Digital storytelling revival project

Joe Lambert at the Center for Digital Storytelling passes along this word:

Revive the Archive Project

CDS sits on a mountain of stories. Stories about first kisses, fish dinners, fabulous friends, and forgotten photographs. Stories that touch on every part of what it means to be human. Our archive spans 14 years, and some 4,000 movies.

CDS would like your support for the CDS Revive the Archive Project. With your help, we will be able to revisit stories from our workshops in the past, and produce them as public pieces for the world to share. 

Over our history, many of the stories created in our three day workshop process have been intended principally for the private sharing of the maker and her/his immediate community. It was not realistic, or necessarily preferable, for us to make the work available for broad distribution.

In 2007, with your generous help, we will select a group of stories and invite the makers to join us in a special production process. We will interview the makers in studio, re-work their stories to address any concerns for public presentation, and create a broadcast quality DVD featuring the makers and their stories. These stories will also be presented on our website.

For every $1,000 we raise we can complete another story. Our goal for 2007 is 25 stories. To find out how to contribute, go to http://www.storycenter.org/archive.


New family oral history site

My brilliant and charming friend, Susan Kitchens, has launched a new site.

Family Oral History Using Digital Tools is a site devoted to family stories -– recording them, transferring them to your computer, and creating digital archive disks. It includes how-tos, tools and techniques.

Susan and I have been discussing oral storytelling over the past year. Glad that Ourmedia and the Internet Archive could help her offer an accompanying podcast. I'm hoping Susan will head up the Ourmedia Learning Center's section on oral histories.

Ashes and snow

Ashes and snow, in Flash. Nice.

International Digital Storytelling Conference

My friends Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling, Daniel Meadows of Capture Wales and Karen Worcman of Brazil's Museum of the Person (she's on Ourmedia's Board of Advisors) are all attending the three-day International Digital Storytelling Conference, which begins today in Melbourne, Australia. Writes Joe:

As a follow-up to the 2003 BBC Digital Storytelling Conference, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is hosting a gathering to “investigate the power of personal narrative as a way to explore issues of social justice, community building and social memory.” Speakers from Latin America, Asia, Europe, North America and the Asian Pacific region will share their work and experiences in the field of narrative and new media. John O’Neal, civil rights activist, theater performer, and writer, will give the keynote address. As a long time resident of New Orleans, he will talk about the role of artists as citizens, both from a historical and broad social perspective, as well as in light of the Katrina disaster and his community. After the conference, Amy Hill will lead a workshop for survivors of violence, related to her work with Silence Speaks, and Joe will co-lead a master’s workshop with ACMI’s Helen Simondson.

Wish I could be there. Maybe next year.