Interactive personal storytelling: an ethnographic study and simulation of apartheid-era narratives

This paper reports on a digital storytelling project which seeks to create interactive storytelling of personal experience narratives. We begin with an ethnographic study of two resident storytellers at the District Six Museum, Cape Town, Noor Ebrahim and Joe Schaffers, who tell audience their personal Apartheid-era narratives. An analysis of their narratives and audience interactions led to the design a digital storytelling prototype in the form of a virtual environment containing two storytellre agents based on Joe and Noor. These agents simulated two interactions: questions in which users could ask the storyteller agents questions; and exchange structures where storyteller agents ask users questions. We evaluated the effectiveness of these in a controlled experiment (n=101) and found that questions led to significant increases in narrative engagement (p=0.05) and interest (p=0.02) while exchange structures significantly improved narrative enjoyment (p=0.004), engagement (p=0.002) and interest (p=0.02).