Map of Memories is a proposal for a community-based project, led by pupils at Stanley Road Primary School, Worcester. Here's the proposal in full:
Stanley Road Primary School and its surrounding community is home to a vast array of cultures, traditions and memories. This breadth of culture is known to the pupils and their families, but may be less apparent to neighbouring communities (or even to people living in the Stanley Road area).
Map of Memories aims to collate these stories and memories into a visual and auditory journey by using new media tools and Stanley Road school's pupils' journalistic techniques.
Members of the community are invited to visit the school, and asked to bring with them objects, photographs and stories from their childhood. Pupils take each visitor through a sequence of archiving processes:
- Digitising their objects (taking digital photographs of objects or scanning photographs into the computer)
- Finding and recording the location of the stories and memories using a world map
- Recording an audio interview with the community member, and asking a prewritten set of questions
- Uploading of all digital content to a central website
Once the Map of Memories project begins and the first digital content has been uploaded, the website is opened up to the school and members of the community, and a click on a single link opens Google Earth on the visitor's own computer. Instead of geographical information, Google Earth shows the location of each memory on an interactive Earth, with lines from each memory tracing their way around the globe back to the central location of Stanley Road Primary School.
Navigating across the globe, either on an automated guided tour or manually choosing entries to view, the visitor is greeted with a rich tapestry of memories harvested by the project.
Coordination
The bulk of the project is split between 3 rooms in Stanley Road School. The main hub of activity is in the processing room. This is where pupils process the visitors and their items/memories/locations on the central database website. The second room is the waiting area and photography studio where pupils introduce themselves to the visitors, then take digital photographs of their items/scans of their photographs, and then take them through to the third room: the interview room. This room is a quiet, low noise/echo room where the pupils can interview the visitors.
The interview process allows for the pupils to ask a specific set of questions in order to harvest as many memories the visitor has of being their age, and what they did during their time as a child. The list of questions would be collated by the pupils before the project begins - this is important, as questions about childhood can often come across as sentimental or false, but questions about childhood from children would more likely appear genuine, and would come from the children's own personal interest in the project.
Some visitors may not have gone to school, others may have started work at a young age, or others may have suffered hardship. This delicate process of interviewing needs constant supervision, as the breadth of answers, the detail, the clarity and the personal nature of the questions could bring up problems during the process. This is the only stage that would require constant supervision.
Each interview lasts no longer than 10 minutes, and is recorded using semi-professional recording equipment I would supply. This equipment is simple to operate, with one button for start and stop, and records directly to memory card in mp3 format. Once the interview is complete, the audio recorder is taken to the processing room, along with the digital photos taken in the waiting room, and is passed to a processor who uploads the mp3 file and any accompanying images to the central database.
Along with the audio recording and images, another element of the interview is recorded - the geospatial information, the actual location of the area the visitor has been talking about in the interview. This is found before the interview, and can also use details given during the interview, as well as a written sheet prepared by the visitor with place names written on it. The place names are entered, and when it is found, the longitude and latitude are recorded and a marker is placed into a map in the database. Most of the complex actions happen automatically - as soon as the processor has completed a simple online form, attached the files, and clicked the submit button, the extra information is harvested by the website.
As soon as information is entered onto the database, the public Google Earth map is automatically updated with the new interviews and location information. The public can access the file at any point throughout the project's progress, and can view and listen to new interviews as they are added day by day.
Privacy in the project is protected by not recording interviewee's names or current locations, and by using photographs that do not reveal their present day appearance (it is expected that any childhood photos brought in by interviewees will be for historical reference and not to highlight their present identity). This level of privacy might not sit well with current policies and may need refining before the project begins.
Estimates for this proposal are attached, and with any proposal and costs, if there are any questions and feel you would like to talk further about this project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
