Innovation by SIT

“Shipping Out” is a documentary using new media and online technology to tell the real-life story of Rafael Aboulafia. Born in Palestine in 1893, Abulafia volunteered to serve in the British Army in World War One, hoping to help the British Empire conquer his homeland from the Ottomans whom he saw as a cruel enemy.  But war had other plans for him. In April 1915 he shipped out of Alexandria to fight in Turkey in the Galipoli Campaign, one of history’s bloodiest battles. It was then, that he started keeping a diary. “Shipping Out” brings these events back to life, after exactly 95 years, as an interactive, digital, daily updated, blog experience.

The project’s creators, Roni Aboulafia and Shiri Perciger-Cohen, describe “Shipping Out” as an innovative experiment in memory, preservation and, no less important, an experiment in anachronistic media.

“We tend to forget that the term anachronism does not mean “old”. It means “an error in chronology”. Taking materials that were written in a notebook 95 years ago, preserving the chronological format and transforming them into a blog is an anachronism in the most basic sense of the word. Clearly, digital media is a completely anachronistic to the world described in Rafael Aboulafia’s diary”.

Transporting Rafael Aboulafia’s story to a different medium means the preservation of authentic historical data that was on the verge of being lost forever. It also enriches our experience, adding new layers of information that enhance our understanding, and bring the story to life with pictures, maps, links to ancillary historical date and related web content.

But, more than anything, the experiment that “Shipping Out” represents proves that a good story is a good story, regardless of the technological wizardry of its presentation.

Michal Olmert Naishtein is SIT’s Blog and Online Marketing Manager.

Michal and the rest of us at SIT would be happy to talk to you about innovation.

Click here to contact us