nici /memory /abstract

Brief Abstract of Thesis Project

I’m still not happy with the title Narrative Histories. Community Stories is another possibility.

     Narrative Histories will be an on-line system for the collection and display of the personal narratives that comprise a community’s history. The system will use photographic images as the memory triggers, allowing individual users to provide written or oral narrations of the memories that they spark. The design encourages episodic memory from its contributors rather than the linear narration that is often associated with historical account. The collection of stories is instead ordered through a system of tags—key words and phrases associated with the narratives—that allows navigation through the collection that emphasizes common themes and experiences. Navigation based on narrator and on triggering image will also be possible; my goal is to provide various ways to navigate through the information that highlight shared experiences and connections between the personal accounts. This allows the viewer to construct a coherent narrative from these episodic bubbles based on their particular interests.
     The system is designed to accommodate many communities but its initial implementation will be with The Hip Santa Cruz History Project. This is a local historical group that aims to collect the narratives from participants in the hip culture movement in Santa Cruz during the late 60’s and early 70’s. Much of the initial seed narration from the HSCHP will be gathered from interviews and written accounts with participants who do not have access to the narrations of other participant. After the system goes online, the participants will have the opportunity to read or hear the narratives of others and submit further narration of their own.
     Once the system is in place and users begin to add to the narrative space, visualization techniques can be used to examine how a group setting influences memory. Studying the pattern of accumulation of narratives and they ways that viewers choose to navigate the available data will inform further design considerations and provide insight on the role of community history in our culture.
     The story space of Narrative Histories will be available to the general public via a website, and any viewer can sign up to become a contributor and join a community or create their own. Each community will have the ability to allow or restrict membership, but there will still be a space for the narratives about a community contributed by non-member. This system will facilitate the gathering of community histories while allowing those communities some degree of control over how they are defined, and it will provide a display and navigation system that increases the accessibility of these histories while still allowing a variety of trajectories through them.