Evaluating Multimedia Storytelling: Offshore Wind Impacts in Taiwan’s Fishing Villages

Abstract

Offshore wind development on Taiwan's west coast is reshaping the coastal environments and livelihoods of fishing communities in Changhua and Yunlin Counties. This thesis argues that climate and energy transitions are not only policy or infrastructure challenges but lived, place-based processes shaped by environmental knowledge, livelihood, and attachment to home—and that multimedia storytelling can make these dimensions legible to audiences who have no prior connection to the places described. The thesis proceeds in three parts. Part I presents fieldwork conducted in Taiwan's western fishing villages in early 2026, drawing on interviews with nearshore fishermen, fishermen's association leaders, offshore wind developer staff, and environmental researchers. Through a narrative account of that fieldwork, it develops an understanding of offshore wind as a transformation of time, space, and community on the coast rather than as a discrete infrastructure project. Part II traces the translation of that fieldwork into "At Wind's Wake: The Offshore Wind Buildout on Taiwan's Fishing Coast," a long-form multimedia narrative built in two forms—an interactive multimedia site and a baseline photo essay—situating the making process within frameworks of critical making and narrative visualization. Part III evaluates the multimedia site against the photo essay through a within-subjects counterbalanced study (n = 43) with twelve post-survey measures across six constructs, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with a subset of eighteen participants. The multimedia site significantly outperformed the photo essay on ten of twelve measures, with effect sizes ranging from moderate to very large. The strongest effects appeared on immersion (d = 0.89), sharing likelihood (d = 0.78), social presence (d = 0.63), and motivation to learn more (d = 0.65). Recall was the sole dimension unaffected by format—both produced equivalently high scores—but open-ended responses revealed qualitatively different recall content: multimedia participants retained data, place names, and sensory detail, while photo essay participants retained character and narrative detail. Interviews identified voice and video as the primary mechanism of multimedia's advantage, pacing as the central design tension, and genre familiarity as the key driver of credibility perception. A correlational analysis further revealed that sharing operates through structurally different pathways in each format: photo essay sharing was predicted by participants' own experiential responses, while multimedia sharing appeared decoupled from these measures and driven instead by a judgment about the artifact's value for reaching others. Taken together, these findings suggest that multimedia form does not simply present place-based environmental narratives more richly; it redistributes what audiences perceive, retain, and feel motivated to pass on. For audiences encountering a place-based environmental case for the first time, multimedia form can extend its public legibility while also introducing tradeoffs around pacing, credibility signaling, and conditions of encounter that shape how that legibility is experienced.