Digital Arts Service Corps - mit

WAM! It's more than just onomatopoeia...it's women media

danielle martin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 18:56:08 +0000

I'm here at MIT (my fall place of graduate Urban Planning studies, btw) at the 2007 Women Action and Media (WAM!) conference this weekend, a yearly conference that combines a bunch of topics that interest me - media, activism, social justice, and women's issues. I read BITCHfest for my book club recently (selections from BITCH magazine), and it got me more interested in feminist media related issues, especially in that the techniques and lessons learned by feminist activists around framing in the media relates to many other issues (such as poverty, network neutrality, and more).

So far, I've gone to three very different sessions. The first pre-conference session attracted me around the idea of framing class more effectively in the media. [I mean, come on, we're VISTAs fighting poverty, right?] Ellen Bravo (and her book, Taking on the Big Boys) suggested a few interesting hooks to change the way the mainstream media frames issues of class and work:

The Snow Day - The kids don't have to go to school, but many low-income parents do; that means that a snow day really means a day home alone for many youth.

The Flu Epidemic - The media is always covering stories about people not staying home to stop the spread of the flu virus. But if you really think about it, people with low paying and/or part-time jobs can't afford to take sick days and they usually have service jobs like cleaning public spaces or handling food.

"Best places to work" lists - We need to probe more about these lists, because the companies on the list often give money to associations that give awards.

I went from thinking about poverty's media image, to the image of social change on the web. Allison Fine, and her book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, has been getting a bit of buzz at Project HQ because it's basically what the CTC VISTA Project is trying to do only a daily VISTA basis. Mostly the session fueled more questions than answers:

? Is MoveOn.org really just a reflection class organizing techniques?
We need to tap into the core fundamental ways of behaving by successful social change organizations and how they convey to using new media/tech. Primarily, we should focus on how to start and facilitate conversations to build a movement. You can start with an online conversation but they can be better implemented combined with in-person discussions.
? Why are there no comments on our organizations blog?
There was a frustration around not getting any interactions on blogs and listservs, because they get put out there and they don't get used. This can be combatted through connecting these conversations to in-person interactions and by also participating in other nonprofit's online networks.
? Are we blogging/podcasting just because it's cool?
The challenge is that there is an array of tools to have two-way interactions but are non-profits really taking advantage of that? Are they really offering up space to comment, but they don't respond (listening deficits)...behaving still one-to-many communication scheme?
? Are we liable for things said in blogs/forums on a site if we host it on our server? Many participants were afraid of not having enough control of the message if the movement building happens in an online social network.

On Saturday, I became "press", helping Alana, a very capable young woman of the Project Think Different Media Watch Team, video several sessions over the course of the day.

In the Our 21st Century Bodies, Our Multimedia Selves session, the presenters spoke about how their transporting information dissemination from a published book (Our Bodies, Our Selves) to online (http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org). I liked how Elana Hayasaka simplified how new online media are taking advantage of the weaknesses of classic print media for activism:

- update quicker and more often
- more accessibility / web search function
- avoid cost page limits
- dispersal to a wider audience
- involve the reader (interactivity)
- appeal to younger readership

Yet again, the topic of the "freedom" of blogging versus having a moderation scheme came up. But I like that they admit that the focus of the blogs shouldn't just be just a public relations tool for the organization, but instead give a framework (social, political) for further discussions of women's health. I also really like one example blog they referenced Hollaback Blogs, that encourages people to blog a photo/video (from your camera phone) of a person that sexually harass them on the street.

"For some fun, go listen to the HOTGirls (Helping Our Teen Girl in Real Life Situations) version of JT's "Sexy Back." It's a good way to start thinking about framing media for young women of color (YWOC), as demonstrated by this project out of Atlanta, GA. I was really impressed by the materials from the presenters in this workshop, from the Advocacy Institute - they have some great handouts on Designing Effective Outreach Strategies. More so, I was impressed by the media examples from the Pro-Choice Public Education Project (PEP) Recognize campaign. Most interestingly, both HOTGirls and PEP have campaigns/programs fueled by youth leadership councils and did extensive research ahead of time on tailoring the message effectively for YWOC.

[Download the powerpoint from the Do You Know Who You’re Talking To?: Effective Messaging for Young Women of Color, with Nicole Clark, Candace Webb session here.]

Finally, I ended the day in the "On the front-lines of Media Justice: Transitions in Policy and Movement Building" - which really meant: how do we change gears in a social change organization without causing a crash. Hannah Sassman presented a great case study of how Prometheus Radio Project decided if they were going to expand their community radio efforts into community wireless efforts. They made the hard decision to not go with the community wireless buzz because it didn't fully serve their constituents.
"We made the decision to put off expanding into wireless advocacy efforts until when the time was right, not when the time was sexy." Sari Gelzer also alluded to the decision making process of the Global Action Project to update their efforts to train youth-led organizations in media skills, in an environment where the part-time implementors of programs in non-profits didn't necessarily have time and/or opportunity to participate in decision-making.

