The Pararchive Project

If you’ve been following the progress of our Technology Workshops, you’ll already be able to imagine Gladstone Pottery Museum: it’s there in our very first photos of the striking red brick bottle kilns that so vivified the website.  Located in a Victorian pottery factory, it’s where the team experienced, first hand, tales of the Potteries…

Anna Anthropy’s queers in love at the end of the world is a provocative example of a brief game created using Twine, “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories”. Anthropy’s game takes place in the last ten seconds of the world’s existence, forcing the player to make a series of decisions about how to spend the end of…

Having toyed with the idea of spatial exploration for accessing archive material since the initial Pararchive meeting I attended in December, I pitched the idea to Arduino Manchester members at our last meeting to some positive responses. Initially, I thought this might involve handling objects or walking ‘through’ a story in a gallery space, but…

The Pararchive team has been reflecting on the merits of linear storytelling versus interactive non-linear storytelling. Though we’re still partway through the process of understanding the needs of our various communities, the question of linear vs interactive is already beginning to shape some of our design decisions. There’s great value in stories which have a…

What do MOSI’s archives hold for Pararchive project members?  This is what Daniel and I set out to discover through a behind-the-scenes visit to the Manchester museum under the expert guidance of Jan Hicks, MOSI’s Archives and Information Manager. We started out from its Collections Centre, which holds about a third of the objects not…