Last spring I attended a lecture at the UNC School of Journalism by Professor Rich Beckman, a pioneer of the interactive online documentary. Destined for a new position in Florida, the lecture was primarily a retrospective of his and his students’ award-winning work. At the end of his lecture, I asked him how long it will take for interactive storytelling to be as ubiquitous as pen and paper; when will the layperson be able to make the kinds of multimedia stories that he and his students are famous for? He answered that that time would never come. We need skilled journalists, he said, skilled editors, skilled media producers to tell these stories for us. That kind of work, he said, would remain in the purview of the trained professional journalist.

I suspect that what Beckman meant is that the skills required to produce interactive documentaries currently require extensive training in a specialized (and expensive) software suite. This software is used to manipulate media into a limited number of interactive arrangements for an end user to consume, and it is the skill of the producer that ultimately ensures the hoped-for user experience is had. If this continues to be the primary workflow for the creation of digital stories, Beckman could indeed be right about our future storytellers. I’d like very much to build the tools that prove him wrong.

To democratize digital storytelling and maximize its interactive possibilities, I believe we must begin to uncover the informational roots of stories, their underlying components and the primary digital documents that can help us tell them. Beckman’s idea of digital storytelling is based on using software to manipulate media. However, the potential of digital storytelling lies in using software and databases to leverage the connections between media– and the connections between media and people. I want to make tools that place the power of interactive multimedia storytelling into the hands of the young, the old, the disenfranchised, and the ignored.