Multimedia Storyboarding: Textual Analysis of the Digital Age

By Christopher Meltzer, Storyboard Project

With the turn of the twenty-first century, literary interpretation and analysis began to take on new mediums. One of the most prominent interfaces used in literary interpretation is the Internet. The Internet allows users to navigate their way through various websites with just a few clicks of a button. Students in the modern era have become adept at using this interface as a means to gather information, including literary interpretation, because of its accessibility and user-friendly characteristics. By having a work of literature like Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp transposed onto a medium that is as high in demand as the Internet, students are able to easily navigate there way through various hyperlinked items that connect to numerous forms of analysis and interpretations.

The Multimedia Storyboarding: Going Beyond CliffsNotes® project (hereafter referred to as The Multimedia Storyboarding Project), recently developed at the University of California, Santa Barbara takes the literary works of Ernest Hemingway and transposes it onto an Internet interface. This allows users to interactively engage in the analysis of the text. The project is an interactive storyboard hyperlinked to other web pages, which go into a further description of the text. It is composed of eight different frames on the home page, each entitled with an element of a specific scene’s plot and a photograph to allow for visual representation. Students in the digital age are highly visually responsive because of the rise of effective advertising as well as visual representations of various things in modern society.  Taking this into consideration, the project used theme-specific photographs to represent the eight key scenes of the text. On the main site, there is also a hyperlinked item that will navigate the viewer to a “blog-like” section of the website that allows for interactive engagement by the viewers. By enabling the user to view different analyses of various scenes and also to interactively engage in the discussion of the text, the website can effectively display various interpretations. In order to create this website, the developers went though a methodological process using various tools, such as the software TaPor and iWeb.

A good example of the type of story that would be available on this website is Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp.  In order to create an effective storyboard, the developers of the project had to close-read the text to decide on the most important events of the plot. By deciding on the most important elements of the plot, the developers were then able to create thematically designed web pages for each one through the program iWeb. With each scene depicted on a different page, there had to be some sort of element that would tie the entire site together so the reader would not be distracted or confused. Therefore, the website is strung together by a serious of adjectives that are hyperlinked to each page located along the top of the home page. This provides another area, besides just the photos, that is hyperlinked to different pages and keeps the plot in a linear order. One purpose of a storyboard is to create a linear procession of events, usually proceeding from left to right. As such, the project takes the same idea and transforms the literary work Indian Camp into a processional storyboard that has its design based on different themes interpreted from the story. Although the website itself features various forms of analysis, such as character analysis, plot summary, and an interpretation of themes, it also uses different technologies, beyond the ordinary, to analyze the work.

Unlike other literary interpretive websites, such as Cliffsnotes®, The Multimedia Storyboarding Project goes beyond plot summary and character analysis. The website features extensive links to outside resources that aid the reader in an understanding of the literary work. For example, the blog-section of the website allows for readers to add their own interpretations and analyses, as well as a link to the tool of analysis known as TaPor. “TAPoR is a collection of online text-analysis tools--ranging from the basic to sophisticated--that allows users to run search, statistical, collocation…and other "tools" on texts.”  As an example, the developers used three different applications of TaPor in order to analyze the word choice used by Hemingway in his short story, Indian Camp. The different ways that the words were strung together as well as how many times they recurred allowed the developers to interpret various ideas about the eight different scenes, such as the themes of masculinity and feminity. With this element exposed, they placed the different analyses on the website as well as links to the actual site. This was done in order to allow the viewer to see what the developers have analyzed, and to permit the viewer to create their own analysis. Unlike Cliffsnotes®, the website goes beyond the literal interpretation of the text and uses these other sources to help the reader get a better understanding of the text he/she is analyzing. One question that remains unanswered, however, is why the developers used the medium of a multimedia storyboard to represent a literary work as opposed to something else?

In order to best represent a literary work in a linear fashion, a multimedia storyboard was used. This allows the developers to keep the story in a linear progression while featuring various textual analyses. According to Jane Stevens, a professor of multimedia journalism at UC Berkeley, a storyboard can serve a variety of purposes, including literary representation.  With this in mind, the group took the idea of a multimedia storyboard and created a website that would best help an individual be able to interpret a literary work. Other mediums, such as a three-dimensional representation or a visual collage of images, help in analyzing only one aspect of a literary work. With a storyboard, the group was able to analyze multiple aspects of the literary work and create an interactive interface in which the viewer can contribute his/her own analysis. This junction of analyses allow for various viewers to collaborate on themes, character analysis, and other interpretations of the text. With the medium of a hyperlinked storyboard, the navigation of the viewer throughout the site is simple and efficient. It also permits the literary work to be displayed differently according to different parts of the story (i.e. theme represented by colors, plot represented by frame titles, etc.). The storyboard that was used in The Multimedia Storytelling Project is a prime example of how a literary work could be analyzed and represented. As an example, the developers created the site using Hemingway’s Indian Camp as an example.

