This idea came to me when I was working with City Lore’s (New York) Place Matters project. Can we re-imagine our cities through interactive and shared stories? And how could “ways of seeing” and “ways of employment” of these stories contribute to new ways of reading, understanding and valuing our built environment?
Recounting stories of everyday places where we live and work can spur active engagement with others who share these spaces with us, revive interest in our built environment and encourage stewardship of our patrimony. The need for collaborative storytelling to create a public culture takes on a sense of urgency when established traditions and ways of life disappear and new ones emerge. This is true for many US cities where old demographics and culture have given way to new inhabitants, economic practices and cultural life. Merely telling stories is not enough in these cases – rather citizens should be inspired to participate and contribute in a collective retelling of stories thereby producing a public discourse that is invested and engaged.
Such a project is truly interdisciplinary and collaborative because it allows us to expand horizontally using a website as a portal to experiment with multiple forms of place-storytelling. It involves multiple modalities of dissemination – local residents uploading their stories, scholarly searches, stories curated by specialists, media and multimedia stories.
I will bring in multiple examples of similar projects done is different cities. It seems like scholars have already WRITTEN such place stories. I am more interested in discussing alternative (to brochures, monographs and book) visual and digital forms of dissemination that may actually be more democratic and may reach more diverse audiences than the traditional University Press scholarly books.
I’d be interested on how to take such a project into the classroom, as well.
I’m interested. People from my hometown (most have moved to other states) created a facebook page to do ‘Remember when’ about the hometown. Lately someone went through the town, took pictures of every house, and posted them. People started commenting about who lived there when (going back about 50 years), adventures they had, etc. It seemed to me a promising start to creating a history of place.
I am interested.
I am very interested in the questions posed here. Place Matters and City Lore are both models of engaging residents in the process of memory and history. I am especially interested in digital mapping projects, like City Lore’s “City of Memory Map.” What is especially appealing about this project is that community members can add to the project. However, the flash-based technology is perhaps not the best platform. As a researcher working in Baltimore, I want to think critically about digital mapping projects that involve residents as well as researchers in building better urban spaces. How can we best use digital technology to develop useful and interactive historic maps? Why are maps so central to our understanding of culture? Our collective understanding of place seems central to both preservation and development of places that matter.