Food for thought - I thought we might consider a previous inner-city oral history project - Murmur. Instigated by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority as part of of the 2007 Bealtaine Festival, we saw a series of metal green ears add to the fabric of Dublin's inner-city streets. The project concept was simple - record locals who would in their own voice recount stories and histories of the local area. Passers-by could ring the number on the green ear and key in a code in order to have the recording played.
Today the green ears remain a residue of the installation, and the recordings are still available online at the project website.
What I wanted to reflect on was the difficulty in designing local story-telling projects using new media while foregrounding issues of accessibility. Granted, many people today do have mobile phones - so it is understandable that this could be used as a component of the project. It is a playful idea to have the voices of the 'past' recounted through new and emerging media often personally associated with contemporary or future plans.
But that these local phone calls would cost credit I think is a flaw in the design. It is unfortunate that a freephone number could not have been used to provide more easily - less costly access. However, a counter argument would be that the phone credit/call cost would be something of a ticket price for the performance. However, the costs do not support the project, they support the corporations that own the phone companies.
I do not mean to fault Murmur directly, but I feel that with inner-city storytelling projects, care must be taken in designing the access to the stories. It is not enough merely to put the stories of local communities on display for those who can afford to access them.
(Disclaimer - if anyone has further information about the project and whether they did indeed provide for some gifting over of outcomes to the communities involved, please leave a comment)
Photosynth is recently developed software which allows you to upload and knit together a number of images of the same location into a navigable cyberspace. This video depicts the application of the software to the site of Stonehenge by National Geographic. This is something we could apply to the Monto or Clanbrassil Street - creating an online, navigable streetscape which could incorporate photographs of traces or objects of archaeological interest that might otherwise be glossed over.
Jonathan Harris has dedicated his life to collecting and sharing stories. He has developed some of the most inspiring and cutting edge story-telling media around. This recent talk at TED demonstrates how powerful digital storytelling platforms can be. We could possibly deploy something similar in capturing stories in the Monto or Clanbrassil Street.
His project The Whale Hunt shows the different possibilities for mobilising digital photographs and metadata to construct navigable digital photo-stories - creating different story-lines by select specific components. Have a play through the hunt HERE. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom of the screen to play with the different modes (mosaic, timeline, pinwheel, etc.).
His and Sep Kamvar's project - We Feel Fine - is an amazing demonstration of the possibilities of public blogging to capture a sense of how we feel about the world - creating shared communal stories. The We Feel Fine applet allows you to dive through a storm of contemporary emotions - shared publicly to the world. (This one is my personal favourite.)
Darcy Alexandra passed on this amazing project to me. The Center for Digital Storytelling has an interesting project exploring the application of digital storytelling to mapping and place-understanding. StoryMapping in their own words is:
"StoryMapping is a call to action. We are taking the lessons learned from more than a decade of work in Digital Storytelling, and integrating it with an emergent tool set of digital mapping technologies now available to the broad public.
Whether it is geo-tagging images on Flickr, building story-based GoogleMaps, developing Windows Live virtual tours, organizing local cell phone walking tours, or the permanent imbedding stories into locations to be received by Bluetooth and other wireless information, we can now create maps that share stories about the places that matter to us, and place our life stories in countless geographic contexts."
It could be an exciting possibility to explore similar synergies between archaeological visualisation techniques and digital storytelling in the context of Placing Voices / Voicing Places. This could help erode divisions between tangible and intangible in the context of heritage - as well as undercut temporal divisions between the 'past' and the 'present' in the understanding of management of heritage - particularly in diverse complex inner-city areas.
Placing Voices - Voicing Places is a collaborative investigation and mediation of the contemporary heritages and material cultures of inner-city Dublin. Clanbrassil St and the Monto will be explored throughout Autumn and Winter 2008 through archaeology, art, digital storytelling, photography and sociology. The project hopes to inspire news understandings of the co-temporal qualities of the things both known, forgotten and sometimes remembered about the places we civically share.
