Articles by Francesco Ripanti

The use of interactive storytelling by museums and heritage sites lends to the creation of experiences that support visitors in engaging emotionally with the objects on display. Finding ways to connect to the cultural content is even more important for visitors of archaeological sites due to the often fragmentary nature of the exhibits, which can leave them wondering what was once there and how it relates to them. In this paper, we describe the creation of a prototype mobile storytelling experience that attempts to explore a more emotive kind of storytelling in cultural contexts. The prototype was evaluated in a preliminary study that took place at the archaeological site of the Ancient Agora of Athens. The observations provide insights for the design of future iterations of such emotive storytelling experiences.

This paper discusses some new perspectives about communication in archaeology. The main direction in recent years seems to go toward the increased use of new technologies by the same archaeologists who dig in a site and are not specialists in computer science and communication. So far these new technologies have been used in the search of better communications but they have been developed individually. Furthermore, the focus has been on the instruments rather than on the contents of the communication. Our proposal is to put together different media in order to enhance the potentiality of the same communication. For example, the use of 3D and docudrama together can enhance both the visual and narrative aspects of communication. In this paper we show a possible interaction of 3D and docudrama applied to the archaeological site of Vignale (Livorno, Italy), and discuss their benefits and drawbacks and the useful relationship between this creative approach of communication and the open source philosophy.

Methodological reflection on communication in archaeology greatly developed over the past fifteen years. It is now widely accepted that video-narrative medium has a larger potential compared with other media commonly used up to now. The archaeological video can be divided into some different categories - documentary, video update, docudrama - each of them potentially destined to a variety of audiences when the movie is inserted into a narrative framework. By its nature, the archaeological site of Vignale, where the relative poverty of the remains on the ground sharply contrasts with the richness of the 'stories' the site itself can narrate, is an ideal place to test the docudrama-model video. Initially intended to be just an instrument for communicating with and involving local population in the archaeological project as a whole, the video-narrative proved to be a powerful tool in stimulating the research group itself towards a more thoughtful and 'multivocal' recording of the fieldwork done. The output of the project was the making of a brief 'series' of videos, with the general title of 'The Excavation and its Stories. They were initially used as an educational support for younger students in archaeology, but later obtained a wider audience through the web.