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On Wikumentary
The Art and Science of Wikumentary
Created by Mike on Mon 17 of Mar, 2008 [04:45 UTC]
Last modified Wed 26 of May, 2010 [10:30 UTC] (44 posts | 7028 visits | Activity=2.00) Why Local Newspapers Should Die, Too (or Especially)
Unsurprisingly, the news these days is full of apprehension about the demise of...the news. A little closer to reason, the NY Times' Opinionator had a good round up of current "future-positive" thinking about the next few years, prompted by this post by Clay Shirky. The takeaway message is that news is still important, but newspapers (and the organizations required to practice traditional journalism) are obsolete. Shirky says:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need. Often, defenders of newspapers say it is the local paper that must be preserved. I disagree. I believe there is a very important factor that isn't getting considered in this conversation, even by those, like Shirky, that are willing to let go of traditional models. Traditional journalism is a fundamentally exploitative industry: it uses the stories of others for financial gain. The terms of the debate about the future of the news have been too kind to the newspaper industry. Too often, the papers have been depicted in an overly altruistic light, where the world would face disastrous consequences without the knowledge unearthed by crusading reporters. Fundamentally, however, the newspaper’s business model is to extract information from a person or community and sell that information to other people for a profit. That profit is never returned to the source of the information. Indeed, paying for information is looked down upon, a practice only fit for the pictures of celebrity babies. Information is a resource like any other - with the one giant exception that information is a resource that disadvantaged populations have plenty of. So taking away the stories of a low wealth community, for instance, in order for a publisher to turn a profit is especially hurtful. In an information economy, stories are a potential source of both fiscal and social capital. As the arbiter of community storytelling, traditional journalism business models deny opportunities for communities to develop capital from their own information resources. It is for this reason and no other that newspapers, both local and national, should die a quick death, not because newspapers operate in an outdated model. The latter fact is merely a happy coincidence that is also an opportunity to re-think storytelling in the information age. I can think of only one instance where paid journalists are necessary, and that is the realm of investigative journalism, a realm where the subjects involved are actively trying obscure a storyline that needs to be told for the greater well-being of others, e.g. the New York Times’ uncovering of Bush’s domestic wiretapping program, or the Washington Post’s reports on the mistreatement of veterans at the Walter Reed hospital. This kind of reporting takes training and resources above and beyond what could be accomplished in a community media framework. That said, one can imagine the difference between the Post articles and what a wikumentary by the soldiers themselves could have looked like!
Our Stories, In Focus - A Community Art and History Project
I was excited to hear of an upcoming project that is very close to how I imagine a good wikumentary would work: Our Stories, In Focus - A Community Art and History Project.
Share your story - become part of Chapel Hill's history! Share your personal stories and family mementos as part of the Town’s 2009 Community Art and History Project. We invite you to bring your piece of history (a photo, a letter, etc.) to any of our four community workshops listed below, where we will scan or photograph your item to be included in a community “tapestry” created by local artists Leah Sobsey and Lynn Bregman-Blass. Your memento will be returned to you on the spot. Further explore your personal and community history at these workshops by participating in oral history, genealogy, journal writing and story circle sessions. I will be volunteering at the Carrboro workshop Saturday March 28th. While it's great that these workshops are being conducted, they're still a couple steps away from what I'd like to see. The problematic part is that people will be offering all these wonderful, personal artifacts to be digitized...and then control over them is immediately ceded to the two artists mentioned in the blurb. While I'm sure these artists will treat their subjects with the utmost respect, I still think it's a disempowering methodology. Why not give our community members the power to create their own art out of these mementos? This problem is very similar to one I discussed in a previous post in relation to a project hosted by the Duke Center for Documentary Studies: How Much Community Input is Enough? Nevertheless, I'm really glad this is happening. It indicates that there is enough interest in these kinds of ideas here in my own community to take things to the next level! A story about Our Stories, In Focus is at the Chapel Hill News.
On Being Wanted
I hate it when blogs get off message, but I can't resist: this has been a freaking fabulous week in my pursuit of grad school-dom. In my defense, this is ultimately all in the pursuit of wikumentary, so think of it as a small step for Mike, a giant leap forward for wikumentary.
University of British Columbia at Vancouver offered me admission. Along with that comes an automatic scholarship that makes the international tuition comparable to attending school here at UNC. Quite a deal to go study in the fair country of Canada! Potentially there are still funding offers to come from SLAIS itself. The University of Michigan also said yes. The have also offered a 2 year, half-tuition scholarship. AND they have offered to fly me out there and put me up in a hotel for their Visiting Days weekend, to which I said, yes please! No word yet from the MIT Media Lab, but that was the long shot anyway.
