Cowbird

“Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.” Jonathan Harris’ latest project, just released, Cowbird is a gorgeous new platform for individual and collaborative storytelling. As Harris describes it on his site,

“Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. We are building a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

Cowbird is also experimenting with a new form of participatory journalism, allowing people from all over the world to collaborate in documenting the overarching “sagas” that affect our lives today. Sagas are things like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement — things that touch millions of lives and shape the human story. We believe the real story of a saga is the story of every single person touched by the saga. But it’s never been possible to tell that kind of story — until now.”

Harris is best known for We Feel Fine, “an almanac of human emotion“, created by sampling the world’s blogs every few minutes for the words “I feel fine” or “I am feeling”. The work, created with Sep Kamvar, made a stir when it was launched in 2005 and soon became an iconic piece. Still live, We Feel Fine still impresses for its innovation and for its realisation, bringing computer science, data visualisation and storytelling to bear on content that is unlocked by tapping into the common metadata structure of blogs.

While studying computer science at Princeton Harris noticed that, ”suddenly people en masse were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives; blog posts, photographs, thoughts, feelings opinions…so I started to write computer programmes that study very large sets of these online footprints.” The beautifully simple idea of sampling the blogosphere was one way Harris went about this, working with the human data in the snatches of self-expression being accrued moment by moment on social media platforms. I Want you to Want Me (2008) continued this line of inquiry, examining contemporary love and desire through the content that people post on dating sites. Since then Harris has explored the space where storytelling,human and machine meet in a number of fascinating projects including The Whale Hunt – a Nanook of the North for the digital age. You can explore them all on Harris’ site.

Cowbird enters a field which, partly inspired by Harris’ past work, is becoming busy.  Storify looks like a similar proposition but is about storytelling through aggregation rather than considered narratives by individuals. And Storify is a less alluring proposition. Cowbird is elegantly realised so that you want to explore (though I haven’t had time to yet). But I’m uncomfortable with the invitation based membership. It will no doubt guarantee a high quality of content, but it seems at odds with the project’s professed remit. A “small community” can no doubt tell some great stories. But can it be inclusive enough to build a “library” of “human experience”? I guess we’ll find out.

There’s an interview with Harris about Cowbird on Design Mind.

Four categories of collaborative documentary

I’ve just been in Barcelona, at the ECREA (European Communication Research & Education Association) Digital Culture Workshop which looked at innovative practices and critical theories.  It was a terrific gathering – small enough to get to know people, focussed enough to be productive – a great mix of conviviality and critical dialogue. (Thanks to the convenors, Caroline Basset and Elisenda Ardevol.)

I presented in the Creative Practices strand which was concerned with, “concepts of participation, co-creativity, co-design or co-innovation in creative processes involving audiences and independent creators in a wide spectrum of activities including art, photography, video, and videogames.”  My paper offered a draft categorisation of the projects I write about here, according to the type of contribution made by the participants. I’ll give a brief summary of the four categories.

In “The Creative Crowd” model which covers work including Mad V’s The Message, and perry bard’s Man with a Movie Camera; the Global Remix, multiple participants contribute fragments to a highly templated whole, analogous to the separate panels within a quilt. The units of content may not make much sense on their own but value and meaning accrue as they come together producing a distinctive aesthetic that’s about energy and repetition. (Though not a documentary, The Johnny Cash Project is a prime example of this mode.)

In the second model, “The Participant Observers” are distributed filmmakers who each contribute to a work that’s concerned with contrasting experiences of place. The participants decide when and what they shoot and what story they want to tell, but their role in the final contextualisation of that content can vary dramatically. Participants may contribute rushes towards a linear whole that someone else edits, as in Life in a Day, or produce a stand-alone film, a considered narrative, for an interactive framework as in Mapping Main Street. Though filmed observation is as old as documentary I see the prevalence of these situated observers now as significant. What they bring is the potential for documentary “knowledge” that is grounded in experience – situated, embodied, affective. This mode is all about multiplicity, and when content is organised in a database the output can also be open-ended, produced through the interactive experience of the viewer / user.

