I don't know how well known Badia Pozzeveri is, but when I tried to search for it, I found a page in the Italian Wikipedia, but none in the English version. (This is your chance to create the page on the English-language Wikipedia, if you go for that sort of thing.)
If your Italian isn't what it should be and you want to know more about Badia Pozzeveri ("badia" means abbey), you should turn to a new, immersive multimedia story in Science magazine, which explains that the abbey is a very unusual archeological site, in which bodies were buried in the same place for 1,000 years, from the 11th century to the 19th.
It is here that archeologists–as part of a collaborative research project and field school involving Ohio State University and the University of Pisa–are trying to learn about life from medieval times through the Industrial era by revealing the secrets of the bones.
The Science story on Badia Pozzeveri is the magazine's first attempt at the kind of multimedia project made famous most notably by The New York Times with its stunning multimedia story "Snow Fall" by John Branch, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.
I suspect that Science would like us to think of its story, entitled The Thousand-Year Graveyard, as its "Snow Fall."
It isn't.
Science cannot match the resources the Times put into its story, and that's clear from even a quick comparison of the two. The blowing snow on the opening page of "Snow Fall" is mesmerizing. Not many multimedia stories anywhere can match that.
But you could argue that Science's story is, in one respect, even better than the effort by the Times. I'm guessing Science spent considerably less on its story than the Times did on "Snow Fall," and the Science story is almost as good.
I'm not talking about the text by Ann Gibbons. It's good–but her stuff is always good. (If this sounds like a left-handed compliment, it isn't meant to. Her stuff is good.) What's interesting is what Science has done with photographs, video, and layout. The photography is superb. The layout is fashionably uncluttered, with easily readable text, plenty of white space, and just enough pop-ups, or pop-downs, or whatever they're called, to make it feel fresh without seeming jittery.
And Science has done something very interesting with the video. The short videos placed throughout the story consist largely of cameras roaming slowly over photographs, Ken Burns-style. That strikes me as a smart way to add video without a video camera rolling constantly during the reporting. There are a few segments of actual video, but not many. The video can't compete with Nova, and it shouldn't try to.
Ah, but look at what I've done: I've written about the images and the layout and the video and I haven't told you anything about the graveyard, its corpses, and what they are revealing about, say, the Black Death, or syphilis, or life from medieval times through the Industrial era.
That's the question we must ask about these multimedia projects: Do the trappings distract from the substance?
In this case, I'd say no. The story is rich, and the images and videos enhance it. That's the key. Science and others who want to pursue this kind of multimedia reporting must learn to do so in a way that does a better job of telling the story. Snow Fall won a Pulitzer, and yet I remember the video more than the story. That is not what should happen.
It was supposed to be a story about an avalanche; not a demonstration of the potential of the Web. Did it succeed? Maybe. But I'm concerned that with a story like this, we might be too quick to reward razzle-dazzle.
In my view, we will know when multimedia storytelling has arrived when we react by talking about the story, not the multimedia.
-Paul Raeburn
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