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

Team-members

write names

Ele Pajula
Lauri Laineste
Jaanus Sakkis
Taavi Lindmaa
Ulrika Rosenblad
Olga Ivanova
Geroli Peedu

Tools

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

mobile phones able to take pictures and to email both text and visual files and also play music as an ipod.

orkut.com and facebook and myspace as second level aggregators based on the individual participants with the aim of sharing the experience with other friends who are not into the project.

flickr so as to share visual files with colleagues and friends who are out of the program. utube might be used as a tool for uploading both visual and sound files in the system.

eventually lastfm so as to connect a musical stream to textual and visual files uploaded into the system

blogger and wordpress as aggregators in which entries uploaded in the sytem are monitored and stories are basically told, but even as spots feeding or being fed by other blogs in which people tell other stories or give updates about their daily life.

wikipedia and wikimapia (http://wikimapia.org) that allows us to distribute entries and parts of the story we are telling on a collaborative, but we have to check and explore interactivity. googlemaps might be used the same way.

photoshop-like programs so as to edit pictures before uploading into the system.

After discussing tools we will use for defining the main channel leading from so called 'perceptual' layer to the one in which storyprocessing takes place we basically agreed about the fact that the very new thing this experiment will try to introduce is a collaborative level of interaction making every one of the participants able to feed a stream of data everybody else can use so as to define their own narratives.

This is different from plain blogging in terms that everybody of us will rely on a datastream that is not just defined on the basis of the position of individual participants in the locative field and will not just depend on their own personal sensory assessment. Hence the main purpose of channeling is the one of making other participants aware of the activity stream of everybody else. We even agreed about the fact that probably the monitoring layer might be incorporated into individual weblogs as feeds we can get from twittersearch and flickr narrativeecology group, but even from p2p direct connections.

We are trying to figure out strategies that make it possible for individual participants to directly express ideas about new tools making it possible to do new things and perplexities abut the way the experiment is going. Probably it can be made through individual weblogs using special wp tags or categories such as narrativeecologyhelp will arise or similar while participants will be trying to establish connections with colleagues in respect of the meta-layer of the experiment.

Final evaluation:

File:Narrative tool map.png

Mobile phones were used but also cameras (pictures uploaded to Brightkite). Mobiles were the easiest to use (always handy), cameras produced better pictures.

Ipods were used but not actively incorporated into storytelling. Lastfm and other music-related tools weren't actually used. The original idea of the music-layer was too difficult to incorporate, uploading pictures and tagging them and actively monitoring others activites proved to be enough of a challenge without trying to add another dimension to it all.

Orkut, Facebook and Myspace weren't actively incorporated (privacy issues - not wanting everyone in social networks knowing about one's activities or aesthetic reasons - not being happy with how it all "looked") but other people did indeed take active interest in our activities but through Brightkite and Twitter (strangers first commented on pictures and then actively followed people's photo-activities, Twitter is becoming more and more popular amongst people thus our feed in Twitter couldn't have gone unnoticed by acquaintances who joined Twitter).

Flickr was indeed one of our main tools, Blogger and Wordpress aswell. Flickr provided us with necessary information and was the tool connecting things and stories.

Wikimapia, Googlemaps etc weren't really used, no one bothered to photoshop things either. These tools probably could have been incorporated on another level, but the map provided by Flickr seemed to be sufficient and the raw pictures were aesthetically pleasing enough without "tuning" them.

We found out new network Zannel what also enabled to add images to the internet environment. The most important, it allowed to tag content. The thing with Brightkite was, that it didn't add tags to photos. So, you had to go to flickr and tag them separately.

Actually using these different kind of tools (Brightkite vs Zannel) makes it interesting - could the stories from two different networks emerge somehow?

Topics of individual and collaborative narratives

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

it's emerging sort of a connection between locations and topics in terms of mainstream topics being more likely connected with the old town and underground topics to be more likely connected to surroundings and suburbia. Plus, special events, both big and small might convey given topics. More important, we feel like emotions to be linked to locations are eventually more important than topics and such emotions might lead the navigation through the environment and define the borders of narratives.

more than topics we are discussing storytelling strategies based on evental characters and the way entries acquired on the perceptual layer will be used into individual narratives. Recurring items, hysterical laughs, emotions might be connecting different stories in terms of being used in variable ways by different participants.

Final:

We did indeed use Old Town and "underground" topics as our themes. "Underground" themes included topics of graffiti, topics of art, any specific topics related to suburbia didn't emerge. Crime or deviancy weren't really under discussion for anyone. Special events were discussed but not because we discussed it earlier but more because it was "current" at that moment. Emotional aspects emerged sometimes and for some people but it wasn't the main theme throughout.