The third mode I call “The Community of Purpose”. Here, a group of participants take part in a production with a shared objective around social change. They may be involved in making content but may have another role in the process, as the resident experts do in the Highrise project. These projects tend to be iterative rather than having a fixed trajectory. Global Lives and One Day on Earth are examples here. What’s fascinating in this category is that collaborative process – the dialogue and experiences involved in production - begin to be as important as product. There is a definite turn in this direction right now, though this way of working is not new in itself. Kat Cizek’s work at the National Film Board, in particular, is a deliberate re-working of Challenge for Change – the 1960s project which initiated Community Media. ( See earlier post on Cizek as Filmmaker in Residence.) For more on this group do take a look at my interviews with David Evan Harris (Global Lives) and Kat Cizek (Highrise). An open rights framework such as Global Lives has can then add another dimension of emergence as uses for the content can grow in a unrestricted way, driven by collaborators.

After I submitted the abstract for Barcelona I added a fourth category, which I call, The Traces of the Multitude. (Thanks to Jon Dovey for introducing me to Negri’s concept, here used somewhat ambiguously.) This category relates to “Semantic Documentary” -  work that’s just emerging like the Highrise spin-off, One Millionth Tower, and 18DaysinEgypt. These projects introduce a new aspect to collaboration by drawing on social media content – linking to a multitude of, potentially anonymous, contributors. Here we can start to see documentary that is continually live and updating, with static video linked to live web data. (I’ve been working on an article with Jon Dovey about this work and the wider implications of the “Sea of Data” for documentary, in which I ponder my own experiments on the The Are you Happy? Project. I’ll write more about that here soon.)

It was lovely at ECREA to meet and hear from a number of scholars doing theoretical work on areas close to mine. I presented alongside Isis Hjorth, from the Oxford Internet Institute, whose PhD examines peer-production in the Wreckamovie community. Isis is asking whether accounts of peer-production have been over optimistic, and if these modes aren’t in fact closer to the managerial and bureaucratic modes of conventional production than has been suggested. The other panelist, Antoni Roig, is, with co-researchers Talia Leibovitz and Jordi Sanchez Navarro of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, examining the concepts and practices of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Again, their interest is in getting behind assumptions about democratisation to understand the complexities of these practices.

The discussion after the panel circled around what is going on in the dynamics of participation. As Trish Morgan asked in a Tweet, “Who has final editorial say in a collaborative, crowdsourced, peer-produced work?” The answer varies, and the discussion made me realise that I need to tease this out and make some of my working assumptions more explicit. When I speak about collaboration I assume that the types of contributions people make, and the control they have, will be uneven; that not everyone will have the same stake or involvement, though the terms certainly need to be clear at the start. I think of collaboration as a relationship that can be productive even if it’s asymmetrical. This perspective comes from experiences in production going back to Video Nation, where the BBC provided production expertise, cameras, training, editing, and the BBC platform, and the participants brought their everyday life experiences, community contexts, their time, thought and their recordings. The co-creative relationship that existed in the first stage of the VN project (94-2000) – which was founded on participants right of veto over what was broadcast – produced documentary insights that were valuable to the audience – based on reviews and audience feedback – and, by various accounts, to the participants – see Nancy Thumim‘s research at the time. Though it is worth saying that Nancy produced a more critical commentary on institutional mediation in her later research which looked at Digital Storytelling including the Capture Wales project I was part of at that time, which will be reflected in her forthcoming book, Self-Representation and Digital Culture. (I do apologise for referring to the VN example so often, but it’s so relevant here. For another take on VN, and a substantial overview of this field, see Nico Carpentier’s Media & Participation, published earlier this year.)

