Social Computing, Maps and Storytelling

Last week, we attended Warren Sack’s lecture at Rhode Island School of Art and Design (RISD). Sack referenced the writings of Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community), Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle or see this translation online), and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (information and communication theory + translation + A Mathematical Theory of Communication) to locate two of his well-known projects Translation Map, and Conversation Map, and a project that has gone through various phases and is still under development, Street Stories.

About Street Stories: For geographically-based community members, many local places have stories associated with them. Some of these are commonly-known stories; others are personal narratives associated with, for example, the house of one?s childhood or the place along the old train tracks where the sweetest blackberries grow. But when people move elsewhere or (sub)urban development paves over an area, the stories are decoupled from the places and the places lose their vernacular particularities and are transformed into much more generic spaces. As increasing numbers of geographically-based communities are displaced by network-based communities, the places of community?and their associated stories?are lost.

The goal of this research project is to invent new places of community memory and communication for the network society through the creation of a new practice and technology of storytelling. Prototypes of the proposed technology already exist. Many museums and historical sites have created audio tours by lending visitors a tape, recorder, headphones and instructions on when to start and stop the tape to hear the recorded story associated with the given place or artifact the visitor is looking at. Technologies of this sort that can automatically detect the visitor?s position in a defined space. The proposed technology is a digital, networked device (built using a wireless technology, global positioning system, and a handheld computer) that will allow visitors (or locals) to record and leave their own stories at any geographically specified location they desire.