Stories Matter

Posted by Laurel Hart

If you are a regular to the Stories Matter website, you may have noticed some changes to the website that have been made over the last few months – changes designed to make it easier to navigate, more informative, and more enjoyable. The blog has been moved off the main page and can now be accessed through links in the side bar, while contacts, affiliates and affiliates have been listed under the headings “credits” and “associations and links.” Links to individual and group bios now have now been integrated into the text. If there is anything you are looking for that you can’t find, or any links that are broken, please contact us to let us know. These updates have been part of preparations for releasing the latest version of the software – Stories Matter v. 1.5.1. Over the last few weeks, the development team has been working diligently at testing the software and fixing bugs so as to make this version of the application as smooth as possible. As usual, once the application is released, there will always be new bugs to be discovered, and suggestions for ways to improve the software in the future. We encourage you to report these bugs as well as your experience with the application to us at stories@alcor.concordia.ca. Version 1.5.1 of the Stories Matter application is slated to be officially released within the next week or two, so be sure to check back often. We are very excited about this release of the application, and are looking forward to providing oral historians around the globe with this valuable new tool.

Posted by Erin Jessee

It is with great pleasure that the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and BNA-BBOT announces the start of Phase II of Stories Matter. Taking Phase I as its foundation, Phase II 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. Once stable, all enhancements will be added to the offline (Phase I) and online (Phase II) versions of Stories Matter, so continue checking the blog and Stories Matter website (www.stories-matter.com) for updates to the software and the overall development process.

Posted by Erin Jessee

The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling is pleased to announce the start of a new phase of international and interdisciplinary collaboration with Bruxelles nous appartient, Brussel behoort ons toe (BNA-BBOT), based out of Belgium (http://www.bna-bbot.net/Public/). Translated in English, their name means “Brussels belongs to us!” BNA-BBOT is a dynamic collective that works on urban ethnology. Through innovative methods and intervention studies, they work to reveal how “coexistence” in the city organizes and manifests itself. In this way they are creating an alternative image of Brussels as perceived by its inhabitants, who are actively involved in their projects. This new collaboration has emerged out of several weeks of conversation regarding the functionality of Phase II, and possibilities for making Stories Matter relevant for a wider range of academics, professionals and students around the world.

Posted by Erin Jessee

After nearly a year of interdisciplinary collaboration, the first phase of Stories Matter is complete. 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.

We have been successful in creating what we believe is extremely convenient and intuitive software that will inspire oral historians to continue listening to their interviews long after the interviews themselves are completed. While Stories Matter may not replace transcription for many oral historians, it will undoubtedly compliment it due to its ability to allow users to create convenient video and audio clips for research purposes and integrate them into such presentation software as PowerPoint. Furthermore, we believe users will be impressed by the software’s ability to preserve important forms of communication typically lost in transcription, including changes in tone, volume, rhythm, and body language, allowing for more nuanced analyses.

Thus, we invite you to visit the new Stories Matter website at www.stories-matter.com where you can download the software and begin using it locally to build a database or series of databases from your personal collection of interviews. The Instructional Manual for Stories Matter is embedded in the software, and can be downloaded to your desktop by selecting the appropriate option from the Help Menu.

Please continue following the Stories Matter blog for updates on the development of Phase II of Stories Matter, which will begin on July 15th. Its purpose is to enable increased collaboration among oral historians by providing an intuitive online database tool that can assist group projects and encourage public engagement. Phase II of Stories Matter is scheduled to be completed in December of 2009, with a public launch to follow shortly thereafter.

Posted by Stacey Zembrzycki

To date, Erin and I have managed to build a six hour database using the interviews that have been collected by the Education Working Group within the CURA-funded project entitled: Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations. These interviews were done with Montreal Holocaust survivors who have been actively educating students about the Holocaust. For the most part, these interviews recount the prewar, wartime, and postwar experiences of these men and women and they also outline the educational endeavours of these individuals, focusing on their work through the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and the March of the Living program. I have been working with two interviews done with Ted Bolger and Donna Bell and Erin has been working with two interviews done with Liselotte Ivry and Olga Sher.

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Posted by Erin Jessee

As always, the development of Stories Matter is moving forward. Jacques is in the process of putting the finishing touches on a few lingering issues, such as the export feature which will allow users to export the contents of their databases to HTML. Here’s a teaser of Stories Matter in its current state:

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Posted by Erin Jessee

Yesterday, I was able to complete my first interview for the Stories Matter Database. The software has come a long way in the last two weeks, largely due to the exhaustive debugging Jacques and the database building team have been doing. As a result, we believe we’re finally at a point where Stories Matter is stable enough to begin building a database based on a selection of cross-cultural interviews from the CURA project entitled “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations.” There are still a few issues that are plaguing us, such as  (a) the development of a merge tool that will allow us to bring together interviews that have been worked on by multiple users, and (b) an export feature that will allow users to export their clips to a webpage or a power point presentation. Likewise, Jacques wants to take some time to revisit his code to make it more presentable. But overall, we’re finally at a point where Stories Matter is achieving its potential. Continue reading →

Posted by Allison Eades

This week has been very productive. We tested three different versions of SM and began building the database. In addition to this we had important conversations about how to move forward with the clipping, tagging, and indexing of the interviews, and set up guidelines for building that will help ensure that the  eight different interviews we are working on will be represented in the database in similar ways.

On Wednesday we agreed to move forward by clipping the first 30 minutes of our interviews in Question and Answer format (Question 1, Answer 1, Question 2….). I used this format, however given the highly interrogative style of the interview I was working with, I ended up with 13 Q&A clips in the first five minutes. Felling silly making so many clips, and wondering about the value to the user, I wondered what I should do.

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Posted by Erin Jessee

Today, Dr High released a call for papers for a conference entitled “Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New Media and the Arts.” The conference is being co-hosted by the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and the Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations. Not surprisingly, the central theme of the conference overlaps with several conceptual interests that are presently being negotiated by the Database Building Team in our work on Stories Matter. Of particular relevance are our attempts to design a software that shifts away from the use of transcripts to include more of the original context of the interview, such as sound, emotion and body language, and the challenges we’re facing in developing indexing and tagging terms that can be used as a general guide for generations of students, teachers and other interested users. As a result, we’ve decided to begin working on a paper proposal that will allow us to make the development and database building processes we’re continuing to work toward even more accessible to the public. The team is very excited about the opportunity to take on a more conceptual challenge to balance out the debugging and database building on Stories Matter. For those of you who might be interested in also submitting a paper proposal for the conference, you can find the call for papers below:

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