Lives: A System for Creating Families of Multimedia Stories

Lives is a system to author and visualize stories based on a collection of biographical and historical multimedia content enhanced with event objects. Stories are constructed as hyperlinked slide-shows, which may also be visualized in a timeline. Besides manually created hyperlinks, Lives also supports the discovery of stories and media that intersect the time period of a story element. Authoring is simplified by dragging and dropping from query results or the timeline, enabling re-use of events, media, and parts of other stories. The key feature of the design of Lives is the use of a three-tiered model with media, events, and stories. Lives has been used to narrate several aspects of Charles Babbage’s life and contributions that cover a period of 200 years. Other stories created with Lives include “The Advancement of Computer Technology”, and “The Early History of Programming”. Lives allows a user to view these stories within their historical context, including other technological innovations and events from the period, enabling deeper and broader investigation for the curious.