In a few short weeks I will be sitting in a small class with Ira Glass. I don’t really like the whole celebrity band wagon, and loving Ira has become a bit cliche as of late, but I’m pretty damn excited. Really, I just want to say thanks. Because some time ago when I first got drawn into the world of making stories, I watched a video wherein Ira tried to explain that a successful future producer knows what they want to hear, knows what they want to make, and knows that what they are currently able to produce falls way short. He went on to play a clip of himself at 27 on the air. It was tremendously awful, as he warned. He emphasized nearly every third word, and generally tried much too hard. The point is that, eventually, he found his voice, and maybe the rest of us can too— if we just keep making. Make lots. Make daily. Find someone to make you produce on deadline, he says. Well, at least I managed that part! What follows is a series of also awful attempts at producing something for WYSO’s Community Voices program, led by the ever adept and lovely Sarah Buckingham and Neenah Ellis.

First up is a piece I produced prior to the formal training program. It was recorded using the new Avid MBox Pro with two Rode M1s in my professor’s office. I was quite happy with the recording quality (moving up from the internal mics of my Sony PCM-D50), though if you listen closely you can hear that his shirt cuffs brushed the xlr cords here and there just enough to introduce a little noise. The original recording was about 1hr 15mins and was cut to the short version to promote a public salon series.

Though my levels could use work, in terms of production values and quality of narration, it is probably my most polished piece yet. Not because I had reached some savvy plateau of production skills, but something much more akin to luck. Because luck cannot be repeated at will.

Episode 1: Introducing Gilgamesh by Brooke Bryan

From there we proceed to a piece that existed in my mind for a solid year— prior attempts to produce from the audio (in Garage Band) were wholly unsuccessful. While Pro Tools is generally too quirky and complicated for my daily needs (it’s tough to complain when one was warned repeatedly by mentors not to go there), the fades are the only reason these audio recordings were able to serve as a testing ground for a vox pop assignment. In particular, there is an important clip of a little girl speaking that was interrupted at the end by an adult who was closer to the mic. The fade controls allowed me to steeply drop off the little girl’s last word in a way that no other fade I’ve seen came close to. Pro Tools fades are amazing tools, and when you need them, you need them bad.

Unfortunately, somewhere in the production phase I managed to lock all of my tracks together, which effectively ended by narration takes and further tweaking. What’s more unfortunate, I’m pretty sure that the take I got locked into was one of the worst takes of the whole experiment. (I really struggle with the idea that I am supposed to write for radio. Something about the seeming spontaneity of the listening experience makes me want to create the media in much the same way by just speaking whatever I think I’m trying to record, as you will hear in the failed attempt at the end. Otherwise, this piece was fun to write for, though I might have went a little too long.)

Overall, this piece was a fantastic learning piece, and while the finish quality isn’t where I hope to be with such a fun a vox pop, this production may be more about doing something with poor audio than it is producing a polished vox pop from good recordings. And the narration is awful. Something about it is horribly uptight—owing, perhaps, to the fact that I rarely have a moment in my home studio alone. (I need some space people!)

3.14 :: Happy π Day – Kids Sound off on Science by Brooke Bryan

The third piece is perhaps my favorite. It’s one of those pieces you never could have planned (though if I had more time I would keep working the narration.). I work at a college Ecology Institute that manages a thousand acres of land, and one of my new favorite past-times is running around the grounds with our volunteer naturalists, learning things I’ve never had the chance to learn before. Of course, I run around with gear whenever I can manage it. My assignment was to create a “Sonic ID.” Developed by Jay Allison, the Sonic ID is a way to tag the station’s airtime with the federal requirements (call letters and digits) while capturing the character of the local community. Being a big sense of place person who never leaves home without an audio recorder (recording endless streams of sound for apparently no reason), I instantly thought I could spend the rest of my life crafting Sonic ID’s.

This particular hike was in the first two weeks of March, and the world was a muddy mess. I went out hoping to catch the sounds of thick mud underfoot, and to catch some thoughts on whether its more ecologically sound to walk straight through the mud, or on the edges of the trail. (Of course, straight through the mud or you widen the trails!)

But what actually happened, was, well, surprising. It’s easy to love wildflowers, but to understand what you hear you have to understand the thrill of the hunt. For weeks, we had seen Purple Cress (a very common native plant) leafing everywhere. But no blooms—for weeks on end, the buds looked like they would burst. Until…

WYSO Sonic ID—Purple Cress by Brooke Bryan

And the next piece is just a piece of good fun. I let myself run with the spontaneity and immediacy of radio, and just ran with it. I really would like to produce a series of Ohio Hums. Just little tidbits of the too-often overlooked. The character of a place, and the folks who move through it.