SEASR: Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research
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!
Grad School Entrance Essays pt. 3
The third installment of my Academic Statement of Purpose to the University of Michigan School of Information Science. If you see a typo, PLEASE do not tell me!
Media and Memory My decision to pursue this line of study is a very deliberate and personal one, and one that continues a trajectory that I have been on for some time. Some of my earliest and most vivid memories are of interactions with media. From my first trip to a movie theater, where I sat awestruck by the Star Destroyer in the opening scene of Return of the Jedi, media has been an important part of my life. For almost as long (from my third grade poems?), making media has been just as important: I have been/am a writer, musician, photographer, and multimedia documentarian. Somewhere along the way, the relationship between my memories and my media got more complicated. The media I made started to become my memories. I started to depend on my media artifacts to represent the stories of my life. Naturally, it then becomes important to organize these pieces of media in a way that makes sense to me – so that my personal narrative makes sense. This is part of why I am drawn to UM. I want to better organize my media – my memories – and create innovative ways for others experience my stories. During my last three years as a multimedia technician and as a continuing education student in the UNC-CH School of Social Work Nonprofit Leadership program, I have experienced firsthand what it is like to give people the tools and knowledge to tell the stories they want to tell. Stories are fundamental to the human experience; they are how we make meaning and store our most personal information. What I want to do next is provide entire communities with tools to tell their stories in creative and social ways. I want to make our stories more accessible to each other. And I want to see if those tools can make a difference in challenged communities like the ones in Jackson, Mississippi where I grew up. I am almost certain it can be done, but I have a lot of questions and a lot of problems that need consideration.
Grad School Entrance Essays pt. 2
Part 2 of my Academic Statement of Purpose essay to the University of Michigan's Information School. I'm applying to their Community Informatics program.
Wikumentary Both the primacy and complexity of information have drawn me to careers in media. Information is one of our most basic social needs, and also one of our most valuable assets. Information - about ourselves, our surroundings, others - is what underlies the entire human experience. As such, to improve the flow of information between people is to directly and positively influence their quality of life. I want to use media to increase the quality of life for as many people as possible. Specifically, I am interested in using nonfiction multimedia storytelling for social empowerment and community economic development. I hope to accomplish this by building collaborative software, media tools, and web applications that allow people (especially youth and disadvantaged populations) to collect media (primary sources) about themselves and their communities into networked, interactive repositories. These multimedia databases would use stories as an organizing principle. In a current web project, I call this “wikumentary” – a portmanteau of the words “wiki” and “documentary” – and I believe it represents the next step for documentary work. Such processes can be accomplished through progressive business models and social entrepreneurship, melding and fostering opportunities for digital literacy, storytelling, community empowerment, and new modes of economic development that include substantial social components. Ultimately, I believe wikumentary provides an avenue to improved quality of life and “alternative” development (1). To date, my implementation of these ideas at http://wikumentary.net has been limited to traditional wiki organization and editing techniques, which are unfortunately rather rudimentary. I have ideas to advance my work, but lack the skills, which is why I turn to the MSI program (where new skills would lead to even more ideas, ad infinitum!). I would like to explore 3D visualization of multimedia databases. I want to dig into accessible programming languages like Scratch and add intuitive ways for people to incorporate their existing media artifacts. I want to build large, touch-screen interfaces for people to communally interact with wikis in real-space. I want to see autobiographical stories proliferate and hyperlink to each other in the same way as the nonfiction articles on Wikipedia. I want to provide social tools that give people ways to leverage qualitative information about themselves for community economic development. I’d like to help usher in a new kind of economy that finally capitalizes on the democratic potential of the information age, an iconomy (2). I’d like to build flexible, scalable story networks that allow people to imaginatively and interactively assert and explore both their singular identities and their relationships to the rest of the world. I hope to expand the open source options of locative media production. I want to move beyond Google Maps, and help incorporate cartographic media production into basic new media literacy skill sets. I hope to push the artistic frontier of lifelogging. I want to foster digital fluency by providing opportunities to critically engage with identity construction and representation through media – and to make that process fun, easy, and interactive. I could, perhaps, use a little focus, too. 1 Friedmann, John. Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development. 2 Nutt, M. and Schwartz, G. The Story Economy. Is it a good idea to cite yourself in an entrance essay? Not too sure about that one. To be continued...
