Legacy Matters

Time Traveling at MIT and Stories, Scrapbooks

I sent in my RSVP and last  weekend, I dropped into the Time Travelers Convention at MIT, but seeing no one I knew, left.  Might go back though if I meet them later.

Personally, I prefer stories for time travel.  What better way to travel to the past or insure a presence in the future than through really good stories?

My real reason for being at MIT was to learn more about the Work of Stories at the MIT Media in Transition conference.  While there were some of the 200 presenters, I  only stopped in on a few, those on digital storytelling, especially for families.  I wanted to see how time travel via digital stories was doing.  After all, digital storytelling -combining images and sound with a strong written narrative -  is a new art form, accessible to anyone who can use standard computer tools.  I think it's destined to be the preferred means of storytelling in the 21st century especially as internet savvy people grow older and begin to reflect on their lives and their stories as part of their legacy to their families.

J.D. Lasica writes about how the Center for Digital Storytelling helps people hold up a lens to their own lives.  He quotes  Joe Lambert who founded the Center.

"We sense that digital storytelling is beginning to spread like wildfire across the land," says Lambert, 45, who runs the 8-year-old center with his wife, Nina Mullen, plus a staff member and a posse of associates and technical volunteers. So far the non-profit project has trained more than 4,000 people in the use of digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives.

I like Joe's first principle:

Every human has a powerful story to tell. You can not experience life without insights to your experience, which are valuable to a larger audience. Most people's perception of living a quiet, mundane, uninteresting, unmemorable life mask the vivid, complex and rich source of stories that everyone has to share.

I met Helen Barrett who's helping people with Electronic Portfolios especially in the field of education.  She shares her ideas on her blog and most valuable is her guide to digital storytelling tools.  Soon she'll be spending more time at Digital Family Story with her husband.  Hopefully, she'll do some redecorating to the site which looks clunky and outdated but still has useful links around digital storytelling.    I liked this older man's tribute to his Dad which nicely incorporates news footage and music from World War 2.  The narrator, his voice almost breaking, as he talks about the last time he saw his father, demonstrates better than I could say, how important hearing a voice and a personal point of view is.

Another great list of resources and links can be found at digitalstories.org.  I learned how much the BBC is doing in capturing stories of ordinary people in Wales.  Called CaptureWales, the BBC site features ordinary people creating their stories at digital storytelling workshops around Wales with a new featured story each week. 

For great stories there's always the favorite Fray where I found this amazing story of life and death about murder and carpet on the van walls, that you don't want to miss.

The only good paper I heard was by Barbara Audet at Auburn University who talked about the reinvention of the American scrapbook, this time with digital photographs and technology along with a more consciously crafted narrative.  I never knew before that Mark Twain was such an ardent scrapbooker, making them and taking them wherever he went, and making money with his patented "self-pasting" scrapbook.  PBS made an absolutely fabulous interactive scrapbook combining selections from his works, photos, illustration, clippings, and audio files.                 

The $2.5  billion scrapbooking industry in the US grew 28% in 2004 over 2001 according to this survey.  How much faster will it grow when digital scrapbooks and stories really take hold?  Take a look at Digital scrapbooks for lots of ideas. 

UPDATE:  Just came across time travel blog - back and forth  to LA in 1947.

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