Interactive Narrative Analysis

This interactive narrative is an interactive documentary short that follows Marta Aviles, a longtime resident of Brooklyn’s Los Sures neighborhood in South Williamsburg, NY. Living there for nearly forty years, she now faces challenges with the rapid gentrification of her neighborhood. This piece documents her journey in deciding whether to stay or to leave her home. The narrative was broken down into the following structure: Introduction, The Street, The Stairs, The Apartment, The Listing, Part II (Trailer), and Credits.

Media, Modalities, and Marta This narrative was experienced through an online web interface. This interactive documentary was composed of video clips from Marta’s past in the Introduction, an interactive web map to explore in The Street, a spatial navigation mode where I had to walk Marta up the …show more content…
The use of Marta’s voiceover to guide and to show personality, the use of video clips from the past to show change of time, the use of the apartment listing to create something familiar to the user, the use of the phone call from the realtor, were all elements that effectively conducive to the way I feel about the current state of our system today. The limitations of this narrative were that it was not complete, keeping me wanting more out of her story (shown through a trailer at the end). By doing this, I did not feel as though I had closure with the story. There were sections where I did feel limited in my navigation, not being able to skip anything I want, only some parts. For example, in The Listing section, I had to listen to her interview before I was able to engage with the actual apartment listing. Although these limitations are small, I believe that this interactive short is something that has challenged how other people see storytelling