Journeyits

Journeyits are artifacts that capture the sequence, experiences, and outcomes of a journey, designed for analysis, storytelling, or reflection. The term combines journey with artifacts and has appeared in digital humanities, UX research, and narrative design contexts to describe integrated records that fuse narrative text with data.

Forms and formats vary; journeyits may exist as digital projects—interactive timelines, mapped routes, or media-rich dashboards—or as physical objects such as travel journals or mixed-media installations. They are typically organized around a chronological structure that aligns events with locations along a path.

Core components often include a route map or spatial trace, a timeline or milestones, reflective entries, and media such as photos, audio, or video, along with metadata like date, place, participants, and conditions.

Creation and curation generally involve planning the scope, collecting data from diaries, sensors, interviews, or media, synthesizing observations into a cohesive narrative, and presenting the result in a visual or narrative interface. Privacy, consent, and data quality are common considerations.

Uses include documenting user or customer journeys in research and design, teaching narrative structure in education, storytelling in journalism or cultural projects, and archival or museological contexts.

Relationship to other concepts: journeyits overlap with journey maps and data storytelling but emphasize an integrated, artifact-based record rather than a single deliverable. There are no widely adopted standards, and practice varies by field.

Origin and reception: the term began circulating in the 2020s among practitioners exploring narrative-rich data approaches.