A Collection of Resources for Community & Interview Projects (under construction!)
One of the goals of the Why Here | Why Now Project is to empower other communities to tell their story by examining local issues that are pertinent to their cultural sustainability. This page of resources is meant to be a collection of digital tools and guiding ideas that can help other students, professors, and community members conceive of — and implement— similar projects that address whatever hyper-local issues face your communities.
Website Framework
Wordpress as Content Management System
A content management system (sometimes called blogging software, but preferably not) is the very first thing you need to start a digital project online. If you are looking for a way to present just one interview, skip down to the section called “digital tools.” Wordpress powers the Why Here | Why Now project website, and there are two different versions of Wordpress you may choose, depending upon your needs and your budget.
Wordpress.com
The least intensive (to set up) version of Wordpress is hosted on Wordpress’ own servers. It is free to use (unless you purchase further capabilities), has limited functionality in a few areas, and will give you a domain name something like www.yourproject.wordpress.com. Despite its limitations, it is powerful and easy to use, and starting a site there is a great way to get up and running. First, you will get an API key (a code number) that will be important to you should you “upgrade” to a self-hosted version, and you will learn the basics of the administration panel, the back-end hub of the Wordpress experience.
Wordpress.org
The Why Here| Why Now project is powered by a self-hosted version of Wordpress, which is also free to use, though it opens the door for other costs, like purchasing server space for web hosting (about $150/year). Self-hosted Wordpress allows for much greater functionality, a domain name of your choice (www.yourproject.org- which should never cost you more than $10/year), and is the best option for those who want full functionality like more media storage and the ability to modify the css of your theme (colors, alignment, fonts, etc.) for a custom look.
Wordpress Themes
Themes provide the visual aesthetic for websites powered by Wordpress, but they also determine the ways in which the CMS moves. That is, themes are built in different ways by different designers, and how you work with your content is determined by their theme functions. Without getting into too much detail, most of the themes I use for the projects I host and support are grid-based, magazine-style themes. See some in action at African Metro News, DaytonCREATE, and updayton.
My favorite theme designs are from Graph Paper Press, because the lead designer (Thad Allender), a photojournalist of some sort, has a keen minimalist aesthetic that makes his themes useful for a variety of needs. And they are category driven, which is an easy mechanism for code newbies to grasp in order to have control over your site. Click on the image to check them out — including F8, the theme used by the Why Here | Why Now project.
Be warned: self-hosted beginners often have a tough time setting up GPP themes out of the box. But once configured, the structure of the themes is incredibly easy to use. The Why Here | Why Now project has 5 categories (Interviews, Community Conversation, Photography, Process, and MLASC). My user never really needs to know this, but it allows me the ability to segment parts of my website for different purposes: blog posts on the project will never be seen in the same part of the website as my feature interviews, which will never be seen in the section devoted to my work in after school programs, which is kept separate from my sense of place photography.
Web Hosting
I use Dreamhost for all of my self-hosted sites. I find it to be an easy to use platform, with a navigable administration panel, and quick customer service via email. They have a carbon offset program to boot.
Digital Tools for Text and Spoken Word
Digital tools are open-access computational applications that anyone can use to explore and/or present data. Because my work focuses on interview and narrative, my particular area of emphasis is on using digital tools for spoken word applications. To that end, and a few others useful for projects like this, here are some of my favorite tools.
Wordle
Wordle is an algorithm program that creates a graphic representation of text by weighting the number of times a given word appears with a greater font size. I use wordle extensively throughout the project, in some cases (believe it or not) as a primary research tool. Because we tend to repeat what is most important to us when we are speaking, I have found that visualizing full interviews always renders something wonderful.
During my first stage of project design, it became pretty clear to me that producing the one to two hour interviews into something that people would actually listen to (which, yes, is the goal) would result in a loss of thoughts and context. My original intention was to create slideshows of audio and images for each interview, produced somewhat like a documentary radio or podcast series.