[We had a great discussion on some specific examples of how non-profits approach transitions and sustainability, but I had videotape the session so I'm hoping Hannah posts the notes soon on her blog http://hannahjs.worpress.com.]

On that note, I'm pooped. I'm off.

The museum might not have walls, but it's got some stories...

danielle martin — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:35:02 +0000

When people ask me (as they inevitably do when they find out I'm a full time volunteer) why I do VISTA, I often cite the ways it connects me to groups and people that I could have never imagined I could meet doing a regular job. In fact, my work this year doing digital storytelling facilitation and other related projects for MassIMPACT came out of meeting Natasha Friedus (of Creative Narrations) at UMass Boston and getting myself invited to her second Spreading the Stories train-the-trainer workshop last year. And so it was how I ended up at the MIT Museum this past week, working with able fellow facilitator Lisa Dush of Story Builders, UMass Amherst, and MIT in the fall. We were asked by Cesar McDowell of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice to help out with the new Museum Without Walls project.

Museum Without Walls (MWOW) is an interesting approach to bringing the museum experience out of the museum, approaching the entire MIT campus like a potential historical and personal tour and reflection space. Using adapted video players with WIFI access and GPS, the project aspires to have visitors walk the campus and access a rich library of video and still content based on their physical location by 2011. Since it's MIT, the gadgets will certainly be innovative and the stories unique, but the interdisciplinary idea of museum content that could change as users add and walk around with it piqued my personal interest in placed based storytelling.

Our small digital storytelling workshop was billed not only as a pilot to create MIT place based stories, but as a Independent Activities Period (IAP) offering. (I learned later through one of the stories that this is a way for MIT students and staff to explore small subject explorations in the time between fall and spring semesters.) We set up a workspace in a long exhibit space, so that our story circle and laptop workspaces were surrounded by antique single lensed microscopes. In fact, this full immersion in the to Museum became a quiet theme to the week, where we were invited into the archives to find images and I passed by Harold Edgerton photos and holographs on my way to the bathroom.

Our host Otto Loggers gathered a group of graduate students from the HASTS (History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology & Society), Urban Planning, and Biology programs, sprinkled in with a staff from the Alumni office. In the beginning, Lisa and I were curious on how we could balance the desire to include historical references and facts with authentic narratives usually characterized in digital stories. The fear is always that participants will lean toward professional, objective tales and away from more personal stories, but this group also had the challenge of being the pilot stories in the MWOW project. We decided to go with the flow and see where the participants' stories and group's dynamics took us.

I'm glad to report that the group came together well, still bringing a myriad of tones, purposes, and expressions. While one PhD student mused why MIT isn't more focused on environmental sustainability, another detailed her participation on huge, puzzle riddled annual Mystery Hunt. Another student candidly discussed her emotions around being an Iranian student at MIT and shared a table with fellow HAST student who hysterically chronicled her initial days of getting hopelessly lost in the maze of MIT's buildings. One story even connected MIT to Lawrence and Lowell through past funders and current initiatives. Even the stories about alumni and IAP featured personal touches such as famous crimson red jacket and a "borrowed" sign warning of laser beams. (As soon at the stories come out of post-production and the MWOW folks figure out next steps of getting the pieces online, I'll include a link here.)

The usual stress of learning a new form of expression coupled with new technologies was a bit increased when we learned that most of the participants were Mac folks and we were confined to the Windows laptops we were able to procure. But I always make the argument that the stories can be made with even the most rudimentary tools and keeping it simple never hurts. So even when Windows Movie Maker crashed and the participants started to perfect the Day 3 hunch over their machines, I told them to be patient, stretch and take breaks, and save often (Ctrl S is your friend). In three days, they not only made seven 3-5 minutes long digital stories, Lisa introduced the group to audio editing in Audacity and we managed to scan quite a few photos and artifacts for both the stories and the Museum's digital archives as well.

In a stroke of luck, we invited the Museum staff that had opened the doors for us or researched our topics in the archives to come see the finished pieces. I say this was lucky because they were such a gracious and appreciative audience - especially friend Adam Holt who's excited about the possibilities of this project to combine digital storytelling and mapping. These staff had seen us around the last three days, but they had no idea that we were working on such "gems" of MIT's history funneled through personal experience. After a frazzled afternoon of harried video editing, these compliments soothed our storytellers and got them thinking about how they could take digital storytelling back to their departments and projects as the next semester begins this week.

This workshop was a good break for me from working with youth or community organizers, strictly because the mind sets seemed so different. MIT students seem strangely focused on their individual studies and programs yet still connected with so many aspects of the world and the environment. By throwing a personal narrative process into this mix, Lisa and I created a space that yielded new challenges and benefits for me as a facilitator. The juxtaposition of the microscopic and global mind sets created a compelling challenge as we revised the stories based on the perceived audience and intended point of view. And the idea that personal reflection should be tempered with historical and archival facts and context both limited and expanded the impact of each story differently.

The next step is determining how I can bring this new both PLACE and HISTORICAL mind set into the next set of train-the-trainer workshops I'm trying to do this spring with housing developments and community organizations in Boston and Springfield.

[Also blogged at VerdeSmoke.com]