Giving my summary to the Ecology of Narratives course and our team project.
Overall, the project was very interesting. We were using some social tools like Brightkite, Twitter and Flickr to cover the topics most interesting and emotional to us. We used mobile photos to illustrate our stories (Flickr map of photos tagged “narrativeecology” ). It’s a pity that we could not share videos and audio recordings as easily as photos. If we could tag places not only with photos, but also with videos and audio files, we could come up with something more experimental.
Well, collaborative storytelling was expected, but as far as it concerns me, it didn’t work out very well. Maybe there were too few people in the same neighbourhood (in Brightkite for example). I was wondering if the stories will “grow” automatically, that people will take part in the discussions, create new content, tag similarly. For such stories a critical mass of people is needed.
Stories and clusters
While browsing popular tags on Flickr, I started following some clusters. Some tags create clusters – a set of photos tagged similarly. For example the tag “happy” may create the following clusters (sets of photos describing):
- smiling
- happy people
- events that make us happy – weddings, birthdays etc
- parties, cakes
These are the most common elements in Flickr people associate with tag “happy”. If we explore the tag cluster for “China“, we see that people associate China with the Great Wall, Beijing, Shanghai, travelling, city-life.
Why I’m telling all this, is that stories could be clustered similarly like photos for example. Let’s take our project – we saw stories about:
- buildings and architecture
- food
- emotions and colors
- different signs etc
If we take a look at the clusters, we could analyse which topics (clusters) are relevant to specific locations. In Tallinn we were covering topics mentioned above, but what kind of stories people cover in Toronto or Mexico City (via Brightkite for example)? As there is no tagging possibility in Brightkite, so it’s not that easy to find it out.
Twitter, the locative storytelling experience
I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of months now and found it as a great source for following some local news. If something happens in your neighborhood, the quickest way to share it with the rest of the world would be publishing a short notice on Twitter or Brightkite.
For example last week there was this earthquake in Italy that made thousands of people share their expressions on this accident. It’s the most direct source of news – directly from the people from the exact location. Could you get any closer?
Also, Twitter might be great for sharing news that are really local, the news that make sense for people living in this neighborhood. We here, in Tallinn wouldn’t care if a local supermarket in Paris would be out of order for a day, but if we would happen to be in Paris this time, then most probably we would care. Tools like Twitter are great for serving local news.
Hybrid environments and collaborative editing
To sum up, the course gave us an understanding of collaborative storytelling in the hybrid environments. The coolest, with a locative twist. Not only do “tags” tie stories together, but also locations do. I look forward to continue this Brightkite experience.
Posted on April 13, 2009
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