entretags/blog

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).

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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).

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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. (more…)

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.

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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. (more…)