Ohio Hum Promo WYSO Community Voices by Brooke Bryan

The benefits of gathering with other new radio makers and storytellers is so vast that it is hard to explain. There’s something wonderful about the journey, about cracking open our computers and sharing something with other ears for the first time. Listening with (and to) others is a way to be present to a certain moment and place, and the various perspectives that arise through the listening and critique are always amazing. Reminds of how similar and different we all are, at the very same time.

And we had visitors, too. Noah reminded us that the three core human needs are food, sex, and the urge to change someone else’s copy. (As a former print journalist, I almost fell out of my chair laughing.) He talked to us about movement in story telling, and how the story has to keep it’s forward flow if your listener is going to stick with you. And most importantly, the story is in the tape, and the producers job is simply to draw that story out and connect it with narration or other context.

In radio or audio storytelling, every single clip must add something to the story that couldn’t possibly be lost while retaining the story’s integrity. Avoid cliche’s, don’t use rhyme as sound is musical enough. Don’t spoon feed your listeners with the meaning, they are quite capable of grasping the narrative. Don’t look for interesting things said, look for things said interestingly. And never, ever write before you cut your tape. Ever.

Our final assignment is a short documentary— 6 to 10 minutes. I wanted to call mine No Socks, since Mother’s Day is also No Socks Day (whatever that is, it rings a bell for this house). It would be a story about the importance of choice. Existential choice. One of my favorite thinkers, Simone de Beauvoir (author of The Ethics of Ambiguity), thought kids enjoy a certain sort of metaphysical privilege. That is, the world that they know exists before them, and will continue to exist just as such, no matter what they do or don’t do. They are removed from the burden of making their own decisions. The job of parenting, then, is to wean youth from this state of metaphysical privilege to a place where they can make their own life-worlds through choice.

I thought if I captured a lot of household sound that I would end up being able to edit down to some specific moments of childhood/parental chaos. If I got that far, then we would have a recording of the follow-up conversations, in which I would probably capture the most amazing moment of mother-daughter conversation that’s ever happened on the planet. And with that nugget of gold, I’d have my story.

Looking back, I wouldn’t choose the same project again, not as a first-timer. First, the vacuum cleaner approach towards recording for hours on end is immediately overwhelming unless you have a dedicated practice of cutting your tape each day. (I don’t.) Second, talking about responsibility and choice within the context of daily life is stressful. The process wasn’t fun, and adding the recording technology into the scene led to a lot of performance from my kids. So I ended up with a whole lot of low quality tape, all the while still looking for my story while entertaining a variety of plan B options.

One Plan B arose when I realized that my kids have an entire economic system—a black market—operating right under my nose. They have stores, paper money, devices for controlling inflation, bankruptcy, and a licensing authority that determines who can drive the clothes-basket cars through the house. I never knew! But that’s a later post.

Somehow, over the last handful of years, I have developed a mild obsession with gathering sound and images from the places I frequent. I’m not altogether sure how it happened, but this urge has bloomed into a host of mundane but near-daily fieldwork habits, a stash of decent gear, and a personal archive full of sound.

Not all of it is usable sound, and the recordings that are the most theoretically usable for documentary work are too often the same recordings with errors in gain, handling, and mic placement. (Not to mention the ever present issue of wind.) When I glance through my files I often wonder why I save some of them, especially in light of the sheer storage space required to archive high quality digital sound.

Being the vibration of air and frequency that sound is, the moments that I capture would otherwise pass by me, through me, then away from me, extinguishing in distance and direction. But I capture them, though I know not what captured moments are good for. I don’t have clear purposes for the sound I keep, but when I listen to it, it takes the shape of a visual wave form on my computer screen through which I come to understand it.

Outside my Window on the Second Morning of March by Brooke Bryan

A book I have been reading, The Auditory Culture Reader by Michael Bull and Les Back, raises awareness of the role of sound in society through a series of essays both historical and contemporary. In the introduction, they caution against the tendency to look at the past through the “epistemological lens of the present.” The point, they write, is that we have to be aware of the dominant sensory tendencies of our day. The ability to think critically about things is, perhaps, dependent upon whether we can think beyond, around, or through these cultural-sensorial biases to our perception. (The overriding point being that we live in an intensely visual, technology-mediated culture.)

It seems we interact with sound in visual ways these days. I have never “cut tape” like those who worked in sound before digital audio editors did. But I have reveled in working with an audio file long enough to know just where the next voice of a certain narrator begins and ends because of the visual wave form. In more than one way, my own work can be located within this turn toward visualized sound, and I’m not sure what to make of this apparent dual irony at the heart of my work. On the one hand, I think I am developing a practice of being present to the moment, yet I fiddle with my technological gear. On the other hand, I feel I am breaking through the visual bias of contemporary society by focusing on audio work, yet I capture “the sonorous” only to interact with it visually.

One of my favorite philosophers, Martin Heidegger, talked a lot about “the darkening of the world” that, for him, had everything to do with technology. Though he lived and died before the digital era as we now know it, he warned that technology can ensnare us into simultaneity and speed, in many ways enslaving people into a monotonous shade of gray that is fed by an endless stream of instantaneous images.