Grad School Entrance Essays pt. 1
To commemorate my first acceptance letter yesterday from the UNC School of Information Science, I thought I'd post some of the writing that I've done over the course of applying to Graduate Schools. The essay I wrote for University of Michigan is a bit long, so I'll break it up. Here's the first part:
Last spring I attended a lecture at the UNC School of Journalism by Professor Rich Beckman, a pioneer of the interactive online documentary. Destined for a new position in Florida, the lecture was primarily a retrospective of his and his students’ award-winning work. At the end of his lecture, I asked him how long it will take for interactive storytelling to be as ubiquitous as pen and paper; when will the layperson be able to make the kinds of multimedia stories that he and his students are famous for? He answered that that time would never come. We need skilled journalists, he said, skilled editors, skilled media producers to tell these stories for us. That kind of work, he said, would remain in the purview of the trained professional journalist. I suspect that what Beckman meant is that the skills required to produce interactive documentaries currently require extensive training in a specialized (and expensive) software suite. This software is used to manipulate media into a limited number of interactive arrangements for an end user to consume, and it is the skill of the producer that ultimately ensures the hoped-for user experience is had. If this continues to be the primary workflow for the creation of digital stories, Beckman could indeed be right about our future storytellers. I’d like very much to build the tools that prove him wrong. To democratize digital storytelling and maximize its interactive possibilities, I believe we must begin to uncover the informational roots of stories, their underlying components and the primary digital documents that can help us tell them. Beckman’s idea of digital storytelling is based on using software to manipulate media. However, the potential of digital storytelling lies in using software and databases to leverage the connections between media– and the connections between media and people. I want to make tools that place the power of interactive multimedia storytelling into the hands of the young, the old, the disenfranchised, and the ignored. to be continued...
Back from Prato Community Informatics Conference
Despite rain and several lackluster airline experiences on the part of Delta and Co., Ellie and I have managed to make it back from a wonderful trip to Italy.
It was great to finally have some feedback about our paper from colleagues that shared our interests. I was certainly encouraged by the feedback and questions from the audience and by conversations afterwards. Mario Marais from the South African Meraka Institute alerted me to the existence of narrative therapy, which I am very interested to look into. Martin Wolske from the University of Illinois Community Informatics Initiative told me about some great community/youth work they're doing near Champaign. There were a lot of great ideas being circulated at the conference, and at least a few blog postings worth of things to write about...so hopefully I can get around to writing about them now that preparation for the conference is over! and, um, after I finish applying to grad schools.
Timelines as wikumentary
I love the idea of creative uses of timelines - they seem to me a currently underutilized vessel in the "digital storytelling" world, which seems to be dominated by photo/audio slideshows. One timeline project of particular interest to me is The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History, a collaboration between The UNC Center for the Study of the American South and The University Library. But how to do something like this collaboratively?
Enter xtimeline. It has a pretty standard timeline interface, with scrolling and the ability to drill down into event details. The cool part, though, is that you can set group and public editing permissions, i.e. this one on World of Warcraft. Right now it seems there's a lot of empty space: my searches for Mississippi and Carrboro turned up nothing. So, this is a good time to go start a timeline over there! Would wikipedia work better as a timeline-based application? What if you could hyperlink to other timelines that people had made in xtimeline? Timelines may well become one of the most popular forms of wikumentary. It's exciting to see how this will play out.
Wiki Novels
Well, hello. Long time, no write. I won't bore you with excuses, but they include a dirty three-letter initialism: GRE. All I can say is, "whew." How irrelevant the GRE is to wikumentary might make a good future post...
In the meantime, I've just recently been enthralled with the idea of seeding a wiki novel (the subject is still very much top-secret, but you'll be the first to know. It's a killer idea, if I do say so myself). The crowd-sourced novel is not a new idea. Even publishing juggernaut Penguin tried it last year with their A Million Penguins experiment. But what may be a new idea is: can this form be a profit-sharing, economic development project? Could all the wiki authors somehow get some kind of compensation for their efforts? The Penguin blog counts 1500 contributors to its novel. What if the novel was, instead, a community biography? What if they had all gotten a pay check?
Are wikis un-American?
Yesterday I was listening to a story on NPR about the Swiss healthcare model. There was a very interesting cultural moment:
Yet Rappaz looks puzzled when asked about people in the United States who say that it would be intrusive to mandate health insurance. "I'm not sure that I get you," she says, cocking her head. When the question is put another way, she laughs. "Oh, I see. That's really an American question. You are so used to having this individualistic way of thinking, and that's why you don't have these social (safety) nets. You still have this pioneer mentality where everyone has to take care of themselves." Wikis subvert the individual in favor of group knowledge, storytelling, and consensus. Is there something about wikis that goes against the very grain of American ideology, in the same way that some national healthcare systems subvert our notions of individuality? Perhaps this is another barrier to the adoption of the term "wikumentary"?!
