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A Web site developing new ways of storytelling

A stark white corridor, flooded with rays from the hot sun of Jamaica. "These days, the language of death is a dialect of betrayals," says the Ghanaian-Jamaican writer Kwame Dawes. The photograph melts into another image of the hall in Hope's Hospice, a home for people living with HIV/AIDS, this time showing a hunched-over man walking toward the shimmering light.

LiveHopeLove.com, with poetry and video and audio interviews, depicts the lives of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.
LiveHopeLove.com, with poetry and video and audio interviews, depicts the lives of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in Jamaica.Read more

A stark white corridor, flooded with rays from the hot sun of Jamaica.

"These days, the language of death is a dialect of betrayals," says the Ghanaian-Jamaican writer Kwame Dawes. The photograph melts into another image of the hall in Hope's Hospice, a home for people living with HIV/AIDS, this time showing a hunched-over man walking toward the shimmering light.

"The bodies broken, placid as saints, hobble along the tiled corridors, from room to room," Dawes continues with the first line of his poem.

This poem, along with other poetry and video and audio interviews, are part of the Web site LiveHopeLove.com, launched in 2008 and developed by the Philadelphia interactive design company BlueCadet Interactive.

BlueCadet, an eight-person company founded five years ago by owner and principal Josh Goldblum, won an Emmy in September for new approaches to news and documentary programming for LiveHopeLove.com. This followed a string of other awards for the site, including best art site and best photography Webby awards.

"BlueCadet created a structure that allowed for coherent storytelling while allowing for depth of investigation and reflection," Dawes said. "One could tell just how much thought went into this."

Focusing primarily on culture, the arts and the local scene, BlueCadet has also created Web sites for the Lincoln Memorial, the DJ James Zabiela, and National Geographic, and kiosks for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. BlueCadet established a graphic identity for the new American Revolution Center to open in Center City by designing its Web site (americanrevolutioncenter.com), business cards, logo, letterheads and newsletters. The company is also working with Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program.

Goldblum, 32, who graduated from Penn Charter High School in 1995 then went to Tufts University, started the agency in 2004 in Washington. He moved back to Philadelphia in 2007, and hired a designer, a developer and others to help expand.

"There's a lot of material [in Philadelphia], this is a city with a lot of history, a lot of stories, a lot of great stuff," Goldblum said. "What we're trying to do is use these technologies to curate it."

So far LiveHopeLove has been a landmark project for the company. It began with Dawes, a professor at the University of South Carolina, who was working on a long article about AIDS in Jamaica for the Virginia Quarterly Review. The article led to a broader project, "HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica," that included a collection of poetry, a performance at the National Black Theater Festival, two short documentaries for public television, and the Web site.

That project was financed by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting through a grant from the M-A-C AIDS fund, which wanted to raise the visibility of these issues in the Caribbean. The Pulitzer Center, which had been working with Dawes, approached BlueCadet to design the project's Web site.

"I think it's the overall process we followed, very much including the Web site, that is transformative - because through collaboration and multiple platforms we created a way of engaging this issue that proved to have extraordinarily long legs," said Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer center.

On several occasions Sawyer and associate director Nathalie Applewhite traveled to Jamaica with Dawes to gather content. While they didn't originally plan on mixing poetry into the project, after reading Dawes' work they knew it should be a key element.

"The way he captures the 'reality of truth' in his words is remarkable," Applewhite said. "And the way Josh Cogan's photography and BlueCadet's design capture that spirit is quite magical."

Goldblum traveled to Jamaica for five days in January 2008 with Cogan, a professional photographer and interactive producer for BlueCadet. They chose to illustrate four poems with Dawes that, according to Goldblum, "were the most visually compelling and provided different vantages on the story" with the biggest diversity of viewpoints.

In their trip around the island they illustrated the poems by meeting and interviewing some of the people described in the writings and taking photos of the various locations in the poetry.

A goal of the Web site was to allow the work to speak for itself. According to Dawes, the team had to grapple with the huge volume of material they had at their disposal - from video interviews to tens of thousands of words to still photographs to poetry.

For Cogan, this is a type of journalism that makes BlueCadet stand out in new media.

"On the Web you can do a choose-your-own-adventure," Cogan said. "People can piece together the story themselves. We've created the ability [with BlueCadet] to just put up information and put it together in a strong way so people can come to their own conclusions."