Basically, Heidegger thought humankind is in danger of losing its “metaphysical grounding,” and that we are nearly so far removed from the root of our natural experience that we barely notice our own decline. Mankind is changing the way it is in the world. Through the simultaneity and speed of contemporary society, our being-in-time or being-here becomes less in situ, less aware, less intentional. Hearkening back to Nietzsche, Heidegger claims that that the very word “being” is now a “mere locution.” We have forgotten what the word means, he says, we “have fallen out of what this word is saying.” For Heidegger, we must entertain this word, this concept that is “evanescent as vapor” in order to understand its “full and rightful scope.”

The full scope of an evanescent vapor.

For Heidegger, the only response for humans who wish to be authentically in-the-world is to keep asking ourselves what we ought to be doing as beings-in-the-world. (It may seem redundantly simple, but his work in this area is deeply philosophical stuff.) The very asking of this fundamental question “opens up the happening” of what it is to be human, brings about ideas of potential futures, and thereby grounds us in the “originary” locus of our past and “burdens” our present moment. I have come to think that, for me, the best way to burden my moments with a sense of what has been and what could be, is to listen. To be present, to be aware. To focus. Should I find it ironic that the practice I am developing to be present and aware is brought forth and mediated by technology?

My saturated yard, bubbling on a February eve by Brooke Bryan

While Heidegger (in this cited area of work, at least) focused on what it is to be conscious in a technologically-driven world of things and other conscious folk, a later philosopher in the phenomenological tradition has considered listening directly. For Jean-Luc Nancy, “the sonorous” is deeply different than the visual. The sonorous “outweighs form.” It “does not dissolve it, but rather enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude, a density, and a vibration or an undulation whose outline never does anything but approach. The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades into its permanence.”

In “Listening,” Nancy wonders why the visual has come to a privileged place in our cultural systems. Why forms of listening have remained in the realms of the esoteric and the secretive (his examples being the Pythagorean teaching methods of ‘acousmatics’ and the religious confessional). Whatever the reason, and wherever the answer, Nancy says we must be sure to bring our eyes with our ears as we ponder this— a somewhat comforting idea to a digital audio gal with these questions on the table.

Turns out, it’s all about relating to place, an idea in Nancy’s writings I would have loved to encounter a few years ago. But to get to place, you have first to work through presence, Nancy would tell us. To come to an understanding of truly “sonorous” experience isn’t so much about being-present as I might have thought. In fact, the very idea of “being present” is, to an extent, a visual idea. For Nancy, “in the presence of” is an idea that belongs to the world of points along linear lines where things manifest as they exist in reality. The “sonorous present” belongs to the dimension of space-time where “simple succession” of the Newtonian world fades into something inherently quantum:

It is present in waves on a swell, not a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelopes or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts… it stretches through space, or rather it opens a space that is its own, the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation. This space is immediately omnidimensional and transversate through all spaces…

So, for Nancy, looking and listening are two quite different activities. “Visual presence is already there, present, before I see it,” he writes. Sonorous presence, on the other hand, requires an arrival of pressure that acts on its subject, passing into it, through it, without regard to whether or not it was invited or is wanted. The ear has no eyelids, he reminds us.

Recording sound is intentional, of course. My recorder has on and off buttons—I can even pause if I choose. More importantly, pausing the forward motion that hurdles me through my days is just about as “intentional” as it gets. I have been late to work and meetings in order to capture a few moments of morning. I have crouched by the side of the road after the bars close to catch the frogs, and sloshed around my early spring backyard trying to capture the bubble-talk of over saturated land. I have pretended to be reading only to tune into the various sounds of a bustling cafe. In this way, though I use technology to capture moments that are in fact “evanescent as vapor,” I am actually pausing the pace of my technological world (if only opting out momentarily for a listen).

But the other irony—the visual nature of digital soundwork—still stumps me. I’m not intending to be biased against the visual (as the new owner of a 7d, I’m arguably doing more photography than audio work at the moment) but I do want to understand the goosebumps. I want to know something of the auditory affect.

The more I listen to sound from all parts of the world, both the exotic and the mundane, the more I realize how it functions as a cue for visual thinking. That is, if I hear a sound that has no image, I will conjure a scene in mind. However, if I see a visual only, I am not nearly as capable at conjuring a sound to accompany it. When Nancy says that the sonorous gives undulation and density to form, I take that to mean that being “into sound” isn’t about heralding one sense over another, it is more about approaching perception in a way that gives the human experience the most bang for its buck. The sonorous is so primary and so evocative, that we need to keen, careful even, about the functions of sound.

I know that I cherish recording sounds because it gives me reason to be present to moments that I would otherwise cruise through, only vaguely aware of the full sonorous presence that can be taken in when you truly listen to the depths and layers of auditory experience. A single, full moment in a busy world. Recording helps me revel in being, helps me regard the full scope of a passing moment which would otherwise be evanescent as a vapor.

