Interactive Digital Narratives for Modern Historical Research

Historians and related disciplinary scientists have been long debating about the historical research as getting close to exact sciences or as a more or less structured narratives. Then, the developments of the WWW and of the interactive media in general have included the digital formats into the debate, mostly with display applications for public his- tory. However, the potential of interactive media for research purposes have remained under-explored, together with their relationship to major historiographic questions. This paper aims at proposing interactive digital narratives (IDNs) to overcome the limitations of linear narratives for historical research. The Historygraphia system supports the development of an IDN, through the interconnection of narratives through a semantic labeling that over- comes the barriers of the diverse history-related disciplines (history of art, history of architecture, archaeology, medieval history, ...). The sys- tem has been experienced and preliminarily evaluated for its effectiveness in addressing the development of historical narratives and the discovery of novel interconnections.