StoryBank: Sharing stories across digital divides
Lead Research Organisation:
Loughborough University
Department Name: Computer Science
Abstract
The aim of the project is to allow village communities in the developing world to create and share audiovisual information easily. This information could be very practical; containing health or agricultural advice, advertisements for local products, or exercises for a school lesson. Or it could be more personal; containing invitations to forthcoming events, reporting local news, or requesting help with a particular issue. Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focussing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information. By setting up a repository, we will allow such information to be stored and accessed repeatedly by different people who may share the same cameraphone, television or other screen-based device on a temporary basis. By connecting this repository to the internet we will also allow people outside the local context to see how the authors live. This could be useful for distant engineers and designers to understand the needs of people from a different culture, and create more appropriate products and solutions for them. In this way we aim to re-conceptualise internet content at a local level, making it more TV than PC-centric, and to test this out across local and global divides.There are three main research questions for the project:1. What kind of stories and information are useful for local and professional users?2. How can we present, organise and deliver the information in an accessible and compelling way?3. How will the information be physically created and represented?Our approach to developing and testing the library system will be to build it primarily for use by one local community in India. This will be identified early in the project, with the participation and involvement of local people and developer organisations already working there. A secondary user group will be new technology engineers and designers in the UK, who will be challenged to design solutions for this community using information in the library.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
Eran Edirisinghe (Principal Investigator) | |
P Palmer (Co-Investigator) |
Description | The design, development, implementation and testing of a series of mobile apps that can be used by users who cannot read or write. The mobile applications were aimed a developing 'digital stories' by combining images, video and audio/voice recordings. |
Exploitation Route | The work has been put to use by an NGO in India to gather life stories from rural communities in the village of Buddikote. The same technologies have wider application capabilities in other deprived communities in the Asia, Africa and the Middle East. |
Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Healthcare Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
URL | http://www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/storybank.shtml |
Description | The various mobile applications and technologies developed under the project has been used by the NGO, VOICES, based in Bangalore. These have been installed in mobile devices that have been used and included in projects carried in a rural community in Bangalore, India. Digital stories covering health, environment, social and agricultural issues have been created by the community and distributed widely, highlighting the problems and the need for solutions/intervention. These have been used by the NGO to informed the local governments about the needs of this rural community. I am aware of the fact that the the project academic lead from Surrey University has since looked at using this technology in communities beyond India, especially in Africa. |
First Year Of Impact | 2008 |
Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Healthcare,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
Impact Types | Cultural Societal |