(What I do with these captured moments remains to be seen. There is a danger, perhaps, of reducing the summer night sky to bugs in a jar.)

Hay! I’m Nia ! I like cheese !I love the pics azsa took! She is so talented!I love yellow springs! I have been in 13 plays and love to sing, dance,and swim.

My name is David and I like soccer. My favorite picture was was when I had a 90 degree pic and it was of sap on a tree (It was close up). The closer part went out of focus :( . But the backround was awesome.

my name is eli  and i like to eat frog legs :)  my favorite pics. that i took was of graffiti a trashcan  a leaf and of a random guy jumping on a trampolin (i think thats how you spell it) i like monkeys, and turtles, i do graffiti and i skateboard, i like zombies i make youtube videos. and i dance disco. i have never killed a giraffe.  i have teeth.  i can backflip. my favorite bands are greenday, papa roach, hollywood undead, and ac/dc. i love myself.

my name is william.                                                                                                                                 

my favorite pics are of food. my favorite album is beestie boys! i like food and video games.

my favorite band is…

green day,cold play,sum 41,Ebanesns,

:):):):):):):):):):):):o

i like taking pictures of nature. i am gage.

My name is Raine. My favorite picture I took was of somewhere were a stair case and an old door used to be you could tell because it had the imprint of those things.

My name is Lily. My mom is the person who made this website. Since I get to go to both classes it would be hard to pick one picture I like the most! -But one I remember and my mom remembers is one of a pink-flower beside a brite-blue sky.

My name is Atulya and I like urban things. My favorite picture are the ones with graffiti.

————-

                            ______________

100115 thatcamp animating community stories by WhyHereNow

Animating Community Stories

Thatcamp Columbus ’10 was a wonderful experience for me, because not only did I again find myself in the mix with digital humanists of all stripes (who, across the board, lean more toward collaboration and innovation than defining disciplinary boundaries — the latter of which is quickly becoming the bane of my existence), but I was able to co-present with Dennie Eagleson, my mentor extraordinaire. Dennie, along with oral historian and author Don Wallis, are in many ways catalysts for this project, which I developed while in their class called ‘Community Journalism: Photography and Oral History” at the Non-Stop Liberal Arts Institute. Since they are both ongoing mentors of my work and my career path in a larger sense, it was really great to reflect upon the beginnings of our current work together. Also heard within is Marjorie McClellan, another example of the local talent I am blessed to have as sometimes-council. If you are not sure what this project is supposed to be about, herein you’ll find a few key phrases I am currently using to define it. A major question was, and still is, how to fund this kind of work?

Historical Place Knowledge

This session was led by Eli Pousson and Dave Lester on the challenges of, as Dave calls it, “federating place knowledge” across digital tools and platforms so as to build a better foundation for both academic and community applications and projects. The other voices in the conversation belong to me (Brooke Bryan), Mark Tebeau, Douglas Lambert, Doug Boyd, and a few others that I, unfortunately, did not catch the names of. If you are interested in place, community narrative, digital projects and the curation of digital information, follow through these links to explore their work. Good stuff, there.

Thatcamp 2010- federating historic place knowledge by Brooke Bryan

Soundcloud, or ‘how amazing it is to tag a wave form’

Soundcloud deserves its own series of posts (yes, forthcoming), but I’d like to at least introduce it here. I have spent the better part of the last year considering how to build digital projects that interact with audio in new ways that are both engaging and effective at communicating information to others. Funny that I should find my answer in the world of the break-beat DJ artist.

As a journalist, I audio-record nearly every interaction that is on the record (excepting phone conversations), and I record all public meetings that I cover. In fact, I record public meetings that I am not covering, because I think meetings can be both the genesis of major community movements, and a performance of (what can later be seen as) promises and ideas that were (often unfortunately) left to wither. To this end, I have a hard drive full of community visioning sessions, workshops, planning meetings, and presentations in Yellow Springs, Dayton, and within various communities of interest that are, essentially, documentary in nature. Soundcloud opens new worlds for what I might do with them.

What I find in my work is that long form narrative (here construed as anything from a transcript of a multi-hour oral history interview to my print coverage of a 3.5 hour school board meeting) is good for some things, but not at all good for other things. An interview transcript of an individual talking might include everything that he or she said during an interview (including each instance of ‘um’ or ‘like’), but does little to convey the nuance of spoken word and the subtle instances of emphasis, uncertainty, sarcasm, and endearment. In another instance, a write-up of a school board meeting (while lacking the same nuance) can only include those moments of the meeting that the reporter (myself) chooses to include. If only there were a way to tag an audio file that could allow users to listen to the parts they find interesting or important…

The digital paradigm is shifting information patterns away from an undue reliance on traditional authorities and the linear written word. At the same time, it increases the need for a curatorial mindset, as the thinking behind tagging and indexing information is every bit as important as the thinking behind linear information management. In some ways, it is a new kind of thinking that is inherently trans-disciplinary, trans-mediative, and connective in nature. What sorts of information are essential to living in community? There are likely as many answers to this question as there are communities. The great thing about digital tools is that, when we create platforms for information management, we can allow each community to ask — and answer — their own question.

