StoryArk is an asset management and storytelling platform built to reveal relationships within cultural history collections.
Relationship illuminates meaning
meaning reveals story
story engages
What is StoryArk?
Using a suite of user-friendly tools, collections are enriched by crosslinking assigned data points to connect relational assets using custom taxonomies, thus bubbling up the embedded stories for curation in an online museum.
Seeking the sweet spot between the casual visitor and information researcher, StoryArk allows multiple methods of browsing and searching via its exploratory interface, which showcases its key principles:
Focus on relationships, not just objects themselves
We recognize that many people who engage with cultural history collections will not have a deep prior knowledge of the subject and the stories. Topic and subtopic pages are a key focal point in the site design, to draw people in and provide a “landscape” for their exploration.
Provide thematic entry points that make unfamiliar subjects approachable and exploratory
Assets are classified at a very detailed level using an extensive vocabulary that reflects the different thematic, contextual, and personal relationships found in cultural histories. This deep tagging offers users unexpected insights about the material as well as launch-points for further, more focused exploration of a particular subject.
Browse with lateral navigation making every page a portal
Browsing in StoryArk is to experience lateral navigation. Lateral navigation works to cut across pre-determined hierarchical relationships that tend to silo assets, in order to encourage discovery and serendipity. This approach lends itself to exploring relationships, the defining unit of cultural history, by expanding the user’s choice of what’s next. StoryArk’s style of digital storytelling encourages an active user whom we envision as residing at a center point surrounded by a constellation of data points each equidistant from the user.
Allow the collection to grow, and the design patterns to extend for use with other related collections
With its intuitive toolset and extendable architecture, managing collections in StoryArk can be done without technical expertise. The extensive, yet user-friendly, administration interface provides all the tools needed to upload a variety of media types and create the data points that link them together.
Texas Coastal Bend Collection
The Texas Coastal Bend Collection is a cultural heritage site focusing on the ranching culture in Victoria, Refugio, and Goliad Counties. Featuring black cowboys, vaqueros and the Irish immigration, the collection includes over 9,000 photographs and 1,400 hours of audio interviews as well as books, maps, family papers, 19th century ledgers, diaries, videos, genealogies, and artifacts all illuminating a unique tri-cultural history.
