It has been one month since I presented my thesis, concluding the Master Course in Interface Design at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. As the practical part of my thesis I developed {Hi}Stories, a system to support user-generated contents as historical records. The documentation of {Hi}Stories can be found here. {Hi}Stories was also presented at the CHI 2008 conference in Florence, you may read the short paper published at the proceedings of this conference here.
Just got to know a survey released this year by IDC, which attempted to measure and forecast the amounts and types of digital information created and copied in the world - and whether it is generated from individuals or businesses.
In this research the amount of information created and copying was analyzed in order to give a forecast for the entire “digital universe” through the year 2010. Some interesting findings:
IDC predicts that by 2010, while nearly 70% of the digital universe will be created by individuals, organizations (businesses of all sizes, agencies, governments, associations, etc.) will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability, and compliance of at least 85% of that same digital universe.
Information security and privacy protection will become a boardroom concern as organizations and their customers become increasingly tied together in real-time. This will require the implementation of new Read the rest of this entry »
In All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation, Scott Rettberg distinguishes three types of participation a contributor might have in a collective narrative project:
Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their contribution to it might be utilized.
Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project.
Unwitting participation: Information utilized in the collective narrative are gathered by the machine itself, and contributors have no conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material.
These three levels of participation are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that one collective narrative project could utilize contributions on all three levels.
In this article, Rettberg looks into well stablished systems such as Wikipedia and Flickr to extrapolate methodologies for the creation of collective narratives. Individual Flickr users, for example, aren’t consciously thinking about forging connections with others.
The term Collective Narratives might have different meanings. In my thesis I use the term Narrative firstly to stress the mode of discourse I’m considering: Narrative = describing an experience, event, or series of events as a Story - which is of course different from expository discourse, persuasive discourse, etc.
In general sense, however, Story might be used both as a synonym of narrative, or as a sequence of events described in a narrative. In this sense we may try a narratological approach. Within narratology, narrative can be defined in several ways, but the formal structure is the crucial aspect of all narratological definitions (ref).
Two big projects with the motto ‘ordinary people writing history’ are being lauched this month: Einestages and Miomi
Einestages was launched last week. It is a website of Spiegel online, one of the most visited german websites, which is also part of Der Spiegel, one of the largest-circulation news magazines published in Germany.
Einestages is strongly focused on the quality of the content, all contributions are reviewed by the editorial staff before being published. Once approved the story can be linked to others. The interface is clear and the content can be found easily - the system also don’t have that much content yet. The most interesting thing I found in this website, however, is the Fudbüro (lost and found office), where people can post photos or texts and other users can add any other material they have (everything serious and review by the editors, of course).
I just joined Facebook and noticed this kind of ’stories’ each member automatically builds. It is a list of statements, organized in groups, which describe the activity of each person in the system. The presentation of this statements in consecutive order sets up an implied causality, which may be interpreted as a narrative.
In Facebook you can also install different applications that allow you to build narratives with friends or other users. One of them, Web Story 2.0, remebers me the stories I’ve build with my collegues with SubEthaEdit, when we were tried to explore the software as a game. Read the rest of this entry »
Storypaths aims to explore the meaning of images in different contexts. The starting point for your story is a Flickr image. By adding some text to this image, your words are interpreted as tags. Images with these tags are going to appear next to inspire your next writing. Just pick one of them and keep going. In this way you just have half control on your story: who knows which pictures were tagged with the words you wrote? or the reasons for a picture to receive this tag? The richness of the game is exactly exceptions created by subjective interpretations.
I was proud to know that one brazilian website was the winner of the Golden Nica 2007, in the category ‘Digital Communities’. Overmundo is an online discussion forum that aims to bridge geographical and social barriers in Brazil. It conveys culturally and socio-politically discussions and scenes from large urban centers to rural regions.
Started in Berlin Dropping Knowledge is a good example of what I call ‘collective narratives’. The proposal is quite interesting: by asking questions and getting different answers from people all over the world we are able to understand better how they perceive their environments. Asking questions is in a why finding out about what the other one already knows and in which way he has found out about it. Read the rest of this entry »