Soundcloud, re-conceived for spoken word applications, is going to change the way I do things. I’m sure of it. I have much more to say about it, but I must save it for a later date. Meanwhile, if you look at the embedded play widgets on this page, you can see comments along the wave form which tag different sections of the presentations. You will find that you have to click on a small ‘>>>’ sign to scroll through an entire comment (the javascript comment window being as small as the height of the player). To add comments yourself you would need to click through to soundcloud, create a (free) account, and then tag, comment, and reply away.

A crowd-tagged map from just one of the breakout groups from the first round of community workshops. The green dots represent 'strong places' and the red dots represent 'weak places.'

Recently I wrote a piece on the Yellow Springs/Miami Township visioning process for the paper I write for, the Yellow Springs News. I was working with a large amount of pre-sorted ideas (narrative phrases generated by community members and recorded verbatim by session leaders) to summarize the draft findings from the first community workshops. The article was in anticipation of the kick-off to the second stage of the process, another public workshop designed to help community members work some of these raw ideas into goals.

But narrative phrases that have been pre-sorted into categories (with one idea sometimes being filed under multiple categories) are fairly difficult to assess. From a journalistic perspective, at first glance the ideas seemed oversimplified. Looking closer, the ideas took on a disembodied quality—especially when considering the ‘weak place/strong place’ results of the community mapping project, one of two exercises conducted at the first-round workshops. Since my job as a writer is to make sense of things for my reader in the clearest way possible (as my editors will remind me!), I had to find a way to get deeper into the community generated data—in a nimble kind of way. I was on deadline.

Enter Many Eyes, a set of text mining tools anyone can use to visualize data—with the hopes of revealing unexpected patterns and insights that would be difficult (impossible!) to wrap one’s mind around without computational assistance. Since data visualization is key to my interview work here (I consider Wordle to be a primary research tool/method in my community conversation section), I’ve been looking for a way to use Many Eyes. But because all data sets need to be open-sourced for the greater Many Eyes community, it is not quite appropriate for my oral history/ethnography interviews. So I took the plunge and uploaded two data sets provided to the community by ACP Visioning & Planning, the consultants hired by Village Council to lead the visioning process. (That is, I copied and pasted text into a window.)

Because I participated in the first round of workshops, I had a feeling that some of the mapped responses would be a bit unwieldy. For starters, the dots were very large compared to the scale of the map. And community member’s thinking behind how to place the dots seemed to vary. For instance, after the mapping was finished, one community member said he placed a weak dot on Antioch College because it needs development. Other community members placed green dots on Antioch College, because it was an asset or a staple of the community. Likewise, while many tagged the western gateway of the village as a weak place, a few tagged it green because of its potential.

Using the word tree tool, I was able to see how people referenced these places during their comments that were recorded by the session leader. While the map helps us get a visual handle on things, the tree map allows us to consider what that visual means, by considering those key place words in context. In the weak data set, sorted by ACP, many comments were recorded about the western gateway to the community. You can enter your own search terms, and navigate around from there. Each time you click on a new term, the word tree is remapped. Try ‘western gateway,’ ‘Mcgregor,’ or ‘Vernay’ to get a sense of how to the word map allows you to move through the data.

Weak Set

The strong set, as sorted by ACP, included many responses about the Glen, Antioch College, and downtown. Grab a search term, and see how it moves for you. As a first time attempt with the word tree tool, with copied and pasted data that was not collected for the purpose, I was pretty impressed. My needs as a journalist were far better served through this method than flipping through flat pages of text and power-point files. Since community generated data is non-linear, it makes sense that my research process ought not be linear either.

Grab some search terms and see how it moves for you. And if that gets you thinking, check out these data sets.

Strong Set

This Wordle is made of the first four interviews—each transcribed and combined into one text file to create an experimental, blooming community conversation.

I sense a significant shift in emphasis coming after working with this file. Many of the smaller, or less spoken, words are beginning to gain some prominence as multiple interviewees speak about the same issues. This is good. We have moved from the “YS Mantra” seen in the first two clouds of arts//schools//community into something a bit more nuanced. Towards kids//housing//different//town//things//home//affordable//school//working…

The question becomes whether or not this experiment can actually tell us anything about the meaning the speakers conveyed without knowing something of the relationship of words as they were spoken. People? Community? How many different ways have those words been used, and for what shades of meaning?

But that is the topic of another post, where I will try my best to implement advice gleaned at two recent conferences (Oral History Association and the American Folklore Society) to dig deeper into the “speech mining” I’m trying to do here—with some new tools and some new angles.