Video Nation, and many of the projects I describe on this blog, are initiated and structured by professional producers. This is not to say that participants don’t make substantial contributions to meaning. But that’s another discussion… The producers are “context providers” but only sometimes “content providers”. They can be seen as “benevolent dictators” as Eric Raymond has described it, referring to the dominant mode of organisation in Open-Source Software development. Even the exceptional Global Lives, which as David Evan Harris describes in his recent interview is now run as a collective, is still substantially influenced by Harris’ orginal vision.

Isis Hjorth mentioned the idea that there is often a charismatic individual behind crowd-sourced projects. It’s an interesting suggestion and isn’t at odds with the producer model I’m describing. You need to be motivated to take part as a volunteer in a collaborative project, and Cizek and Harris, for example, are certainly inspirational figures. The idea makes sense in a particular way in the projects described in the Creative Crowd model above. Those examples come close to Fandom. They are not necessarily led by, but they each involve an iconic figure  – Mad V, Johnny Cash – or an iconic work – Man with a Movie Camera. [If anyone isn't sure of the iconic status of Mad V- pictured above - I can assure you that the interview with him on this blog has consistently been the most viewed page - years after he bowed out of You Tube.] These are works of homage. Thinking of them in this way underlines how the dynamics of participation inter-relate with structures of feeling that are not new, and not necessarily egalitarian. (For a nice catalogue of organisational models see the slide below – from a session I recently attended at the Mozilla Festival – where structures for open working were under discussion.)

So the Barcelona workshop raised some important and engaging questions for me. Being there made me realise that I need to unpack some of my starting points, and consider my assumptions. Those four categories may prove productive in that thinking, and they may not. I suspect now that they try and capture too much, conflating production, participation and aspects of form which need disentangling. Another outcome from the workshop for me was that I want to think more about how value is distributed in these projects – about money and surplus value, yes, but also reputational value, the value of taking part, audience value, public value. Some ethnographic work on particular projects is really needed right now.  So the ECREA workshop was productive, as well as fun. And there was lots of interesting work under discussion that I haven’t mentioned here. Do take a look at the abstracts, which are all available on the website.

Britain in a Day

Saturday was filming day for Britain in a Day, the UK version of Life in a Day which is being produced for the BBC by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free company, and directed by Morgan Matthews. Like Life in a Day the project will be made from content shot by the public drawn in through You Tube. The idea is to create, “the definitive self-portrait of Britain today, filmed by you”, which will be broadcast just prior to the 2012 Olympics. According to commissioner Charlotte Moore, all the content uploaded to You Tube will be kept as an archive, a time capsule of Britain 2012.

The BBC has worked with the public in a number of content collaborations designed to capture everyday life over the years. In 1986 over a million volunteers contributed to a snapshot of Britain for the Domesday project, recently revisited as Domesday Reloaded. As Charlotte Moore explains on the BBC blog Britain in a Day has a direct precedent in the BBC’s Video Nation,(the project I co-founded and produced for BBC 2 with Chris Mohr between 1993-2000, and which then continued on BBC online in various guises until March this year.) Looking further back both Video Nation and Life in a Day / Britain in a Day owe a debt to a much earlier British collaborative self-portrait, the remarkable Mass Observation, which began in 1937, and, among many other activities, undertook a number of day surveys,.

With digital tools and the web the early 2000s saw a variety of participatory initiatives at the BBC, projects like Blast, Audio Diaries and the Capture Wales/Cipolwg ar Gymru Digital Storytelling project that I oversaw. Then the mood changed and questions arose about why the BBC should get involved in these initiatives. The projects might be powerful for participants but how did they serve the wider audience? What was the BBC’s role in quality and editorial control in so-called “user-generated content”? More pragmatically, why should the BBC invest in what You Tube seemed to be taking care of?

In the face of these issues, and with commercial criticism that the BBC was doing too much across too many spheres, there was a retreat in the later 2000′s from investment in participatory work. BBC programme makers have gradually become fluent at drawing on social media for audience input and comment, but apart from as witnesses to news events, the BBC seemed to lose sight of its audience as content creators.

