Practice Makes Perfect

Collective Storytelling, Week 3 (February 12, 2008)

Well….actually, 22-minute audio piece. Wow…editing down material is HARD!

Click here to listen to the audio piece. This remains a work in progress.
(File Upload Pending)

I do not find audio editing software particularly intuitive. I spent this week compiling and editing audio files from three separate interviews that I had conducted back in February along with transitional inserts of my own. My biggest challenge was making the volume consistent across files. Despite a good try, I never succeeded in adjusting the files to match. As a result, the lowest volume on music track was still too loud for some sections of voice. Nor did I achieve another fundamental goal of the assignment yet: editing down to 5 - 7 minutes. As I said…..the piece remains a work in progress.

Lessons Learned

- 5 minutes is not much time. Editing down material and splitting fluid conversations into snippets is HARD!!!!!!! There must be tricks I don’t know and cannot intuit.

- Collecting compelling info on same subject from multiple people: Be really clear and consistent about what material to collect. Stick strictly to original question(s); don’t alter them slightly from interviewee to interviewee. Create subquestions based on material already collected to be sure content is consistent from interviewee to interviewee. Impromptu questions are helpful to generate additional rich material.

- I am unpleasantly surprised by my continued confusion over how to use Audacity Effects/Amplify, Normalize and the Envelop Tool in order to get consistent volume control across multiple clips of materialfrom different sources. I thought I had figured this out. Every time I try to apply Effect/Amplify to a section whose volume is too low, the volume goes to nothing. Alternatively, the Envelop Tool only seems to let me reduce amplitude of the loudest sections to match the low volume sections rather than increase volume of low sections to match the loudest. This is discouraging.

Week 2: Collective Storytelling

I visited the StoryCorps station at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan today. I got to take a look inside the booth. For such an intimate place inside, the outside wasn’t very inviting. Cube shaped structure wrapped in text-covered or frosted glass. Can’t really discern what’s inside even though it is glass-walled. Only real explanation can be found in brochure boxes or poster at the entrance door.

I guess I had my heart set on listening stations outside or inside as a cue. I guess I expected the booth itself to be more interactive with the general public. Something to tempt people to share a story themselves. Instead, a poster at the entrance advertises an 800 number to call to listen to archived stories and a brochure located in small Plexiglas boxes attached to the outside walls invites participation.

So I wonder who is offering stories. I didn’t ask the attendant if they get many walk ins. Online reservations are booked weeks in advance. Maybe people do take brochures from the little Plexiglas containers on the outside walls — including those who have business in the nearby courthouses — and call back for reservations. Maybe people who hear the stories retold on National Public Radio. Hum.

I wonder what demographic information is collected from StoryCorps participants. If I were visiting the Library of Congress 50 years from now to listen to the archives, I wonder if it will be as clear who didn’t share stories as who did.

I took a brochure and planned to give a call for stories once I got home. In the end, the brochure didn’t list the 800 number posted by the door to the StoryCorps station. I went online and listened there, instead. I learned a bit about the traveling booths and special initiatives, such as the Memory Loss and New York City partnerships.

This is a great project. Inspiring and heartfelt stories; easy to relate to or empathize with. Well produced. The StoryCorps publicity really emphasizes the story archive as a reflection of our nation. My only wish would be that the disenfranchised were more fully represented. Search the stories for homeless, four will appear. They are brief, tell little of the struggle and context behind the positive aspects reflected in the stories. I expect that eventually partnerships like the ones with many New York City community organizations could potentially generate stories that are not so edited to exclude these kinds of details. Reminders of where we as a nation still need to grow.

Final Project: Collective Storytelling

Click here to go to “Teen Confessions Thru the Ages,” my collective storytelling blog. Have fun with the maps. Post comments about what did and didn’t work for you.

Assessment:

As is always the case, my “final” products are actually works in progress. I am really happy with what I learned and the technology confidence I gained as a result of this assignment. Ins-and-outs of basic blogging; the basic functions of and relationships between ftp, servers, applications downloads, etc.; a little something about php and html; the challenges and opportunities associated with collective storytelling.

The intention of this blog was to create a place where experience could be shared between adults and teenagers that was fun and informative in the same stroke. In person, sometimes communication breaks down during teen years. This blog works from the idea that teens actually do really like to talk about themselves and their exploits. Also, adults may be more comfortable or more effective telling and making meaning out of stories of their teen years when they are not speaking to anyone specific.

Blog user feedback was positive or otherwise instructive, so I want to continue working on this blog to get the kinks worked out and to really test whether Platial MapKit adequately serves my goal. I learned a lot about WordPress Codex and php, css, html in the process of bringing this blog to life, but some of the remaining fixes require more advanced knowledge that will come with continued work on this. This documentation is intended as a checklist and reminder for ongoing work.

Click here for more about feedback from users, my assessment of Platial and current blog architecture, what I learned in the process of creating the blog and next steps.

