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Experience, Don’t Tell! Integration of IDN into Journalistic Narratives

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Interactive Storytelling (ICIDS 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 15467))

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Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative case study of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) in journalism, focusing on three examples produced by news media outlets. The first is the BBC’s Syrian Journey, which depicts the pathways and struggles of Syrian refugees migrating to Europe. The second is the Guardian’s Refugee Challenge, an interactive experience that immerses users in the difficult choices Syrian refugees might face. The third is ProPublica’s Waiting Game, which illustrates the long and uncertain wait for asylum seekers in the U.S. These works were selected to explore the complex societal issue of refugees, reflecting current scholarship that identifies IDN as a powerful tool for addressing such complexity. This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of how IDN can be applied in journalistic narratives, how journalistic IDN can be defined, and how the selected cases fit within existing IDN literature.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the EU COST Association in the form of the COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations), https://indcor.eu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ITI-LARSyS | IST, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Cláudia Silva

  2. University of Murcia, La Merced, Spain

    Rocío Zamora-Medina

  3. Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Andrius Šuminas

Authors
  1. Cláudia Silva
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  2. Rocío Zamora-Medina
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  3. Andrius Šuminas
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Cláudia Silva , Rocío Zamora-Medina or Andrius Šuminas .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    John T. Murray

  2. Universidad del Norte, Atlántico, Colombia

    María Cecilia Reyes

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Silva, C., Zamora-Medina, R., Šuminas, A. (2025). Experience, Don’t Tell! Integration of IDN into Journalistic Narratives. In: Murray, J.T., Reyes, M.C. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78453-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78453-8_20

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