A pop-up city is a new sort of built environment, the sort of built environment that can be created in an empty space that allows one to plan from scratch. This is the suburb’s city.

All things left unconsidered, it is a beautiful place.

The buildings are faced with handsome brick in modern shades with charcoal undertones. The advertising and storefront signage is minimalist. The development is built around the center square, a polygon of concrete alternated with thick sod, laced with buried fountain pipes. Facing the square, from nearly every direction, are patios of restaurants I can rarely afford. But many can, apparently.

They come for good food, good service, and good views. They come to wear the latest fashions–the season’s latest that they bought last week (perhaps from the store around the corner) when the fiscally conservative spouse wasn’t watching. Then again, perhaps many on the patios have no need for fiscal conservatism when it comes to attaining the good life.

But I don’t mean to be sarcastic or sardonic. The fact is that even those who would speak the highest disdain of a pop-up city will come to patronize it from time to time. And, despite their intellectual distrust, they will enjoy it. I certainly enjoy it. My kids love to come—my son coined it “the new city” when it was built a few years back.

Certainly it is a consumerist space, a place conceived for shopping. But there is no use pretending, as far as I can tell, that each of us is not just as affected by the consumerist ethic as another. It matters very little if you find yourself sporting apple green patent leather sandles with the trend setters, or grunge skeleton and scroll printed hoodies with the twenty-somethings, or the classic jeans and crisp tank with the eternal thirty-somethings. It matters little, I am prepared to argue, if you spend your money at the Greene or at Target. The fact is that we are consumers. We all glean our identity from goods (some of us more or less, and in different ways). We are all part of the trend that finds this American consumer-system rising and the hyper-local civic system weakening. (And with that statement, I intend to invoke ideas like those explored in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.)

So I came to this particular pop-up city (the Greene in Beavercreek, Ohio) on this particular day not at all to point toward “those consumerists” nor to call the Greene’s foul for being what it is, but to sit and ponder why I, and all of these happy people around me, like to be in this place.

Admittedly, my exploration of the pop-up city has little to do with the active shopper—like the lone woman with a bag who is feeling good about the click of her new kitten heels on the concrete—but from a point of view that is concerned with the grandmas and grandpas and moms and dads sprawled out in the center square.

Very few are actively shopping. Many are dressed in their Sunday-best. Everyone, and I mean each and every single person I observed over a three-hour period, is engaged in an act of leisure. And not once did I see a single child in trouble; not once did I see a single child scolded or disciplined. Given what I have observed elsewhere, and given how hard I know it can be moving through the world with kids, this is remarkable.

This particular Saturday, a warm and slightly breezy midsummer day, finds staff on duty to serve white towels (free of charge) to dripping children playing in the chlorinated fountains. There is a juggler in Americana costume lending an air of reserved carnival, his favorite thing being, it seems, to juggle dangerously close to the faces of daring and brave children he has been hired to entertain. Apparently, no parents or grandparents mind his repeated feats of proximity. If they do mind, the worry is not enough to call them off the benches and the concrete steps down to the square. Eventually he manages to get the vast majority of the youth (ranging in age from early toddler to tween and numbering near thirty) to march around the square behind his lead, juggling pins all the while.

A band is setting up under a large white festival tent, and the snow cone vendors bring around free orange-colored samples to nearly each and every congregant. Another entertainer, on seriously tall stilts, is twisting dog figures out of squeeking balloons. Eventually, I realize I am doodling a pleasant cell-shaped congregation of oddly shaped and interlocking circles and figure it is time to pack up.

I left the Greene with a sense that this is a public arena, a new sort of main street, where people can do whatever it is that we do when around others in a town square. I left frustrated that public congregation must happen in a for-profit sphere, and I drove the 25 minutes home wondering what trends, both national and hyper-local, created the space and the need for this sort of development. 40,000 years of human civilized society on record, in highly organized cities, and now the ability “to be in public,” for many Americans, is confined to artificial town centers of this sort or another.

But days later, in a class taught by long-time Antioch College philosophy professor Scott Warren, I realized the darker trend at play in a pop-up city. It is not only that we ought to be a little ashamed that our local community governments have failed to ensure public arenas for their communities, leaving innovation to the for-profit sphere. There is a real problem, a liability inherent in this trend that threatens the tap root of “democracy.”

We watched Naomi Klein’s No Logo documentary. While everything she says about the depths and ramifications of advertising and tribe-branding and consumerism is psychologically accurate, I was thinking about the pop-up city. Perhaps the greatest argument for the wantonness of the pop-up city is that it seems like a public space, but it simply isn’t.

Should someone want to picket or protest or distribute pamphlets here, they could be immediately turned away, or worse. The rights of public space do not apply. These streets are not really even streets.