So I welcome Britain in a Day as a sign of a renewed curiosity about what might be possible when the BBC and the public work together in documentary. Saturday Nov 12th was an interesting day in an interesting year – the Remembrance commemorations coinciding with the leak about Armed Forces redundancies, with ex-soldiers at Occupy London, a gloomy economic picture contrasting with sublime Autumn weather. Having shown in making The Fallen how he can build a powerful whole from multiple stories, Matthews is just the director to work with the video material that people will have generated.

Putting audience created content into the hands of a professional director is one response to the possibilities of participatory culture for documentary. Projects like Highrise, Man with a Movie Camera; the Global Remix and Global Lives offer alternative approaches and show how collaborative and participatory modes can lead to new forms of documentary experience. I look forward to seeing Britain in a Day. Meanwhile I hope that this commission heralds more experimentation with participatory documentary by the BBC, including non-linear work which can compare with what the National Film Board has been doing in Canada, or Arte in France.

The Interface is the Message

I just came across this TED talk by Aaron Koblin – artist and now lead on Data Arts at Google Labs. It’s a treat. Koblin whips through his work – from his data visualisation projects which began with Flight Patterns, through his meditations on the human and the crowd using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to his standout 2010 work with Chris Milk – The Johnny Cash Project  - exploring collaborative creativity, and The Wilderness Downtown - which takes advantage of HTML5 and javascript for personalisation. ( See earlier posts on The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown.) It’s a formidable body of work – playful, critical, moving – and fascinating to hear his account of how his thinking has evolved. Enjoy!

The world’s first open source 3D documentary and more!

Mozilla’s mission, as Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, explained at the start of proceedings at the Mozilla Festival yesterday, is about building choice, freedoms and technologies into the web to make it a place where we can be makers, not just users. Mozilla are putting their supporters money where their mouth is, building these values in practice through open-source projects which began with the Firefox browser. The ethos of the Mozilla Festival is “less yack, more hack”, and the running order is made up of learning labs and workshops where projects are developed in a sprint. This years theme is “Media, Freedom and the Web”; the question, “what if media can be as open as hypertext has been?” and the open plan spaces of Ravensbourne College‘s RIBA award winning campus in North Greenwich, were abuzz yesterday (and will be today) with people working on ambitious, important projects including The Data Journalism Handbook - which will give aspiring journalists a toolkit for accessing and making sense of data available through the web. See the Festival site for the agenda and some of the coverage.

So there was a lot to be excited about at the Festival. Even so, the release of Mozilla’s Popcorn 1.0 – the HTML5 tool that “makes video work like the web” was the big story yesterday.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you’ll know about Popcorn – a tool for linking video to other web content – which has been in pre-release over the last year. (CollabDocs posts include Open Video Conference 2010). If not you can find out more in this backgrounder on Popcorn from Matt at Mozilla (thanks for the post title.)

Kat Cizek’s One Millionth Tower, a ground-breaking documentary spin-off from the Highrise project, is made with open-source tools – Popcorn and Web GL  (which enables the interactive generation of 3D graphics). It premiered at the Festival last night. (Unfortunately I had to leave early but experienced the hoopla via my Twitter feed on the train home. ) You can see it in linear form, more importantly explore it (you’ll need Chrome or Firefox) now on Wired.com. This is surely the first time the magazine has led on a documentary story, which underlines the significance of this moment for the moving image.

As Wired puts it; One Millionth Tower, ”is not just a static story recorded on film and then edited together for audiences. It exists in a 3-D setting made possible by a tool called three.js, which lets viewers walk around the high-rise neighborhood. Moving through allows viewers to see the current state of urban decay, then activate elements to show ways the residents would change their world, like an animation showing where a new playground or garden would go.