Tell Me A (wiki) Story
At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, I'm going to reference Radiolab again for the second time in my last three posts. It really is a fabulous show: they are to science what This American Life is to, uh, American life. On top of that, they are hands down the best sound designers on mainstream public radio that I've heard.
They describe their latest podcast thusly: "This spring, Robert Krulwich (Radiolab host) gave the commencement speech at California Institute of Technology. He called it 'Tell Me a Story.'" What I love about it is that it helps confirm my theory that storytelling is becoming a more and more important way of communicating everything - including something as "dry" as science. In the face of the rising tide of our information ocean, storytelling is what will help us organize this information into meaningful knowledge. "Take a chance, find the words, find the metaphor, share the beauty, tell them what's on your mind...tell them a story." Great advice for talking about science, or anything else. How can wikis be used to tell engaging stories? Through wikumentary, of course.
What do we know?
Yesterday I asked a friend to read a statement I had written in order to get funds to present a paper at a conference in Prato, Italy. In the statement, I said that personal stories have a renewed place of power in the new information economy, and that those stories may allow an opportunity for economic development. But she took issue with the statement: "For those who have little besides their own stories, this is good news."
And, of course, she's absolutely right. What I meant to say is that a person's story implies a whole host of social relationships and valuable work that isn't traditionally valued in capital-based cultures like mine, but could be. But either way, who am I to assert that? This is, in fact, supposed to be the entire impetus of wikumentary. I don't know anything about absolute poverty - why am I trying to assert something about its nature? The entire point of wikumentary is that communities and individuals can do this for themselves, with stories of their own. I should stick to what I know and just try to focus on media production...and partner with others to let them tell me about their experiences and knowledge. It's so easy to get in over my head. Does this happen to you? How could a wikumentary help solve this problem?
The Emergence of a Word on the Internet
When I started this site, I had seen the term 'wikumentary' in exactly one other place: this page on the Meta-Wiki site, which was last edited two years ago. Trying to get any site off the ground is difficult, but I've decided to make it especially hard on myself. I'm essentially the only one in the world using the word that serves as the entire crux of the site. Pretty smart, eh?
However, I listened to an episode of Radio Lab today that gave me a great metaphor for what I see as the emergence of the word 'wikumentary': ants. In this segment, the Radio Lab boys explain that ants find food through a more or less random process. Stick with me: 1) Ants move erratically all over the place, leaving ant pheromones in their wake that are detectable by other ants. 2) Ant X happens upon a sugar pile, literally, through its random movements (they have pretty tiny brains, remember). This in itself is insignificant. This ant alone will never lead its brethren to the sugar promised land. 3) But then Ant Y also happens upon the pile, again randomly. Now there is a pheromone trail twice as strong leading to tasty ant treats. When Ant Z goes to the pile, the trail is 3 times as strong, and so on. 4) Now, other ants start to take notice because they sense a strong pheromone trail. They stop finding the pile randomly and start following the trails of the other ants. 5) Soon everyone' s partying up and down the sugar conga line. So, to complete my tortured metaphor, when I first started the site, I was like the first ant on a sugar pile. However, as other people start to stumble upon the site, they start to lead other people to it. Also, as I leave my pheromones all over the net (in the form of blog comment signatures that link to this site, for instance), using my web stats software, I see people following those trails to this site. Although I want to drive traffic to this site, I also want to drive the word 'wikumentary' into people's heads - just to have more people thinking about what the word could mean, even if that's different than how we define it here. But I ALSO see that happening, which is exciting. More and more people each month arrive at this site after searching for the word 'wikumentary'.
Ants: they farm, domesticate pets, organize public works projects, and provide apt metaphors for the internets. - Ant Party courtesy tarotastic
The September 11 Digital Archive
One thing I'd like to start doing more of here is to collect examples of online wikumentaries. In my mind, the term 'wikumentary' can currently be better defined by showing rather than telling. And a lot of people may already be doing wikumentary work without even realizing it!
The Digital Campus podcast is produced by Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I listened to Episode #29 today and they mentioned in passing the September 11 Digital Archive, of which I was previously unaware. The September 11 Digital Archive uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. The Archive contains more than 150,000 digital items, a tally that includes more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images. In September 2003, the Library of Congress accepted the Archive into its collections, an event that both ensured the Archive's long-term preservation and marked the library's first major digital acquisition. It's a great project, and a wonderful example of wikumentary. Of course, what makes it a wikumentary is that you can "Tell your story, add your email, and upload images, documents, and other digital files to the Archive." The project is a collaboration between the Center for History and New Media and the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning.
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