends through messages like these. We can relate. Nahed and Hamada are like us.
Except, they live in circumstances most of us have never experienced. In a few short (!) paragraphs, the piece sketches Nahed and Hamada’s contexts as the story begins: Nahed is an (involuntary?) expat, Hamada’s planned tour with his band is a challenge because of travel restrictions imposed by Israel.
‘Build tension whether through curiosity, intrigue or actual danger.’
Chris Anderson, TED head curator on storytelling
Right there, the piece starts to increase tension. I’m invested: is Hamada going to make it to the US? Especially since I’ve just been shown the social media video of a song performed by him and Nahed, posted by UNRWA USA. The video does far more than illustrate how the two met and that they are both musicians: it adds emotion. It’s a beautiful song called ‘a lover from palestine’, performed to raise money for Palestinian refugees.
The WhatsApp messages that follow the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel drive the story forward, along with Hamada’s social media posts. The latter in particular, showing us destroyed neighbourhoods, singing songs with children amid the rubble, or just jamming on a battery-powered keyboard, give the war we already know so well a deeper meaning: here is one person’s lived experience.
The original material – the messages, the videos – are neither add-ons to the story nor are they themselves the story. They are used to tell the story, to take you from one story element to the next, with only the bare minimum of prose providing a contextual frame that holds it all together.
That, to me, is what makes this such a great template to use in a heritage or museum online context. It requires a lot of careful editing and selection to go beyond a slick presentation of stories about objects, or the invitation to explore objects in depth or from a different perspective [2]. If we manage to find the story in this and tell it, then an online piece or exhibition like Leaving Gaza can really touch people on a personal level and, dare I say it, make it relevant them.
NOTES
[1] In my view, this will not work as well for digital interpretation on-site, for the simple reason that it takes time to engage with pieces like Leaving Gaza. You’re staring at a screen. On-site, I propose making the exhibition tell the story instead – it gives you many and often emotive and immersive options.
[2] I’m not suggesting that such online presentations are not worthwhile. In 2021, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar received a DigAMus Award (an initiative in Germany to acknowledge good digital interpretation by museums) for an online exhibition called Ich hasse die Natur (I Hate Nature). It presents photographs of objects which are explained through text, alongside an invitation to listen to a playlist of music intended to facilitate a different perception of these objects. It’s very well done technically and really interesting to browse. Personally, though, I feel there’s a story there, and the presentation would have been much more impactful if done as storytelling.
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