In Marsha Kinder’s “Designing a Database Cinema”, the use of database narratives was explained through the analysis of The Labyrinth Project. Database narratives are very essential in providing accurate knowledge of historical events through storytelling. The Labyrinth Project combines new technologies with old events and concepts, such as Tracing the Decay of Fiction, where an interactive game is created to explore Hotel Ambassador and the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Viewers can navigate the space and click hotspots within the hotel to reveal videos and newspaper articles regarding the history and incident.
I feel that database narratives are a very effective way of getting people to learn about the histories of certain sites through the use of storytelling. People love stories, and interesting ways of telling a certain story will maintain the attention spans of the audience. Putting it into a historical context makes information that was initially boring when said in a very factual way, to something interesting, that has a start and an end. Thus database narratives serve as an important tool for educating the masses about their history, their culture, or of about certain monumental events.
In addition, the advancement of technology in present-day paved the way for interactivity to be incorporated within these data narratives. Adding interactivity within a database narrative can allow for a better understanding of the storyline and historic information, by activating the other senses of the audience, rather than just viewing the narrative. By building the storyline through personal effort, the audience is able to see that in a much broader cognitive and ideological sense narrative is also a means of patterning and interpreting the meaning of all sensory input and objects of knowledge.
In a nutshell, database narratives help to boost interest in historical information and also acts as a modern archive, which allows people to learn through storytelling and be able to convey the information in a more efficient way.