The great American social movements, including but certainly not limited to the suffrage movement, the abolition movement, the civil rights movement—these movements that have shaped America have, in each case, required concentrated human forces that first gathered en masse in the streets and public spaces. The importance of public spaces for demonstration can not be underestimated. Without the right to demonstrate we become like so many nations, worldwide, who lack the ability to create change in the face of dominate, oppressive forces.

Now, clearly, the existence of the Greene is not now going to eliminate the ability of the Dayton region to gather should citizens embrace the zeitgeist for a new social movement. But the trend towards pop-up cities is disturbing. Because of the pop-up city’s success, other places suffer as the local money flows in a different direction. Because of the pop-up city’s success, more communities will allow or invite them. And because we are creatures of habit, we run a certain risk of becoming accustomed to these privatized spaces that feel so very public.

Today I pulled myself into a neat little parking space next to a shopping cart rack with the intention of observing how folks move about in the space commonly known as a shopping center. Shopping centers are one of the most fascinating American trends I can think of. With their big box grocery stores, fast food franchises, off-brand clothing stores, and dry cleaning centers, they seem to lurk around the corner from every struggling small town in Ohio. They are not particularly appealing places to be, but their draw seems to lie in their convenience.

This particular shopping center is relatively small, relatively new, and in a location which has a smaller demographic than many other local areas. Sitting about six miles down a country road from the village of Yellow Springs, it skirts the edges of the city of Fairborn, a small city with a large “underserved” population. For many in Yellow Springs, the shopping center marked the advancement of sprawl into the first bit of farm and field which flanked the north side of the highway—marking the edge of Fairborn’s commercial development. This development now has grown another block away from the highway (and into the country), and the long horned bull who graze near an intersection now stare blandly at Speedway customers and a large traffic light. The big old stone house that sits upon this property is as beautiful as ever, but the old white barn across the road is no longer cared for. Each year, its disrepair is more evident, causing passerbys to wonder if the property owner has given up.

I am not opposed to change, and while I’m wary of calling every new development progress or even economically beneficial, this is not a story of how sprawl is encroaching upon the real and the good. This is a story about different places and how they affect who we are.

My capstone project is, so far, lacking in deep methodology. I’m plowing through materials as quick as I can manage, and with a book lent to me by my professor Jim Malarkey (The City and the Sign), I am finally getting into material that feels generative in the sphere I’m playing in. But this is a post on parking lot ethnography. Because that, apparently, is what I am doing.

This is my audio recorder, a Sony PCM-D50. And that is the window of my car. I was there to observe and to record some audio of parking lot sounds, an attempt to catch a bit of the day-in-a-life ambiance that folks like myself move through while getting the domestic business done. (Funny, stated here, that being domestic has anything at all to do with a paved parking lot six miles from home, but these are the times we live in.)

Soon after turning on my recorder, all the noises I could have hoped to record seemed to fall from the sky for the benefit of my recording them: the adjacent car door closing, the engine starting, a cart rolling by and crashing into other in the rack, people talking from afar, a siren passing.

It is a breezy sunny day, a midsummer afternoon that hints that fall is coming just around the corner. My windows are down, the pad of paper that I am taking notes on is rustling a bit in the breeze on my lap. When cars pull in, I do not look up, but use my peripheral vision. A professor of mine walks by, but I do not call out.

Two women pull their cart up to the back of their car, the car next to mine, on the other side of the cart rack. There is a young toddler, about a year old I would guess, seated in the front of the cart. Loading groceries into the car, one woman says to the other woman, “I don’t know, all that noise would make me feel like beatin’ him.”

And the mom says, “Oh, he just sayin’ ‘blah-blah’ all the time.”

And they kept loading the plastic grocery bags into the car, and the toddler kept up his sweet “blah-blah,” and I began to sweat.

Surely, every word they said was recorded in perfect clarity. Did they know they were being recorded? Did they have the right to know they were being recorded? Did they notice the odd tool perched on my window, and were they about to ask me what in the hell I was doing?

Two things became clear to me in those few moments that seemed like an eternity. First, that spoken words must not be taken out of context. The story above is verbatim, and it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Yet, the two women seemed warm, both to each other and to the child. The toddler was having a fine time, and the mother’s reply was affirmative of her son. For the rest of the day I wondered about that transaction I had witnessed. Was the choice of words and the statement of the first woman just a cultural performance? There was no anger or frustration in her statement. It was just a statement, said the way I might comment upon the weather to my companion. And can anything actually be inferred from such a moment in time?

That second thing that became clear to me is that we move through shared spaces believing we are leading private lives. We move with an assumption that we are not being recorded or photographed, and that if we were, we would know. How often do we know?

There seems to be a chasm between this assumption and the tools we carry around on a daily basis. Granted, few carry professional audio recording devises every where they go, yet most phones can easily take pictures, audio, and video. This week, a woman was arrested after someone published a cell phone video showing her dragging an immobile child across the floor of a store. Without getting into a conversation on what is or is not ethical behavior—nor upon whether visual portrayals of circumstances accurately portray the moment they capture—what new understandings ought we (as citizens and as individuals) have about privacy and personhood, given that the tools we all carry in our pockets and purses (and the channels we have for mass publishing) allow for a whole new level of capturing our movements and expressions in shared spaces?