But I quickly found that I wanted to decide which images to linger on for myself (rather than passively watching a rotation) so I decided to publish the audio and photography separately. Still, many thoughts were lost in editing the audio down to a succinct 3 to 5 minute piece (which, by and large, is unacceptable). By transcribing the full interview (minus redacted parts) and pasting the text into wordle, I felt I had made some headway towards representing the words that were edited out.
Visually, the word clouds are very engaging, and have been mentioned by more than one participant as the reason they decided to be interviewed. In an attempt to create an ongoing, weighted community conversation, I have been combining each new interview (that is, the text transcript) with the previous interviews so as to watch the conversation bloom. More on that after I’ve done more interviews. For now, know that wordle is somewhat limited in its function, but is darn good at what it does. It is also dreadfully simple to use.
Tagul
Enter Tagul, another visualization tool that produces things that look similar to wordle graphics, but is actually quite a different animal. Unlike wordle, which makes static images from the text I provide, Tagul slurps in text from a site you can designate, or from google itself — all to render a live word cloud that links to those instances of text. Tagul functions as a search mechanism. Wordle, in the way I am using it to explore spoken word, is something akin to a research tool. Interestingly, both of these tools are literal in that they use the words that are actually present in text. A third kind of tag cloud is built right into Wordpress, but it is a cloud of meta-terms, or terms that an admin assigns. For instance, when someone is talking about gentrification of a neighborhood, they rarely say the term. By tagging your posts in Wordpress with meta-terms, the tag cloud generated by Wordpress (found at the very bottom of this page) is like an index to a taxonomy you have created to structure your content.
Many Eyes, TAPoR, Seasr, etc.
Whereas Wordle and Tagul are visualization tools, Many Eyes is a text mining tool that can identify patterns in text. For instance, the word “community” is prevalent in my visualizations. But how is the word actually being used? The tree mapping application will allow you to see each instance of the word “community” in context, that is, within the phrases that the word appears in.
Many Eyes is not difficult to use, just keep in mind that “uploading a data set” can be as simple as pasting some text into a box. Know that any data you provide will be visible (and accessible) by other members of the Many Eyes community. In other words, before you upload a transcript of your interview, be sure that your interviewee has given you explicit consent to open source their words in this way. For this reason, I have not analyzed my interviews yet, but intend to move towards TAPoR to do so.
Like Many Eyes, TAPoR and Seasr each include multiple applications you can work with, but beginners will probably find them more difficult to approach.
Digital Tools for Photography and Info Graphics
We are blessed to live in an era of digital development that is creating new and free-to-use tools for nearly any purpose you can conceive of. Here are a few of my favorites, from timelines to powerful photography collage to new conceptions of the slideshow, you will find some of these to be effective tools no matter the scale of your project.
****coming soon!****
On the Art (and Best Practice of) the Interview
Interviews are curious things. Will your interviews be informal, vox pop, journalistic, an oral history, or ethnographic in nature? Why should you care? You must care for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that capturing and presenting spoken word carries certain ethical burdens — and invokes responsibilities under the law. And that doesn’t even begin to address various best practice standards as expressed by disciplines like Oral History, Folklore, Applied Anthropology, and journalistic societies. Here I will provide links to the standards that I am familiar with, and a little bit of personal background about how I was “schooled to care.”
****coming soon!****
Compelling Projects
Here are a few projects that I find inspiring.
The Garden Conversations
Because this project is conceived to address a hyper-local community of interest at a time when external forces threaten its continuance, Garden Conversations might be the most similar to the Why Here | Why Now project. It is deeply meaningful to hear so many reflect on what it is to be an urban gardener.
Fragments of Another Life
This strikingly simple project is a look at what property people retain when they leave their native lands. Shown pictured with their material culture, participants tell of a few fine items, with personal pen marks. It is very much about how we invest our identity in the small things we own. This project inspires me to think of the ways that material culture sustains identity, and to find a way to work the emphasis of people’s cherished things into the Why Here | Why Now Project.
