Between text, images, audio clips and videos, there are so many elements at your fingertips to tell a story in the digital era. A new expressive tool is now available to make it easy to assemble material online and share your creation widely.
Tapestries is a user interface developed by Bob Stein and Dan Visel (who works on the Wayback team) that allows people to make dynamic, multi-linear presentations with various digital objects. The curation tool lets users gather items from all over the web and put them together into a single space to tell a story. Rather than simply listing links at the end of a document, a tapestry can be designed by dragging photos, video clips or other items onto a digital canvas that viewers can click to open.
The finished product can be kept private or posted publicly – with the option of inviting others to collaborate, comment on the project, or make copies of the tapestry to edit and revise.
The Tapestries platform launched as part of the Internet Archive’s Oct. 21 celebration. Stein, Visel, as well as the project’s new director, Ben Vershbow, were on hand to demonstrate the tool during the Funston Avenue party.
“We’ve made Tapestries open source and have a good foundation for people to start building on it,” said Stein, a digital media pioneer who incubated the project with the Internet Archive. “I love that we’re entering [a time] when the author or producer or designer is not stuck with one medium. They can use any combination of media to tell a particular part of a story.”
A New Canvas for Digital Storytelling
Vershbow, who worked with Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, and most recently was with the Wikimedia Foundation, is director of the Tapestries project.
“Over time, I got to know the tool, use it and see the potential,” Vershbow said. “It’s about curating different types of media, arranging them however you’d like and fully embedding the media objects. It’s a novel, free way to assemble and make sense of material in the digital world.”
After a limited early release of the tool in 2025, some educators began to experiment with Tapestries in the classroom.
Dene Grigar, professor and director of creative media and digital culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver, introduced students to Tapestries to learn about digital storytelling. Along with her own majors who specialize in multimedia content design and development, it allowed her to teach non-majors unfamiliar with digital tools and programming how to create born-digital content.
“The students loved it. It’s an easy drag-and-drop system,” Grigar said. “It’s great for my non-majors and my majors because it’s a way for them to get more experimental, do more interesting things, take some risks. I used it last spring in my Internet Revolutions class, and it was so successful that I’m teaching it again this semester in my Digital Storytelling class as a way to produce digital narratives.”
The application allows students to draw images, add commentary and captions – sometimes diving in after just an hour of introduction. Grigar said she likes that Tapestries is open source, rather than a proprietary product with the risk of becoming outdated.
Stein suggested Grigar have her class use papers and videos of computer pioneer Alan Kay to examine his work through an intergenerational lens and use Tapestries to tell his story. That project in the spring will include student interviews with Kay, now 86, that will culminate with an exhibition of Kay’s work in Tapestries.
“Students are learning the cycle of the importance of holding on to things that are dear to them, expressing themselves about why it’s dear, and then making it available for other people to see what it’s like. That’s the value of what we’re doing here,” Grigar said. “We want people not to be just consumers of media, we want them to be producers of their own knowledge.”
Vershbow said Tapestries opens up a new dimension for teachers in protected digital space and offers a low barrier to entry. Because it doesn’t require specialized technical expertise to use, he said, the application levels the playing field yet challenges students to think creatively.
“At this moment in education where AI has flooded the zone, we’re seeing this crisis of students not developing critical research skills,” Vershbow said. “Doing assignments in Tapestries is a compelling alternative to traditional research papers, which are really vulnerable to AI shortcutting. This tool changes the equation. Students draw from a larger range of media material and they have to show their work. The process becomes the product, which we think opens up a lot in terms of learning outcomes.”
Reimagining How We Create and Connect Online
In addition to schools, the creators of Tapestries see potential use for the tool with historical archives to create digital scrapbooks, exhibits, and presentations.
“Tapestries are meant to be archivable,” Vershbow said. “It is deliberately low-tech and minimal. You can export a whole tapestry as a zip file – and it could be deposited in the Internet Archive as its own cultural media object.”
Acknowledging that digital memory on the web is fragile, Vershbow said, Tapestries can be viewed as a personal digital archiving tool complementary to large institutional preservation. “It allows individuals and small communities to make their own choices about what matters and what they want to pass on to the future,” he said.
After years of linear creations in print, film and TV, Stein said, it will take time to throw people into a world to see the potential of thinking in two or three dimensions. Yet, he believes users will design “breathtakingly new” projects in Tapestries.
Stein, co-founder of The Voyager Company and The Criterion Collection, sees potential for crowdsourcing creative works since authors can grant anyone permission to copy a tapestry and change it in ways that are useful. His “dream project” is to send 50 invitations to artists (filmmakers, composers, photographers) to put something on the center of a tapestry. Then they can extend the invitation to anybody else in the world. “We could look back in five or ten years and they will have evolved into an amazing tableau or mosaic of ideas,” Stein said.
Tapestries gives users a way to find agency online at a time when the web has become dominated by large platforms and algorithmic feeds, said Vershbow. Rather than having information summarized and knowledge processed, users are relating directly with sources for raw material.
“It’s a connection to an earlier era of imagining and working with digital information and invention,” he said. “It’s more on your own terms. You have the freedom to associate with these things and pull them all into one universe that you sculpt.”
