About This Project: Getting a Sense of the Place

This project is an attempt to explore lived experience and the idea of community by looking at a particular place with the people who live there. It begins with Yellow Springs, Ohio, a storied community of both great strengths and great weaknesses.

The strengths of this place are many: it is small, quaint, and navigable. It is home to plenty of interesting, intriguing people who have written themselves into history. It is a great place to raise kids, and each year more grounded, slow-movement sorts start young families here, re-enchanting the days of those of us who were beginning to taste the boredom of being one of 4,000 in rural Ohio.

The weaknesses of this place are also many: we have lost our employment base, our grounding in the working class, and much of our diversity.

Like the rest of Ohio, we face a general population decline. Unlike the rest of Ohio, our housing costs have skyrocketed over the last three decades, creating a major cost-of-living delta between middle age community members—who purchased their homes two decades ago at vastly different prices—and younger families seeking to establish themselves (who soon find that the entry-level housing market simply doesn’t exist).

Our meetings and our paper are filled with tales of polarization. If one didn’t know any better, one would think that there are two camps to everything: one camp that supports business and development at any cost, and the other camp which supports greenspace at all costs. Of course, then there is that third camp of affordable housing folks which no one seems to know what to do with.

All these problems and yet we stay.

We stay because sometimes we remember that there is a place called the Glen that is cool when downtown is hot. We stay because we know the teachers (and their parents, and their children) and the idea of a new and different place holds so little weight when compared to this. We stay because any village that builds a street around a tree is a place worth rooting for.

We stay because we understand that a community is a conversation, and that here we don’t have to shout. But still, listening is difficult.

This project is based on the idea that members of this community needs to take time to hear differing perspectives. We need to take time to ponder the divides our community faces. Time for thinking through our needs and our constraints. Time to wonder why we insist on bringing in outside consultants—to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars—to do this for us.

Recently, new Why Here|Why Now content has slowed significantly due to the project lead’s other commitments. If you would like to be an interviewer, photographer, or transcriber for the Why Here|Why Project please inquire. There is much to be collected (in images and audio), and there is much deserving commentary—I’ll lend my gear if you help keep this conversation going.

Photos

All photos on the site (excepting the MLASC kids projects) are taken by Brooke with a Fuji Finepix s8000, a simple consumer-grade digital camera that is hardy and quite affordable. You are welcome to use the photographs of public spaces for your own non-commercial use, but you must credit the photo to Brooke Bryan or the Why Here|Why Now Project. If you use them online, you must hyperlink back to this site. As for the photos of families in their spaces, those images are not for download or other use. Seriously.

Interviews

The interviews for this project are based around a guiding theme:
Why do you live in the place that you live, and what does it matter?

Using an abbreviated life history interviewing approach, the full audio reveals thoughts that range from origin stories to conversations on what diversity is and does, to intense critiques of local values and unexamined assumptions. Some interviews are deeply introspective, some focus on family, some will wander further.

The edited interviews are published here as a listening project; a grassroots visioning process. The thoughts and perspectives of people you meet on the street are sometimes different (or at least more nuanced) than you might know.

After choosing an interview to listen to, allow it to load, then press play on the gray button at the top right of the page. While you listen, you can flip through the images and ponder how the words spoken are conveyed through the word cloud. Then, come back tomorrow and do it again with a different participant.

And if you, yourself, would like to add to the conversation, just begin here. It is painless, fun even, and you have the right to preview your content to be sure the story you gave me is the story that is represented.

Word Clouds

The word clouds found with each interview are created to be typographic representations of meaning, made with a transcription of the interviewee’s spoken word and the algorithm program Wordle. What would your story look like?

With the addition of each participant, comes the addition of a new collective tag cloud.

As the conversation grows to include more voices, the collective graphic will bloom in response, changing and morphing its typography with each new voice. You can view two voices together here. And here is three voices together.

Beginnings

This project has its roots in many disciplines, but first sprouted in a class at the Non-Stop Liberal Arts Institute entitled, “Community Journalism: Photography and Oral History” with documentary photographer and professor Dennie Eagleson and author, professor, and oral historian Don Wallis. The class explored the experience of deep listening, the art of the interview, and the methods and ethics of presenting real experience through photographs, sound, and the written word.

A project like this could be called oral history, except it looks at now, not then. It could be called applied anthropology, but know that it forgoes unusual peoples for the family down the street and is concerned with little more than the character and daily habits of a small college town in the Midwestern hinterland.

It is probably bona fide folkloristics, and it surely could be community journalism, except that it challenges what is “news.” There is nothing particularly newsworthy here. Just a place and a few of the people who move through it.

About Brooke

Brooke is a happenstance ethnographer who has a habit of recording daily sounds and interviewing folks. She never leaves home without her audio recorder, and can often be found shooting wildflowers in the 1000-acres maintained by Antioch College’s Glen Helen Ecology Institute— where she is a Project Manager. The Glen borders the downtown district of Yellow Springs (the western-most of three preserves along the Little Miami).

By day, she works with fellow staff and volunteers to bring all things good to the Glen. By night, she cuddles her kids and pets, logs the audio and shots she took that day, and reads. In her spare time, she makes slow progress on a graduate degree in Place & Memory, works on the disseminating committee of an NEH-funded Oral History in the Digital Age project, edits the H-Memory listserv, and serves on the editorial board of the Oral History Association and Newfolk/New Directions in Folklore. Her work using algorithms to represent spoken word has been internationally recognized, and her current research focuses on documenting perceptually bounded places through open source maps and tools.

The Long Version

More detailed information on the planning phase of this project, can be found here.