Week 8: Collective Storytelling
Tenement Museum Visit, 4/7/08
C. Hilmoe

Readings:
Collective Storytelling and Social Creativity in the Virtual Museum: A Case Study, Elisa Giaccardi.
Storytelling: The Real Work of Museums, Leslie Bedford.

Points from the readings that are relevant to observations made during Tenement Museum site and website visits are quoted or paraphrased below:

Motivating Participation:
Narrative engages the listener’s ability to make meaning of an object or event by embodying the tangible and intangible.
Narrative inspires internal dialog that results in a sense of connection.
Stories harbor authenticity.
Object Theatre: Stories bring objects to life without necessity of hands-on experience.

Sustaining Participation:
A listener will fill in gaps in a story or relate the story to his or her own experience. They will make the story their own; create their own meaning.
Using stories as objects taps listeners’ imaginations and sense of play, strengthens cultural identity and sense of belonging. In this way, telling and listening to stories help start a conversation that grows over time.

Outcomes/Act/Impact:
In the act of contributing to, telling and listening to stories, diverse members of a community can become unified and act in a unified manner.
Stories help bring out the universal; reveal the universal through the particular.
Storytelling can help the process of social transformation or cultural change, especially when multiple platforms are combined into a system that motivates and sustains participation.

“Museum” Design:
Need to invent new museum models and interaction spaces that act as catalysts for innovation rather than approaching technology merely as something to be added onto existing practices (Giaccardi).

My Commentary:
The readings relate closely to my own inquiry into the potential of stories and “museums-without-walls” to unify or transform communities or to create a greater sense of belonging or connection within them. Stories promote going out into the communities affected by or targeted by a museum exhibit, whether from an online platform or in on-site workshops, events, etc. Stories make it possible to go out into these living spaces where context can leverage more meaning than is typically possible from inside the walls of a traditional museum.

The case study of the Virtual Museum of the Collective Memory of Lambardia (MUVI) presented by Elisa Giaccardi suggests a system of interdependent programs rather than content management is required to turn a collection of stories (objects, artifacts) into something dynamically related to a community’s past, present and future (instead of a static collection of nostalgia).

Giaccardi calls for a “new approach to museum management and a new communicative competence toward the audience.” She thinks in terms of a new “form of virtuality [that] entails new forms of social creativity and museum construction, and [that] produces cultural objects that were previously unimaginable. ……The audience — the local community – [is transformed] into an active heritage, and [becomes] the main actor in the construction of the museum. …previously unknown facts come to light, role of “fantastic” can play in relation to the emergence of truth.”

The MUVI system used photographs, stories (audio, written?) and a local radio program. Alliances with other organizations were crucial to pulling this off.

At the Tenement Museum and Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS), online and on-site exhibits really seem to incorporate the idea of storyteller, but are less adept at leveraging the story listener for purposes of creating the exhibit and making it a living entity. In other words, the conversation seems truncated.

In the Veteran’s exhibit at BHS, interactivity/technology is utilized more as an add-on (sensors to activate, database content to view) to traditional didactic or discovery methods than as part of a system designed to spur social transformation or cultural change. According to the curator, one of the vets sometimes visits the exhibit, engaging visitors in conversations. I wonder if excluding this element from the formal programming was intentional, for instance, for financial reasons.

At the Tenement Museum, the on-site tour format (1-hour length, space???) and individual educator discretion/ability seem to limit the degree to which the visitor/listeners can dynamically add to the experience.

I am left with a big question: Is it the function of museum vision, logistical feasibility or the pocketbook that stops these two great museums from taking their program to the next step, leveraging the meaning elicited by their exhibits to help visitors explore more explicitly or tangibly opportunities for cultural change or social transformation? The exhibits seem to point visitors in that direction without offering any platform on which to act or participate further.

Granted, there may be activities and goals along these lines that I am not aware of. Or maybe perspectives within Museum management or executive boards consider this approach uncomfortably close to taking a stand.

Week 7, Collective Storytelling

Click here:Hilmoe’s Final Project Proposal

Week 6, Collective Storytelling

My recent work in this class can be found at Nuclei & Catalysts: A Geographic Collective Storytelling Event (Hilmoe)

The work involves personalizing a Word Press Theme and creating a participatory site, getting participation and asking participants for feedback about the experience.

Weeks 5 and 6, Collective Storytelling

Class assignment involves creating a Wiki and Blog for the express purpose of eliciting participation from a group of designated users.  This week’s focus was uploading and customizing the wiki and blog.  I still need to customize the sites, then proceed with rallying the troops. We’ll see what it takes to get participation.  International travel from 3/14 through 3/23 will prevent me from monitoring the sites; prompting and eliciting activity.

Click here to go to the Wiki

Having skin problems.  From where do I update skins? I dropped a different skin directory into the public folder and changed the config file accordingly, but change didn’t show up on refreshed wiki. Do I need to reload wiki to itp server if I change the skin directory?

Click here to go to the WordPress blog.