Recurring items were used.

More ideas: Playing games.

As it comes to "online" storytelling, then it came out that it's quite difficult to define the topics before. We have the tools to publish things that are on our mind at this very moment, that just pop up or something we just want to share with everybody else.

Locations

Map possible locations you may start working (eg. mostly i think i work at Narva Road)

DESIGN PART

Tallinn (Kopli, Baltijaam, Oldtown, City Center). (mostly) Downtown Roma. Eventual locations we are just visiting.

After the discussion about tools making position of entries available and relevant, we agrred on the fact that the more dispersed in the locative field are the participants, the more the aggregative channels will be crucial for tracking their activities and making it possible for everybody to use their entries in a purposeful way.

Final:

Actual locations included: Roma, Helsinki, Tallinn (Old Town, City Center, Tatari street, Mustamäe, Kadriorg), Keila, Tartu, Pärnu, Nelijärve, Baltic Sea, Prague.

We agree with our initial notes on the aggregative channels.

What is your theory?

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

-how the connection between location and music may affect the direction of storytelling is an issue we might be addressing given that we include utube or similar tools into the storytelling process. It basically mean that we would have to establish p2p connections or groups into utube or similar.

-how locations change in time or don't is an issue we will address even considering the time in which entries are uploaded into the system, that is not necessarily in the very moment in which content are wtitten or pictured.

File:3254776227 a66281c040.jpg File:3289676929 88b73a4ac7.jpg File:3330488330 9381c0dc3b.jpg

everything that is uploaded into the system might be related to a given story. this might even lead to challenges and contests, as in "I know you are writing about a dog, but now I am uploading the picture of an alien eating rocks on a different planet and you have to use it and to relate it to your story".

novels are not necessarily the best way to tell stories, neither the more intriguing.

-how much people want to be "transparent" by leaving traces and why these social and locative tools is becoming widely used.

-what is the potential of these tools for creating art.

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

-getting to know and learning how to use social networks or tools we are not aware of or seeing them in a new perspective.

-learning how to combine and connect tools so as to develop location based frameworks to be exported into other projects.

-locating and documenting environmental or social issues.

-developing material or knowledge for thesis.

-learning how to write a story.

-overcoming fear of exposition.

-exploring social networks and devices as surveillance or sousveillance tools.

Final: Our practical goals are pretty much met. We didn't feel that it helped us to learn to write a story, rather it was more of a struggle. We didn't really explore social networks as surveillance tools.

Well, collaborative storytelling was expected, but as far as it concermes me, it didn't work out very well. maybe there were too few people in the same neighbourhood (in brightkite for example). I was wondering if the stories will "grow" automatically, that people will take part in the discussions, create new content, tag similary.

Here you document experimental approach

Here you wrote how the experiment scenario will work

we will be mapping social activities and very likely we will be documenting special events, such as people having issues while parking or crossing the streets in wrong places, traffic jams and this will be a bit complex if done while driving. Monitoring locations daily at different times so as to identify differences or identities. Monitoring building sites so as to follow the building process. Or demolitions. We will be documenting language issues, different lifestyles, touristical navigation of the city. We will be uploading such documentation and commenting it. Locating pictures and eventually text, unless we use tools that do that for us. Monitoring stuff other participants are uploading, who's active where and how. Comparing the state of the system day by day. Trying to write small bits of the story on a daily or weekly basis or just connecting pictures and music so as to have an emerging story. Very likely topics will emerge somewhere down the line and individual participants will stick with them, eventually getting bored very soon and switching to different ones. Other participants might be borrowing entries related to topics they find fascinating and eventually they might be keeping up stories other participants are giving up. Participants would even eventually stalk other participants trying to make up a different sense of their activity to be incorporated into their own story. Likewise, groups or individual participants might be involved into challenges or contests, such us adopting as mandatory the use into some story of given pictures or texts that have been uploaded into the system.

Olga//We will also make a conceptual collection of "similar" photos labeled in "red", for example. Like a small art project showing the visual narrative of person taking those pictures in urban environment. Perhaps afterwards it could be analyzed as characteristic of a personality living in town. Concerning collaboration it could be interesting to have pictures from others to make collaborative collage. In this way it's possible to analyze collective mood or smt.

http://www.artkitchen.ee/TLU/narrativeecology

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.

Most used path to upload images started with uploading images with Brightkite. Then images went to Twitter for the readers to follow it although we did not check it out ourselves. After this the images went to Flickr where we composed a blog and then we made a narrative available on personal blogs. The biggest disadvantage was that Brightkite did not let edit the notes.