From the artists statement: “When people flee their homes and homelands because of persecution, they are often lucky to escape with their lives – and precious little else.
‘Fragment of Another Life’ is a series of portraits of people recently arrived to the United Kingdom. Each shows the few mementos that they managed to salvage from their previous lives and is personally annotated.”
Interview Project
The David Lynch Interview Project is a special favorite of mine, not only for the way it maps interviews to place, but because of the existential ethic the project embraces. Participants are unerringly human, and the raw honesty in which they present themselves to the camera while reflecting on the project’s “grand life questions” is endlessly interesting and surprisingly life affirming. Some are heartwarming, a few will chill you. Either way, many of the interviewees have remained on my mind long after I have watched.
According to project literature, participants agree to be interviewed after serendipitously encountering the interview team. The crew traveled 20,000 hinterland miles over 70 days and conducted 124 interviews. 121 of these will be posted to the site.
Rochester Black Freedom Struggle
Studs Terkle
Studs Terkel is highly regarded for the dynamism of his interviews with others. Here, you can listen.
Asides
A bit of press for this project, excerpted from the Yellow Springs News:
Web site profiles life in village by and for young families
By Susan Gartner
“When the Village Council convenes in the small space at the Bryan Center, most Yellow Springs families are busy fixing dinner, attending after-school functions and extracurricular activities, and bathing and putting their youth to bed.”
So reads a portion of a project report summarizing the experience of one local resident who, like many others, would like to participate in the decision-making efforts of local government but is hampered by family obligations.
The report, issued in December, was not commissioned by a coalition of state agencies. Findings were not gathered by an outside consulting firm and funding did not come from the Yellow Springs tax base. The report was authored by villager Brooke Bryan — fiber artist, Web developer, and student in the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute — as part of a class project. The class, “Community Journalism: Photography and Oral History,” was taught by photography professor Dennie Eagleson and oral historian Don Wallis.
Bryan enrolled in the class to fulfill requirements for her bachelors in Humanities at Antioch University McGregor. Students were asked to develop a project that would focus on some aspect of community. A mother of three, Bryan went with what she knew.
“I started with the framework of Yellow Springs families,” explained Bryan, as she kept her children — Lily, Kaden, and Vivian — happily distracted during a recent interview. “I think that the concentration of young families in this area is just phenomenal. It’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
After growing up in Kettering and Beavercreek, Bryan moved to Yellow Springs in 1998 to attend Antioch College. A year later, she withdrew in order to focus on her art and start a family with her husband, Carl.
In ’05–’06, Bryan participated in the Leadership Institute of Yellow Springs, a nonprofit organization (no longer in operation) that provided training for volunteer leadership. It was during this training that Bryan learned about the cost of living study conducted by the Yellow Springs Men’s Group.
“The study stated that for Yellow Springs to be successful and vibrant, the community needed to focus on attracting and retaining people who will raise families here,” Bryan said. As Bryan watched the town wrestle with affordable housing and development, a reduction in the employment base, the closing of Antioch College, and the overall decline in the national housing and finance market, she began to question whether the “families with young children” demographic was adequately being heard.
Returning to school in 2007 to finish her degree, the opportunity to address this concern popped up in a creative way this fall, disguised as a class assignment. In October, Bryan launched the Web site: “Why Here/Why Now Project” (www.whyherewhynow.org).
“The idea of the project is to try to glean information from the people who have the potential to raise their families in Yellow Springs to see what their needs really are,” explained Bryan. “Who plans to stay, who plans to leave, and what realities are affecting those decisions.” Blending photography, audio interviews, and music chosen to match the cadence and energy of the speakers, the interactive Web site presents each family’s story in a unique, engaging, and avant-garde format.
Read More to hear what it is like to get interviewed by the project, from the perspective of a few participants…
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