Your Heritage, Your Story
This is a valuable text for inclusion in any virtual library. Your Heritage, Your Story is an interactive documentary, created in the United Kingdom (UK) exploring archaeology and heritage through the perspective of immigrants. The text is available on a website, enhancing accessibility across multiple devices. The author Hamzaki notes that this text has been designed to promote equity and justice within the archaeological sector and beyond. The careful selection of digital design tools and layout of Your Heritage, Your Story strengthens the authors ability to achieve her lifelong work of promoting social justice and change (Council for British Archaeology, 2023).
The documentary follows Annabelle from the United States and Teresa from Hong Kong as they present their new life in the UK through a range of short films. The story effectively achieves its purpose by subtly examining the influence of archaeology on a person’s sense of belonging (Council for British Archaeology, 2023). Hamzaki effectively shares the underrepresented perspectives that are often missed by the public. The documentary is particularly interesting due to the themes in this text as they challenge the notion that these stories are usually presented from white, middle-class perspectives.
Your Place, Your Story successfully incorporates a range of multimedia elements in the text. The visuals and audio throughout this digital documentary carefully capture the day-to-day life of immigrants and the developments of their personal heritage to deeply connect with the audience and drive change. Through the exposure of multiple cultures across the globe using an internet platform to share this digital documentary, Hamzaki has been able to bring all reader’s awareness to social justice through the careful design of the short films that are included. The layout of the text allows readers to personally select elements that resonate with and relate to them.
Your Place, Your Story expertly meets the reader’s needs through an engaging home page that entices the reader to immediately want to explore more. There are photos of warm, smiling faces and the background visual is a rolling film of a British streetscape, signifying the passing of time and movement through place. Hamzaki further captures the audience with the inclusion of comforting, safe, peaceful music, juxtaposing the journey of the two immigrants who are featured. The future of digital literature is in texts that seamlessly incorporate a range of technologies (Nuttall, 2017) and Your Place, Your Story expertly achieves this.
The format of this interactive documentary ensures that it is accessible to all readers with internet access. The use of spoken audio and subtitles to support this documentary ensures the information is available for all audiences to comprehend. There is a varying degree of interactivity throughout, catering for a range in user’s technical expertise. The series of short films allows key details to be presented in a purposeful, succinct manner. These roll through automatically or the reader uses icons to navigate in a linear manner through each. Alternatively, an interactive mind map provides a visual of how these films are interconnected and the viewer can select the specific video they want to watch. As Cersosimo (2019) highlights, a key component of effective digital literature is the ability to effortlessly align storytelling and digital video, and this is achieved brilliantly in the creation of Your Place, Your Story.
The inclusion of short films with an array of focus themes allows Hamzaki to relate to a wide array of readers, particularly through connections to Annabelle’s and Teresa’s stories. The intended audience for this documentary is new archaeologists, historical and geographical researchers. The audience may extend beyond the initial key themes, with connections to water, further study, family, history, place, culture, loss and much more. These themes are interconnected seamlessly as the digital story plays through.
Interactive documentaries are continually emerging as a text form and there are similar texts such as this on the market. Nogueira (2020) notes that the creators are continuing to establish and stretch the rules for what can be achieve through these texts. Your Place, Your Story is a user-friendly example of how the tools and features of this format can be used to bring about future focused informative documentaries, to make positive change in our unstable society. This text is free of charge, allowing readers from all socio-economic backgrounds to access this important information and its accessibility on a digital platform enables wide sharing and real-time discussions across the globe.
This text is useful for many educational settings including schools, universities, libraries and museums. It will inspire students of all ages who are wishing to study (archaeology and beyond), travel or explore different cultures and backgrounds. It is highly recommended as a must read for everyone.
References:
Cersosimo, G. (2019). Digital storytelling. SAGE Publications Ltd.
https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036853253
Concil for British Archaeology (2023). Interactive documentary “your heritage, your
story”. Council for British Archaeology.
https://www.archaeologyuk.org/resource/interactive-documentary-your-heritage-your-story.html
Hamzaki, Z. (2023). Your heritage, your story. Council for British Archaeology.
https://yourheritageyourstory.github.io/#Your_Heritage__Your_Story
Nogueira, P. (2020). Features and trends across interactive documentaries. iNOVA
Nuttall, E. (2017). Truly digital books require truly digital thinking. The Bookseller.
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