The interactive movie is chock-full of photos from Flickr, street-views from Google Maps and changing environments fueled by real-time weather data from Yahoo. Everything is triggered by Popcorn.js, which acts like a conductor signalling which instruments play at what times.”

Brett Gaylor, filmmaker and Mozilla lead on the Popcorn project has said, “This is the moment where web video grows up as an artistic medium. In the same way that earlier film pioneers experimented with new techniques like montage, we’re now seeing ‘web-made movies’ that pull in real time information from the web.”

One Millionth Tower isn’t a totally slick product. It’s not an end in itself, but it involves significant innovation which has come about through a happy confluence of open-source politics, some very talented people, and imaginative investment by Mozilla and the National Film Board of Canada. Cizek explained how the approach emerged in an interview with CollabDocs a few months ago. There’s lots more background on One Millionth Tower on Wired. Check out the Open Technology video for an explanation of the open-source technologies involved in the piece. But let’s not forget the theme of urban life and community which is the subject of One Millionth Tower, and the inspiring collaborative approach to documentary production which the project reflects. This is Cizek and her team reinventing documentary for social change as a 21st century practice. (Read more about how Cizek was hired by the National Film Board of Canada to rework the seminal Challenge for Change project here.)

As Cizek says in the Open Technology video, “The philosophy behind open-source technology is that the technology is all of ours to own. That’s exactly the philosophy behind all the projects of Highrise. One Millionth Tower is about us owning our urban space and having the power and the vision to transform it.”

The Popcorn 1.0 release includes the Popcorn Maker, an easy to use authoring tool. Try it, you’ll be linking your video to other web content in moments. We have been used to video sitting on the web within a player, aloof from the linked and networked character of its environment. Popcorn changes that. Seeing it in action on your own video content is the best way of getting a feel for why this matters for documentary.

The Connected Documentary

Life in a day – online

If you’ve not seen it yet, you can now view Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott‘s mega collaborative project – Life in a Day – on You Tube. Alongside the film you can access (all ?) the content on the interactive gallery. It’s interesting that the two propositions are now side-by-side. When I saw the film in the cinema I was dying to pause and see the whole contribution from particular contributors. I’m looking forward to trying that now. The question for me is; does that put back some of the context that is missing from this beautifully put-together film?

99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film

How to reflect Occupy Wall Street and the actions it’s inspiring across the US?  99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film is the response of a group of  US documentary film directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers who are contributing time, skills and gear to document the events taking place in NYC and across America.

Ray Pride from Movie City News talked to some of them,“Audrey Ewell, a New York filmmaker and one of the founders of the project, says: “It felt like a media blackout.  I was glued to the Globalrevolution Livestream on the day the NYC police arrested hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, as others yelled ‘We’re not the criminals.’  And then the feed went out because whoever was filming ran out of batteries. And it wasn’t being shown on the news. We felt a need to gather footage like this from all over the country and craft a document of the big picture.”

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Michael Galinsky says:  “As a filmmaker and photographer I understand both the power of media and documentation.  I knew right away that something significant was taking place and I wanted to be a part of it.  I wanted to use the power of documentary to give the voiceless a voice.”

This isn’t the first time people with media skills have got together to create independent coverage of the kinds of resistance that get scant or negative attention from mainstream media. The UK Miners Strike Campaign tapes were organised in this way back in 1984/5, for instance. The Web doesn’t make these collaborations happen, but digital connectivity can help. The “99%” team want to be responsive, getting a film out quickly to show what is happening, as it is happening. They’re asking others to join them, and are using Kickstarter to gather production funding. You can keep posted via Facebook and Twitter.

PressPausePlay

No time to review this now. But I’m sure you’re interested in seeing it…

“The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.”