As for my own ethical dilemma, in being the intrusive and unannounced recorder of private moments in shared spaces, I was relieved of the decision of what to do (or what not to do) with that recording. My recorder was on pause.

Between Dayton and Springfield there is a small pie-shaped village (at least from afar) near the Mad River called Yellow Springs. This is the place of this project. The home page of the website shows images taken by elementary students of the downtown school grounds. Older photos, a hodgepodge of sense of place images, can be found by searching through the early archives. (Hint! Go to the little tab at the top right of the homepage for more navigation.)

I am not sure if I am going to use this map, per se, but one of my goals is to sync images with maps, eventually creating audio walking tours or other interactive ways to experience place.

I am working on my capstone project for my humanities degree, an observational ethnography of four places found within this map: downtown Yellow Springs (Old Main street cum import tourist district), The Greene (pop-up suburb “city”), the urban core of Dayton (site of intensive street culture revival despite serious statistical decline), and the nearest strip-mall convenience center anchored by a big-box grocery store and fast food chains that took over the fields near the highway a few years back. Just maybe, if it won’t get me in trouble, I’ll take pictures of the base, too.

I’m looking for a conceptual model that will bring semiotics, sociology, and folkloristics together in a way that will allow for some interesting phenomenological insights on how people move through these different sorts of places. The end goal is some kind of commentary on how our land use and patterns of development generate and/or mediate our interactions and our thinking.

Welcome to Middle America. What are you doing here?

During the lunch break at THATCamp, George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media‘s digital humanities unconference, I showed a brief glimpse of the project before an audience of professors, historians, digital tool builders, and digital humanists of all stripes. Of course, I was the first to go over my 3 minutes (earning a play of a jaunty little tune I can’t recall the name of, which i had no idea what it was, causing a bit of a laugh), but generally, the project was well received. I might say it was the least institutional of all projects I saw (i.e. clearly grassroots and not the product of a team of professionals), but maybe that is where its intrigue lies. I heard some feedback from folks who meandered through the site after the first day workshop, with my favorite comment coming from Bethany Nowviski, who called the project “fresh.” Yes, fresh works for me.

Despite the fact that my family interviews have been woefully neglected, I’m just as thrilled as ever to think about this site, though certain elements of the Why Here/Why Now project have not materialized because of the need for further thinking (and further tech skills). Eventually, I hope, it will end up in a partnership with at least one other local organization, possibly with podcasts or radio documentary spinning off from this multimedia site. I want to map memory and place and social history. I want to get lost in the idea of place; how we come to know one and how it mediates our experience.

I will also have a chance to talk about the project at the 2009 Oral History Association annual meeting in Louisville, themed “After the Interview.” My proposal was based on a broad conception of what this project is and does, and how changing media has created the space for people with average, consumer grade tools to document “the now.” As it is, oral history has not traditionally been so concerned with the present, but I think new tools allow for new kinds of documentation.

Also, the American Folklore Society will have me in their annual meeting in Boise this October– themed “The Ethics of Place.” I proposed to talk about this project as a way to explore contested ideas of place, which, here in Yellow Springs, often pivots on ideas of conservation of greenspace, affordable housing, and economic development. I hope to gather some thoughts from locals on the subject. The Wordle tag cloud of my proposal sums my abstract up nicely:

I am super impressed with some of the ideas presented in this 200+ urban community manifesto! Collaborative Services: Social Innovation and Design For Sustainability (PDF)

I have been working on an idea for a space in town that could function as a community third space for practical arts, philosophy/literary salons, and kid/family workshops of all kinds (media training/language classes/arts).

Leave it to me to have plenty of ideas (and little to no drive to approach the ever-dreaded funding issue). But this publication asks us to rethink what and how we monetize services and products, how we use and share space, and how we view the public and private spheres.

I think our little urban village of Yellow Springs is primed for a strong third space that welcomes all ages in an informal and collaborative environment. We certainly have the local talent. That talent needs a space to play.

Contact me at brooke@whyherewhynow.org if your jazzed by this publication- I’ve got a couple things up my sleeve and could use a few partners in crime to get it going.

The kids did a fantastic job- taking pictures, pondering their place, and having a general jolly time.

I hope you are as impressed with their thoughtful photography as I am.

I will be in touch with you via the contact information on your release forms to be sure you are happy with all the content featuring your child. If you have any concerns or questions, please contact me.

I hope to be able to use some of the audio we collected over the course of the class, and to work more photos into the top rotation (tricky business, these things!).

Meanwhile, consider allowing your child the ability to comment on some of the pictures that went live after class, so that those students may have the benefit of complements also.

Don’t let the family miss this talent- invite the whole family to view your child’s portfolio!