Making Sense of the Past, Streaming to the Future
October 31 2007 | In MusicMusic collaboration and community storytelling are different today. Not only can participants be in different locations, they can also be from different eras, with dramatically different memories and interpretations of the same piece of music or story.
For example, look at Dust-to-Digital whose mission is to “produce high quality cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.”
Victorola Favorites, Artifacts from Bygone Days
Melodii Tuvi: Throat Songs and Folk Tunes from Tuva
and compare to YouTube where any one can broadcast themselves as opposed being brought forward from the past by an archivist.
Compare these situations to Accuracy&Aesthetics Director Ken Fields tag798 project, a semantic community model being constructed through user-created tagging methodologies, also known as folksonomies.
Participants will be building a community ‘portal’ - but the portal IS the physical community; the map is embedded in the territory. All is based on the premise:
1. Humans are taggers.
2. Creative online practices will migrate into the real world.
3. Enabled by mobile devices.
All of the examples above are about music, but typical ontologies are not geared for processing music, most interpret words. In terms of story telling, which uses words, see the Center for Digital Storytelling based in Berkeley CA. Even the logo is perfect with a divide between the organic human side and machine processing.
Diverse stories are able to be recorded and distributed far and wide….past where the readers own memory or interpretations come into play and the machines preserving and distributing the words have no understanding of which stories are “better” or “truer” or “more meaningful”. Today, machines and networks can only understand higher or lower rankings, ease of processing may make minor works seem more popular and important than they are. The situation will only get worse as time goes on.
The Center for Digital Storytelling helps people to listen deeply through their mission that every community has a memory of itself. Not a history, nor an archive, nor an authoritative record…a living memory, an awareness of a collective identity woven of a thousand stories.
What depiction works for this semantic construction?
Digital Arts & Humanities Project, Nora Social Network Demo
Can the ultimate shared map include a break or reflection between the organic human side and machine processing like the Center for Storytelling logo?
Go back to Africa again and compare this work to the Centre for Popular Memory in Cape Town.
How many breaks and reflections are needed once the issue of translation and transcribing enters the scene?
Renate Meyer
Digitising African Oral Narratives In A Global Arena
Museums and the Web 2004
__________COMMENT______
Hi Deborah,
Thank you for mentioning us. I think it looks and reads great.
Best regards,
Lance
Dust-to-Digital