Hello Danny,
I just wanted to say that's *wonderful* - I had a completely enjoyable time going through it all, (before reco-ing it from @nmdc - I hope lots of other people pick up its greatness). The one thing I might tweak is making it a bit more obvious how you move from chapter to chapter so the less technically adept don't give up, but otherwise it's beautifully judged, and by the end of ten minutes or so of going through it, it's amazing how much you find you've learned while scarcely noticing it (must be the mesmerism).
Oh, something went a bit wrong for me on the 'Goats in Victorian dress' page, but that could be because I'm on a lousy connection. I particularly enjoyed 'guess the weight of the tumour'.
How common is this sort of immersive experience on museum websites at the moment, or are you leading the field? I remember a year or two back, the Guardian used a similar system to tell the story of an Australian wildfire: http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/may/26/firestorm-bushfire-dunalley-holmes-family - and with that too, I went from being not-enormously-interested-in-Australian-weather to completely drawn in by how well it was told: I then expected there to be an explosion of this sort of narrative, but I haven't seen it - don't know if I'm looking in the wrong places, or if (as you imply) it's a long, hard job getting something like this to work really well, so not one to attempt to knock off every other month, even if you're a huge news organisation.
Having made one like this, do you think there will be economies of scale if Wellcome do further microsites like this? And would it be tactless of me to ask what this kind of project costs? - or is it all wrapped up in your day job and so hard to tell?
Cheers,
Kate
From: "Birchall, Danny" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Mindcraft: a new digital story from Wellcome Collection
Dear MCGers
I
thought you might be interested in something Wellcome Collection
launches today, the first in a series (we hope) of 'digital stories'
exploring our collections. It's called 'Mindcraft' and tells a six-part
history of mesmerism and mind control in the nineteenth century history.
http://digitalstories.wellcomecollection.org/
Aside
from a little self-publicity (forgive me, it's been a long haul), I
thought it might be interesting for the list because it's an atypical
digital museum project. We wanted to find new ways of telling stories
online, using our digitised collections as sources, rather than creating
something that explained an existing digitised collection. We also
wanted to expose people to original and new digitised content (some of
which was digitised specially for this project) without dropping them
into researcher-oriented catalogues, so we've embedded Wellcome
Library's player into the experience - you can access the digitised
resources (and download hi-res Creative Commons images, natch) from
within the story.
Your thoughts on what we've done (and the more general issues raised) would be very welcome.
Thanks
Danny
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