The Pararchive Project

Through our accelerator program and coworking space, and with the help of a group of amazing mentors from diverse backgrounds, Oregon Story Board is uniquely positioned to help digital storytelling companies grow their businesses in Oregon. oregonstoryboard.org  

…a series of workshops involving the creation of several interactive, rich-media museum stories. Digital narrations were authored by experts (museum educators, archaeologists, designers, writers, media producers, and other related professionals) who were brought together and collaborated in numerous intensive, hands-on participatory design workshops. The events were monitored in order to both evaluate the usability of…

“…it’s a framework in which to create. I’m a big designer. When I write a screenplay, I’ve diagrammed the architecture of the story. There’s really got to be a structure; art demands it.” More at… Boyhood director Richard Linklater shares his keys to great storytelling

Since Imran, Tom and myself started working on the Pararchive project back in October 2013, its working title has been something of a running joke. While it worked as a reminder of what the project aimed to achieve (a ‘parallel archive’ of individual, rather than institutional, commentary on archival material), it was clumsy shorthand. Besides,…

Though Pararchive’s origins lie in the exploration of archives and heritage, we realised at a very earlier stage that the route through this was storytelling. We always knew that personal narratives and biographies would help to locating our users in what might be otherwise overwhelmingly voluminous collections and historical contexts. I think most of us understand that writing…

  Pararchive was recently invited to take part in the Festival of Ideas in Rusholme, Manchester. More commonly known as the Rusholme Festival of Ideas – which I will henceforth abbreviate as (RFoI) in this piece, the event provided an opportunity for local communities and people to map their ideas and perspectives of how they…

This is slight diversion from our usual beat of stories on archives and storytelling, but interesting to our project nonetheless. Games studio Versu have created Prompter, a programming language for narrative. When, say, Aaron Sorkin or J. J. Abrams are writing a screenplay, they’re not typing little essays to specify that REPUBLICAN FLACK #2 or SCIENCE OFFICER…

A travel app that puts storytelling and cultural immersion above all else. More at humanity.tv/about.html…

We have always had the notion of Pararchive stories inhabiting a tapestry of connected tales – with characters, places, objects, institutions and times as their connective threads. With the notion of serendipity at the core of our design philosophy, our hope was that these threads would allow new narrative patterns, paths and perspectives to emerge both organically and explicitly. Lately I’ve…

  Pararchive won a small grant to participate in this year’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Festival of Social Science which took place from 1st – 8th November. The aim of the Festival was to showcase some of the “leading” social science research being undertaken across the country and to demonstrate how such work…