An essential part of my thinking about wikumentaries is that personal stories are packed full of useful qualitative data. Stories, in fact, are an incredibly efficient way to compress and transmit information. We know intuitively how to unpack that information in our day to day experiences with other people, but how can technology be used to leverage stories into large amounts of data that can be manipulated, analyzed, and, yes, SOLD for the benefit of the storyteller? (Again, exploitation is a foremost danger here. What I'm interested in is empowerment and economic development through ownership of one's stories).

Yesterday I had a great conversation with Joyce Rudinsky, the Chief Domain Scientist for Arts and Humanities at RENCI and a professor in my department. She told me about SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research), and I'm hoping that this could be a key to unlocking the currents of information that flow under collections of personal media artifacts. It seems that SEASR has been used primarily for text-mining and analytics, but it also seems capable of multimedia analytics. I'm not sure yet exactly what its capabilities are, but I'm signed up for a 2-day workshop to learn more. Very exciting!

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