Minett Stories: Telling the history of an industrial region to the public

The online exhibition “Minett Stories” (https://minett-stories.lu) was developed in connection with Esch2022 European Capital of Culture. The aim of the “Remixing Industrial Pasts for the Digital Age” (REMIX) project was to tell the history of the Minett, the industrial region in the south of Luxembourg, to a broad audience. Instead of telling the history of mining and smelting technologies, large iron works and steel barons, the project team instead decided to present the everyday history of an industrial region, focusing on the time span from the industrialisation of the region in around 1870 to the steel crisis of the 1970s. The online exhibition was launched on 28 May 2022 and clocked up more than 5,200 visitors in the first year. The paper will first describe the development and implementation of the exhibition concept. It will elaborate on how the team of curators and designers tried to translate their experience with previous online C2DH exhibitions (e.g. https://ww1.lu and https://175anspost.lu) into a new two-layered website structure. The idea of transmedia storytelling was one of the key elements in the production of narratives and media: the team worked in collaboration with several artists, stage actors and designers to produce graphic novels, interactive videos and maps, radio plays and video essays. All the multimedia stories were accompanied by traditional written essays that explained the historical background, revealed storytelling techniques and presented the underlying digitised sources. The paper will present several examples to highlight this approach, before reflecting on the lessons learned and the success of the exhibition. Drawing on different forms of qualitative feedback and Google Analytics statistics, it will discuss how different audiences perceived the exhibition and how the impact of online exhibitions can be measured.