Stories Matter

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The software currently under development at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling will allow for the digitization and archiving of digital video and audio materials so that users may annotate, analyze, evaluate and share materials in their collections.  The project is being developed in two phases and will provide offline (Phase I) and online (Phase II) versions of the software that will operate in French, English and Dutch.

For the development of Phase I, the core team was comprised of Canada’s Research Chair in Oral History, Steven High, three embedded oral historians, Stacey Zembrzycki, Krissy O’Hare, and Erin Jessee, and a software engineer, Jacques Langlois. Two database builders were brought onto the team in the later stages of the development of Phase I: Allison Eades assisted with testing the software; and Claudia Gama provided post-production and technical support. Funding for Phase I was provided by Dr Steven High’s Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) grant.

This team was successful in preparing Stories Matter Phase I for release in June 2009. In its current state, Stories Matter is free, open source software that is compatible with Macintosh and PC operating systems. It allows for the archiving of digital video and audio materials, enabling users to annotate, analyze, evaluate and export materials, as well as tag, index, search, and browse within interviews, sessions, and clips or across entire collections.

Stories Matter Interface

Phase I represents a shift away from archival software: it facilitates the archiving of interviews and users also have the option of continuing to interact with their interviews in the long-term. For example, users will be able to create clips and playlists, and then export relevant clips to their PowerPoint presentations. Users can also generate a basic html document based on their project(s) which can be easily converted into an interactive website aimed at dissemination and public engagement. All of these features encourage users to continue working with their interviews long after the interviews end without necessarily requiring the interviews to be rendered into transcripts (though transcription remains an option within Stories Matter). The process of creating projects and rendering interviews into convenient clips requires approximately the same time commitment as writing out transcripts. However, the potential uses for interviews in Stories Matter far outweigh that of transcripts due to the clipping and export features. Additionally it does not involve the loss of meta-narrative information. Interested parties may download Phase I for free at www.stories-matter.com.

In the development of Phase II, the core team has expanded. Familiar faces include Dr Steven High, Erin Jessee and Jacques Langlois (now the team lead on Stories Matter for KAMICODE). New faces include our Belgium-based collaborators: Julie Rodeyns, an embedded artist; Wouter Bouchez, a tech coordinator; Muriel Claeys, a project coordinator; and Severine Janssen, an embedded sociologist. Funding for Phase II was provided by Dr Steven High’s CFI grant, with additional funds provided by the Flemish Government, the Flemish Community Commission, and the City of Brussels.

Phase II of Stories Matter will include the development of an online platform for the software, which will allow multiple users to collaborate on the creation of a single database through an online server. As part of this, several new features will be introduced to Stories Matter, including a merge function, database import and export features, and various possibilities for controlling access to the online information. Likewise, several enhancements will be made to Stories Matter in order to improve its usability. These enhancements include: an more specific search tool that will allow users to search among specific fields of information in their databases; a more complex tag cloud feature that will allow users to generate tag clouds for a specific project, interviewee, or session; and the introduction of administrator, project manager, publisher, registered user, and guest accounts for accessing a given database. Phase II of Stories Matter is scheduled for public launch in January 2010.