Group-work tasks: fill in the empty parts as group

Team-members

Jaan- an interest in how to use location based technology, possibly a tool for a thesis
Kaija-Luisa- personal city and psychogeography of the city
Ene- interested about new tecnology, place narratives, living in narratives, by the narratives, activity crossroads
Auli- sacred places in Estonia, creative writing through travelling experience
Kaia-cyber-shamanism and how to transfer it to people,
Priidu - interesting in narratives can be emerged in different web environments
Kersti - it will be interesting to see what will capture the interest of photographers, narratives.

Tools

What tools, software your team has in everyday use? collect what you can use

different mobile phones and cameras, media environments flickr, brightkite, twitter, wordpress.

Topics of individual and collaborative narratives

What narratives you would like to write? Discuss if you need to define topics or not

Out of context element (eg. rabis or hinduists) in the city, what is their trayectoty, what do they do,why do they do it, how do they change the city

To find ordinary things

Idea is that there is no mysticism, it is symbolism. Can parts of papers, stories, books be part of your narrative?

Fictive personality acting in town, biography

City through the dog's perspective.

What a house can see through the day...

Not to have a narrative, starting how it emerges but in one moment it becomes a narrative, not knowing where to direct the narrative in the beginning but in the course of action the direction of the narrative will be defined.

How to connect yourself with the places, what it is for a person, how he/she identifies him/herself within or with the place. This is an individ-specific. Some may look places in internet.

Looking pictures in internet and telling stories. How much it is related with your own ideas. Do we talk what we expect other people want to hear?

Why you pay attention to something in this moment? Supporting, intriguing, irritating.

Chain letters that demand personal opinions to be revealed

Why do you bring it out, why these elements? What can be described and what we can not describe about the place (sounds, scents). What can a photo describe?

You talk what you think people expect.

What comes from your own life into the narrative.

What can a photo tell about buildings, architecture, what is the aim of the photo?

Why people choose or dont choose places.

Why people select a place for activity that is not meant for this activity?

Is an interest in graffitty a source for narrative?

What is the difference between a narrative and documentation?

Graffiti is what you perceive, maybe it becomes narrative when you interpret what the graffitti artists felt

How and why some graffitty places change and evolve

Graffity place as an official exhibition place, why do people choose some places for graffity?

Experience mapping and tagging in town locatively

In one moment the information emerging from the Other will create a very similar story/pattern that will be very collaborative (a map of un imaginable city)

Locations

Tallinn (mostly the center, but also Nõmme, Mustamäe), Tartu

DESIGN PART

What is your theory?

Here you list some approaches, some questions what you want to find out theoretically about hybrid ecologies and narrative storytelling

Combining different narratives created by using media tools (listed up) one big collaborative narrative can be achived. That can give a new perspective on creating a narrative as such.

What are your objectives?

Here you list some objectives what you want to realize by writing hybrid narratives in hybrid ecologies Think what are your practical goals

To create interacting stories in the city. To find out will the theory work.

To find out whether it is possible to attain the Johnny Mnemonic syndrome e.g. having so much information that your head blows up?

Here you document experimental approach

Here you wrote how the experiment scenario will work

You document during experiment how it is working

Evaluation of the design

Use results to validate your theory. Use results to validate if the experimental activity met your objectives and goals.

What worked and what did not work. Why something worked, explain theoretically. Write down the final scenario that other people can use.

The things we noticed

Different ways of creating a narrative:

You create a narrative on your own; using your own picture, your own story, you make everything up by yourself.
Using someone else's pictures to illustrate your story.
You create a narrative after seeing some picture on the web: the picture triggers the story. Some photos trigger more stories!

File:Popular photos.jpg

Sometimes the narrative is already there; sometimes you create the narrative later.

Popular themes in text-reflected narratives:

My Estonia by Geroli; information of different parts of Estonia; sometimes you need tho share the information quickly
Shadows/reflections
Food
Buildings, buildings, buildings from inside and outside

Popular themes in photos:

Animals - dogs, cats, birds
Icons, signs and symbols
Buildings; "before" and "after"
Streets
Some humans, but not so many faces; and not so many pictures of people at all!

File:People things.jpg

A few portraits
Sometimes people are represented as shadows; narrator is a part of the picture as a shadow. Shadow signatures :) Signatures as footprints (digital watermark)

File:Lauri jalad.jpg

Flags (Lauri)
Food
Almost no pictures of nature as such. Where is the nature? Priidu, for example says that he was in nature, but looking for objects, not the big picture of nature
Shadows of trees
Very few pictures of actions, things happening; photos are static, objects, etc.

File:People things2.jpg

Useful results, conclusions

Mobile journalists could use this method to write travel journals
If you read a person's photostream, you could understand their personality :) (or what they want to show about it...)

Members of community of practice: people who share common interest (surfers, photographers, ...) could use this method to write short messages and support them wiht photos (waves in Hiiumaa)

Some problems

Brightkite was not supported by Explorer. It looked messy and there was no place where to post your message or photo.
Mapping problem: while posting photo one place in Brightkite it turned up in another street in Flickr.
Brightkite did not allow editing messages/photos.

Some questions

How much did participants read blogs of others? Was the trigger only photo in brightkite (now it seems so) or could the trigger also be written blog?
If blogs would appear in brightkite with short introduction would this help to follow blogs as well or do blogs require too much time and attention that people don't bother to follow them anyway?
What did participants think about photos and the outcome of this project: did it help them to understand and discover the city?

Narrativestory design 1

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