Meredith Silverman

After getting some valid criticisms in class, I decided to go a different route with my final project. I created an ITP Slam Book here. This week, I got a few friends to log in and prepopulate it. Today, I put an invitation to participate on the student list.

The look and feel of the site were important to me — it had to feel like a spiral bound notebook so that people will interact with it like one. I want it to plunge those of us who’ve used paper slam books back into that angsty, junior high school mentality.

I downloaded Firebug, the Firefox plug-in that lets you play around with the CSS on a page while you look at it. It was a pleasure to use and absolutely essential to this project.

For my final project, I’d like to try the idea I proposed in class in response to my classmate’s amazing project, Analoguer.

The site isn’t built yet, but this is the email I will send out to a group of 30 friends:

I’d like to invite you to participate in a project I’m doing for a class called Collective Storytelling. The class is about all types of narratives that can be created cooperatively.

My final project for this class is about how we know the people we know, and the stories we tell about each other.

I’ve set up a website with a page for each of the people on this list. I’d like you to look through the list of invitees and pick a couple of people you know. Add a story or an impression of that person to their page – it could be the story of how you met, a couple of sentences that explain what they mean to you, or just a brief impression. You can even add images or links if you wish.

As people participate in this experiment, your page will grow and you will learn about what you mean to other people.

All posts will be anonymous, so no one will know who wrote what about them, unless you choose sign your posts. At the end of the project, I will change the names on each of the pages to protect your privacy.

If you enjoy the process, you can invite others to contribute. Create a page on the site with their name and send them these instructions. I would love to include other people we know in common, or people I don’t know at all.

If you would like to get involved, please visit the site this week and write something down. It’s also okay not to participate if you aren’t interested or don’t think you’ll have time.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll hope you’ll give this experiment a shot!

After many tinkering attempts, I’m finally happy with my collaborative storytelling wiki.

I have completely massacred notsosimple.css, notsosimple.tmpl, notsosimple.php, config.php and Site.Sidebar — but I’m the only one who will ever have to use this mess.

I’m going to send out the invitations to participate today.

In my job, I’ve run across one type of collective storytelling: role-playing games. I work for a TV network’s website — and our users love to use the message boards as a public place for collective storytelling.

For fan fiction, or what the users are calling role-playing, the key is to establish the characters first. One way to do this is to invite participants to create characters, complete with a bio and a picture, for anyone to read before they read the story or contribute. The other way to establish characters is to piggy-back off knowledge that everyone at the site has. On my site at work, that means characters from the shows aired by the TV network.

I think it would be fun to harness the characters everyone knows about — celebrities, as themselves. What I’d love to do (although I don’t have the programming chops) would be to call it “Five Celebs Stuck in an Elevator.” You pick 5 celebs from a list, and then you write a story about what happens when they get stuck in an enclosed space, and how they eventually get out (or perhaps don’t). In my imagination, their lines come out of their lil celebrity heads like speech bubbles, like so:

How do you know the birthday girl?

Their responses here.

This is a four-minute interview with Brian Battjer, my boyfriend. He talks about growing up as a juvenile delinquent in New Jersey. The only thing that kept him from going to jail, he says, was an elective class: choir.

I edited the voice track extensively, but just couldn’t manage to add the music I wanted in Audacity. I’d like to rework this in an environment that’s friendlier to multi-track editing. The two-second silences should give an idea of where the music would go.

Listen.

Updated version with music: click here.

Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy resonated with me in a particularly personal way. The excerpt we read made me think of my experience in West Africa in a whole new light. I spent my junior year abroad in Senegal, living with a family, studying the local language and culture, and attending the University of Dakar. Before that, I’d spent years studying the literature and film of the region.

I knew it was a heavily oral culture. I’ve read two transcribed versions, quite different in style and detail, of the Epic of Soundiata. While I was there, I saw traditional oral historians, griots, sing and dance at a wedding, a First Communion, a dance recital in a concert hall, and a small-town exorcism. I was at home when the groom’s family came to sing, offer gifts, and demand my host sister, the bride, in marriage.

I experienced all these things firsthand. But Ong shed new light for me on the psychology of highly oral people. Almost eight years after leaving the country, I found myself thinking of it in a new way.

Orality is still precious in a comparatively literate place like Senegal. A common heroic theme in the literature is a young boy going to Islamic school, learning the Koran by heart, then proving his mettle by reciting it from start to finish. Koran literally means recitation — like the Bible (as discussed in Ong), the Koran is meant to be studied and passed on orally.

The University of Dakar, one of the most highly respected educational institutions in West Africa, educates its students using the dictation method. That means students only get as much information as the average one can transcribe in a one-hour class session. Teachers get free reign and are never challenged — because your grade depends on your ability to reproduce the words of the teacher. Homework was never assigned and outside reading was not obligatory — partially owing to the fact that one or two copies of the textbook were available in the library, and couldn’t be purchased or photocopied.

Senegalese culture is very communal. Personal space and time do not exist. I was given the example of an assistant who walks past a closed door where several important officials are having a meeting. It’s rude for him to walk by without saying hello — opening the door to greet everyone would be seen as the proper thing, not as an intrusion or interruption.

A five-minute walk in New York could take an hour in Dakar, as a result of all the people you are obligated to greet along the way!

Most Senegalese speak two languages at the very least.  They grow up speaking Wolof, Pulaar, Saar, and/or Diola at home.  For many years, their mother tongue is a purely oral language.  School children become literate at the same time that they learn French.  The colonial language is the language of education, of government, of everything official.

The French and the Arabic alphabets are applied to transliterate the many languages of the region.  Although people do read newspapers in African languages, they’re not perceived as a language for literature like French is.  Furthermore, most people — literate or illiterate — prefer to get their news on the radio.

We haven’t spoken for months.  I invited her and a couple other friends over for dinner.  Her chair stayed empty; we talked about her as if she was dead.  I called her today and we fought for an hour.  I finally said what she needed to hear.  We’re friends again. (50)

I stole this shirt from your boyfriend.  I was at a party at his house in the middle of an un-air-conditioned summer.  My shirt was soaked, so he loaned me his.  He watched me change.  It was back before you were dating.  I liked his last girlfriend better. (48)

My dad got drunk and said the word “pussies.”  I’ve never heard him refer to the female genitalia, and certainly not in the plural.  As his sentence led inexorably toward the female genitalia, I wondered which word he would use.  What does it mean that my dad’s a pussy man? (50)