.+We Operate Best Together+.

Posted By Morgan on June 18, 2009

Yesterday, I attended a collaborative brainstorming session on some future Storymapping initiatives of the Center for Digital Storytelling (disclosure: CDS has also given me some seed/partnership money for the project that this blog is hosted at).  This project is seeking to develop a series of national projects for organizing digital story projects based on the link between narrative and place.  Led by Joe Lambert, our session had some great folks contributing their thoughts as well as a nice overview of some other projects running under the Storymapping umbrella.

In the session I learned about participatory action research as a framework for collaboratively affecting community/social change by direct and reflective engagement with communities – communities determine the inquiry and outcomes of learning about themselves together.  I really like the collaborative nature of this approach and it seems really fitting to my project – I just didn’t have a name for it:)

Here’s who was in attendance and the projects they are connected to:

• Ariel Bierbaum: from UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools joined us. She had some great insight in to the importance of community inclusion in any city planning process. Currently, she manages Y-PLAN which is a good network of young people working on community issues across the country.
• jesikah maria ross: she currently heads up UC Davis’s Art of Regional Change project.  And brought a lot of great insight through her work with the Saving the Sierra – a project that uses public media and citizen storytelling, to document community efforts to conserve the environment, culture, and economy of the Sierra Nevada.
• Robert Kershaw: who’s currently at the Center for Digital Storytelling as well as Cows and Fish – Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society.  He fosters using digital storytelling to communicate the value of the land, it’s history, culture and need for conservation.
• Gianluca Corinaldesi: joined us from Italy and is currently working on iPortraits.
• Daniel Rizik-Baer and Emily Jameson also joined us, both grad students in urban planning, having some fresh perspectives how to best move forward.

Joe Lambert, Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling was of course there and went over a great introduction to location-based media and how it could best be used to synergize storytelling efforts around the world.  We covered similar projects that the Center For Digital Storytelling ran as well as some other great resources and even a training on building our own Google maps.

Other CDS Storymapping Projects:

• The Placemeant Project: Stories of Why Where Matters
  Throughout the Spring and Summer of 2005, stories were collected from communities around Ukiah, and in October of 2005, they were integrated into a stage production featuring 21 stories, many performed live by the authors. In 2006, an additional workshop collected stories from other parts of Mendocino, leading to a touring production in August and September.
• Save Our ShorelineWalking through the Wild of the Albany Bulb
  Local to the San Francisco Bay Area, this project suggests ways to think about values that we need to sustain in our idea of recreational space, including the idea of a raw space that children and artists can explore.
• Mondo Bizarro’s I-Witness Central City: this project has a sign-posts indicating a number that people can call in to to hear stories of a particular place in their city.  Future plans for this project aim to have numbers where people can call in to leave their own stories for others to listen to – all via cellphone.

Other Locative Media and Related Resources:

• The Center for Locative Media:  The Center for Locative Media works with different cultural and educational communities to enable the creation, delivery, and distribution of narrative histories of people and places using emerging and locative technologies.
• Networked Publics:  From September 2005 to June 2006, “Networked Publics,” a team of thirteen scholars at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are reconfiguring how which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
• Infrastructure for the New Geography: This is a downloadable PDF from the Institute for the Future that forecasts the emerging ecology of the ‘geoweb’ and the importance for ‘geospatial literacy’ – how will we, in the future, make sense of place to write our own stories and shape our own futures and destinies?

Resources:

• GPS Visualizer – a free, easy-to-use online utility that creates maps and profiles from GPS data (tracks and waypoints, including GPX files), street addresses, or simple coordinates. Use it to see where you’ve been, plan where you’re going, or visualize geographic data (business locations, scientific observations, events, customers, real estate, geotagged photos, etc.).
• PlaceStories – PlaceStories is a software system for managing digital media, creating digital stories and publishing online through Google Maps.  PlaceStories is supporting the storytelling, networking and digital communication needs of community organisations, government agencies and others who work with communities, particularly rural and regional areas.

Might you know of any other projects to link here?  What other locative media + storytelling projects do you know of?  Why is place important?

Category: California, United States of America
Tags: Berkeley, Center for Digital Storytelling, geomapping, google maps, meeting, storytelling