Now that the methodologies of the multimedia storyboard have been explained, it is appropriate to discuss the implications of the project and how they were presented through the example of Hemingway’s short story, Indian Camp. For example, the original framework of the storyboard allows the reader to see how the story is represented visually through photographs. Through these pictures, the reader obtains a literary interpretation of the scene as well as a visual interpretation. Along with the actual photographs used, the aesthetic quality of the site mimics the mood of the story. Throughout the story, somber events such as the suicide of the Indian father occur. With these events in mind, the developers chose black and white as the color scheme of the site to represent the melancholic mood. By using this idea of matching aesthetic quality to the meaning of the story when creating a multimedia storyboard for any text, the viewer would be able to get the same feeling that he/she received while reading the story. Visual representation plays a large role when creating a model for a literary work, primarily because it is the easiest to comprehend in modern society.  These visual cues are not only the easiest to comprehend, but they are also the first thing one sees when entering the site. This first impression is responsible for how the viewer feels while navigating through the entire site. By having the color scheme and photographs represent the mood of the story, the mood for the website is created as well.

Upon clicking each of the different photographs and/or key words, the viewer is taken to another page and provided an in-depth analysis of a specific scene. On the site, the title Hesitation represents scene I of Hemingway’s Indian Camp. It provides the plot summary, character analysis, a visual representation, and a link to external sources and themes. In the plot summary, the developers of the project gave a brief synopsis of the events that occurred giving the viewer a framework of what is being discussed on that page. The character analysis of Nick Adams (the young boy portrayed in the story) gives the reader a perspective to his character and how he was portrayed during the specific scene. Unlike Cliffsnotes® where a character analysis is provided in respect to the entire story, the character analysis featured in The Multimedia Storyboarding Project provides a character analysis for an individual pertaining to the specific scene. No longer does the reader only get a very brief and general character analysis, but receives a more narrowly focused and detailed description of a character. Below the character analysis are two different links: one connecting to a separate page for theme analysis and one connecting to a separate site for interactivity and interpretation. The link that connects to a theme page does not connect to a general, overarching theme page that is the same for every scene.  It is instead linked to a specific page that has a detailed explanation of themes specific to the individual scene. Like the character analysis, this allows the viewer to gain a more in-depth and detailed explanation of scene-specific themes, rather than broad, general, incomprehensive ones.

As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a link on the scene page that navigates the viewer to the blog-like section, which focuses on literary interpretation and interactive engagement. This section of the site allowed the developers to place links on the page that would navigate the viewer to research reports, annotated bibliographies, and interpretive essays. These various journals and articles are provided for the viewer in order to get a better insight to the different interpretations that he/she can have about the story as well as gain some background knowledge about the medium and text. For Indian Camp, the developers were able to gain insight as to what themes and motifs that he used most frequently. For example, some of their research led to the discovery of past events in Hemingway’s life that may have influenced certain elements of the story. The prime example of this is Hemingway’s and his father’s dealing with suicide. The famous author and his father had both committed suicide, very similar to that of the Indian father that committed suicide in the story. This research was highly relevant to an understanding between the author and his work, which would not be found in other literary guides. Through this same process of researching and integrating, the viewer gains highly insightful and relevant information about the author, societal context, and other pertinent information about a given text.

One of the largest differences between The Multimedia Storyboarding Project and other online guides is the availability for interactive engagement between the viewer and the developer. Other sites do not have availability for interaction or for viewers to be able to place their own interpretation on the site for others to view. With the storyboard that was created at UC Santa Barbara, there is the availability for discussion to take place. With the links provided to outside research, different interpretations, and textual analysis using TaPor, there exist specific idea categories for individuals to add comments. These comments can be left regarding the idea that is described in the category or something entirely different, yet related to the text.  For the first time, any viewer who has a specific interpretation of the literary work is able to place their own interpretation on a public site where others can respond and create discussion. Since the site developed is only a prototype, there are no comments left specifically about Hemingway’s Indian Camp. Still, the site did function properly and is ready for these features to be used in the future.

The philosophical ideals behind the creation of The Multimedia Storyboarding Project are that of a one-stop research guide that provides the viewer with an in-depth and interactive analysis of a specific text. Although the project that was created is only of a single text and does not have interactive engagement by viewers, it successfully provides an extensive analysis of the given text. Ideally, the website would contain a wide variety of different literary works that would all feature the same organizational pattern and encompass the same functions and features. The full version of this site would also enable the viewer to easily browse through different categories and genres of texts. By using the example of Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp, the project developers were able to show how the medium of a multimedia storyboard consisting of hyperlinked web pages would be highly effective in the analysis of a specific literary text. It was the philosophy of the developers that the reader of a text should be able to witness various interpretations, journals, and articles about a specific text without having to do extensive research. By having all of these resources gathered into one specific location, such knowledge is easily available, efficient, and highly desirable.

Through the medium of a multimedia storyboard and using the Internet as an appropriate interface, developers at the University of California Santa Barbara created The Multimedia Storyboarding Project in order to help students analyze and gain knowledge about a specific text. By transforming the text into a hyperlinked interactive database with consolidated information, the reader gains a different insight into the text, and is given the opportunity to provide their own analysis of the text for others to take into consideration and discuss. The given example of Ernest Hemingway’s Indian Camp proves that this project is highly effective and could potentially be a highly beneficial and efficient site for students studying literature.

Works Cited