Find out more at PressPausePlay 

Umbrella of Crowdsourcing

The people at The Daily Crowdsource – the “#1 site for crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation news” – have come up with a proposed taxonomy of their field in an info-graphic. David Alan Greir says; ” In order to develop best practices, common ways of handling common problems, and a unified way of presenting the group to the public, we need a standard set of categories. This document is an important step in that direction.” As they define it, “Crowdsourcing involves getting a crowd of people to help you with a task. You ask an undefined group of people to perform a task for you, and anyone who’s interested may perform the task.  You’ll get finished work from dozens of participants, which you get to select the best one(s) from.”

Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon which demonstrates the ambiguity of public participation. If, as Henry Jenkins recently suggested, Web 2.0 is,” a corporate strategy which attempts to capture and monetise aspects of participatory culture”, then crowdsourcing is one of the mechanisms of that strategy, through which companies can get unpaid input on a rebrand, the outsourcing of micro-tasks to low paid workers etc. If we are interested in cultural expression, crowdsourcing is a troubling concept. The word itself suggests an anonymity among those taking part. The transaction is a many-to-one business – an odd reversal of the one-to-many dynamic of broadcasting. Yet Crowdsourcing is proving a powerful phenomenon in the cultural sphere. Take a look at some of the success stories on Kickstarter, for instance, the crowdfunding platform for the arts.

In the field of production, various documentary projects have been created through crowdsourcing, as it’s defined above. The wonderful “Man with a Movie Camera: a Global Remake” was a very deliberate experiment with this method, and can fit neatly into the “Microtasks” category, though perry bard, the artist/producer, broke the template in a significant way by setting herself a rule to include everything that was submitted. bard’s work brings to mind Aaron Koblin‘s early art pieces that explored the crowdsourcing of micro-tasks - The Sheep Market & Ten Thousand Cents.

Ridley Scott & Kevin Macdonalds’ feature documentary “Life in a Day” has been described as a crowdsourced project and could fit readily into the “Contests” category, as described above. It began with an open call to action which solicited a mind-blowing 80,000 video contributions. The filmmakers then made the selections, and participants received various levels of reward if their content was included, with a lucky few getting the prize of joining the Oscar winning director at the Sundance Festival. Yet this is certainly a co-creative work, albeit with highly uneven levels of editorial control.

“You ask a group of people to perform a task”, as the definition says, but when that “task” is an expressive act of recording video, then what comes about is footage which speaks of and from a place, and individuates members of the crowd. Macdonald certainly shaped “Life in a Day’, but it was made from individual contributions which have an integrity and vividness in the finished film. (I did question, though, the decision not to caption those individuals on-screen with their name and location.)

So it might feel comfortable, but it’s not simple, or  I suspect useful, to draw a dividing line between crowdsourcing (bad) and more elaborate forms of collaboration (good). The affordances of crowdsourced and collaborative production are with us now, though we’re in the early days of articulating the values, aesthetics and ethics of the documentary processes and forms that they allow.

How do we delineate crowdsourcing, collaboration and co-creativity in these works? How do we understand a shared process of meaning making? Is participation in these projects a good in itself? How do the process and the finished product interrelate? If there is profit – financial, reputational – who benefits? These are complex questions, without ready answers.

I think it’s helpful to think of these questions alongside the definition of Participatory Culture, developed in 2006, by Jenkins and co-authors Ravi Purushotma, Katie Clinton, Margaret Weigel and Alice Robison. They describe a participatory culture “as one,

With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
Where members believe that their contributions matter
Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).”

This definition doesn’t provide answers to the questions posed above, but shifts the terms of the discussion towards issues of value, context and community.

Meanwhile, that info-graphic brought something to mind – the umbrella, the retro colourway, the “U… of C…” –  ”The Umbrellas of Cherbourg“! A film from 1964 with sung dialogue, an extravagant visual style – an aesthetic so singular, idiosyncratic, it’s the very essence of an auteur sensibility (and fabulous. Do go and see it.) Now that is a strange collision – Jacque Demy and crowdsourcing – and surely an excuse for a clip.