Digital Storytelling: A New Opportunity for the Archival Documentary Heritage of Suzhou Silk

Abstract

Abstract: As a critical material manifestation of Chinese culture, silk has both important and significant cultural representational value as well as multidimensional information worth. Silk archives are an important carrier of silk culture and memory. The Archives of Suzhou Silk are the most complete archives of silk in existence and document the heritage of China and even the world beyond. To better tell the story of the Archives of Suzhou Silk in a digital environment, this article adopts a case study method, taking the Taffeta Archives of the Suzhou Dongwu Silk Factory as an example. It approaches these archives from the perspective of archival science and narratology, discusses the digital storytelling framework of the Archives of Suzhou Silk, and builds a narrative-oriented "story material discovery–story element organization–digital story generation" path and an object-oriented "digitization–datamation–graphing–storytelling" path to build content-based and structure-based narrative graphs and narrative space applications. The construction of the digital storytelling framework can fully show the value of the archival documentary heritage of Suzhou silk, allowing it to better tell its story and providing new thinking for the sustainable development of the Memory of the World Documentary Heritage.