Still need to personalize.  Only two themes were available and neither allowed code changes. Other WordPress themes were not available; server down. (??)

Week 4, Collective Storytelling

Assignment: Read 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell A story: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/50+Ways
Then Pick a Tool: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools. Create a 1-2 minute story. Upload and link from class site.

Here is a link to the Comiqs Website where my Web 2.0 story is stored.

This is the version embedded into this blog.

Some thoughts about this assignment:

To get an idea of what the assignment entailed, I scoured Alan Levine’s web site and the 50+ ways to tell a story with Web 2.0 tools. A story idea began to form in the process. Imaging something in  one of the comics formats helped me refine the idea. Looking at Flickr photos helped me pull the story together.

It was necessary to find, store , organize and manage a lot of photographs before the set I used came together. I recorded the resolution and image size of each thinking I would use only those that were clear in the format I chose.  I didn’t find any instructions about image specs; wasn’t sure if I was suppose to modify them before importing them or if the tool did that automatically.

Plan A did fail: Bubblr would not recognize my Flickr user name. I had picked some of the images because their compositions would have lent a visual flow from frame to frame in Bubbr’s timeline format.  I was able to use Comiqs layout without too much trouble in that regard.

Comiqs is fairly intuitive although editing is a bit confusing.  Still not sure if I could open a published comic to modify contents.

Before uploading the photos to Flickr, I had meant to insert protagonist’s headshot into some of the photos. My Photoshop skills failed me, so I annotated pages indicating my intention.

Embedded link apparently does not working.

Week 3, Collective Storytelling

On Feb 24, 2008, at 6:05 PM, Cynthia D Hilmoe wrote:

Hi, Marianne

Just a heads up that the mixing and editing of material for my 5-7 minute audio won’t be ready by tomorrow’s class. If you have the time…..here are some questions/thoughts………..

I thought the 2 weeks you gave us would be plenty, but this has been a great lesson in level of effort required for something like this. By the time I got the Digital Storytelling reading done and formulated a topic and interview script using its Desire/Action/Realization framework, I was a few days into your alloted time. Then recruiting “subjects” willing to respond to my topic took another chunk of time. (Actually had to revisit the original topic for round 2 of recruiting before I got any takers.) Now I am finally trying to put together what material I collected.

In the end, I am only somewhat excited about the content folks were willing to share or that I was able to draw out. That makes the editing job a little bit tricky. Picking and/or formulating a topic that excites the interviewee takes some talent. Also, there must be an art to drawing out the interviewee in such a way as to avoid run on stories. You know, I wish I had more compelling snippets that I could thread together with my own summary of the more banal sections of audio. As it is, by cutting down the material into 5- 7 minutes, I am concerned that what I leave in the first person voice might get lost amongst my interjections or be too lengthy to keep listeners’ attention. But, I might surprise myself once I get into the thick of the editing process.

After listening to my recordings, though, I am reassured about my interviewing skills. I notice that I am pretty good at drawing out details that people tend to presume into a story. I also noticed I was pretty good at seamlessly directing them to restate using specifics when they originally responded to my prompts with things like “yes/no” or “it/they”.

This is hard, but really good practice. I hope you are not discouraged or disappointed by progress on this assignment.

Cynthia.

Week 2, Collective Storytelling

Wow. Here’s the Audio. What I was able to make didn’t match what I had in mind. I am posting this before patching in the musical soundtrack to get interim feedback. Got to go fetch a Charlie Parker recording, in the meantime.

OK. Deep breath.

First of all, what about seamless transitions? What kinds of riffs (tone and rhythm) or compositions (leading, closing, what?) do I need to gather into my container of sounds to mix and match into seamless transitions? What do I need to keep in mind from a collection standpoint? What key pieces of sound do I need to collect before concluding recording sessions? And how do you deal with the fact that people talk with run-on sentences. How do you break up sections that present no natural breaks?

Second, sound quality. I had figured I’d be able to edit out the background din at the Met. Not. Audacity’s Noise Removal Effect totally distorted the sound. Normalizing helped some. Amplification, too. Did I use these effects correctly? (My notes from Marianne’s and Gabe’s guidance vaporized inside my Journaler software.)

Third, story content. Something about this makes me think of industrial films; of parody. That wasn’t the intent. Granted I didn’t record this material with a very good idea of where I was going to go with it. That probably did not help. I should have had a script of questions to pick from as back up to the conversational aspect of the interview. Though I had a general concept for the subject matter when I recorded, I tried to create the story after the fact. Is this always a bad idea or was it just a bad idea this time?

Finally, what about that feeling I get when arranging and initiating an interview. Ugh. I am so self-conscious. So concerned about inconveniencing people. So hesitant to ask them to go “on tape.” How do I shift out of this persona, molded firmly by my family’s “no pry” rule, into my nosy, no qualms curious-about-people persona? Might sound corny or goofy, but it feels to me like an internal shift is in order……from lower to upper chakra. Go ahead. Roll your eyes.