Empowering Media

The most inspiring thing in the world for me seeing the power of media harnessed and channelled into development. Coming across organisations who are achieving this takes my breath away every time without a fail.

Some of the orgs I know of are:

ABC International Projects
Funded by AusAID, our very own ABC is training and capacity building with our Asia Pacific neighbours and beyond.

Internews
An American based organisation most active in Africa and parts of South Asia, this one is certainly inspiring. Using local health and related issues as topics, these guys are training local journalists to write/ broadcast quality news about issues facing their community in particularly challenging areas. Wow.

Sancharica Samuha
Ahh my beloved Nepali friends. I volunteered with this organisation during my extended stay in Nepal in 2006. They are a talented, passionate group of women and men training women journalists in rural areas, giving voice to their stories through publications and training editors and reporters in the major newspapers about reporting on women’s issues. A small local NGO  achieving big things!

Community Radio:
They’re everywhere and they’re broadcasting fantastic local media voices talking about local issues, events and people.

Yarra Reporter
Operating almost in my own backyard, this initiative is a wonder. Residents of Yarra City’s public housing are trained by volunteers (professional journalists or students) in reporting skills and then encouraged to take up the challenge.

Then there are some Press Freedom orgs like;

IFJ
As well as journalists members organisation they are strong campaigners for press freedom and the safety and journalists worldwide.

Reporters Without Borders
You got it, not only is there the well-known Doctors version, Reporters Sans Frontiers or Reporters Without Borders is an important agency in promoting press freedom and supporting journalists worldwide. One quick look around this website and you’ll see that they are possibly saving as many lives as the other, more famous, incarnation.

I’d love to hear about other organisations so if you know of any please leave a comment and let me know!

Murray to Mountains; prep work

I suppose when the early settlers bashed their way through Victorian bushland and forests to establish train lines- an important marker of colonial conquest over an untamed, unchartered land- they would never have suspected that centuries later we would enjoy these routes as tranquil paths for the humble bicycle.

As, lets face it, an amateur cyclist, I love the idea of a beautiful meandering track through bushland, especially when I know that the route was specifically chosen for the train’s inability to cope with hills- I can certainly relate!

So to celebrate my 25th birthday we plan to cycle the Murray to Mountains Rail Trail route from Wangaratta to Bright with a detour to Beechworth. What better way to celebrate a quarter of a century of life, health and happiness?

Our trip will be a low-key affair with camping in caravan parks etc. My main disappointment so far is that it looks as though we’ll need to take the car rather than taking public transport. I was really hoping to make it a low-carbon trip but after a call to Vline, it was confirmed that they no longer carry bikes on their coaches. Bicycle Victoria’s website seemed to suggest that bikes may be possible on this route during track-upgrades when trains are not available, but even then the clause is “Whenever possible”- and I doubt that a long weekend counts as a probable possibility! On this subject most websites seem outdated but the response from Vline was decisive. But Bicycle Victoria continues its campaign so we can cope that things will eventually change.

Our plan is:

Day 1: Drive to Wangaratta, ride 42km to Beechworth

Day 2: Beechworth to Myrtleford (42km)

Day 3: Myrtleford to Bright (30km)

Day 4: Bright to Wangaratta (84km).
I haven’t figured out the mode of transport yet but it looks likely that if our legs are up to it, it will be a big ride down the mountain to the finish line!

So the weather looks good, the views look amazing and with only a few things left of my checklist we look ready to go!

Plenty of stories, photos and perhaps even a podcast on our return…

P.S. For Melbourne bike paths this google map is a winner

An entrée

Yes, my first ever radio feature/documentary has been taken up by ABC’s AWAYE! program. After what seems like YEARS ( but not quite!) the pieces seem to be finally falling into place.

Regulars may remember the planning stages of this project, working with Koorie community members as well as the  Jewish community which last year resulted in a short 12,000 words looking at alternative practices of documentary production.

The project has certainly moved on in the last few months with extra interviews from William Cooper’s grandson, Uncle Boydie Turner, and great-grandson, Kevin Russell. We jump onboard as these two men journey back to Cummerganja (means “Our Home” in Yorta Yorta language) to revisit the gravesite of William Cooper, an activist campaigning for Aboriginal Rights around the 1930s. Along the way we learn about his work to protest against Jewish persecution and hear about the Jewish community’s response.

Listen out for the program which is likely to be broadcast on ABC Radio National later this year.

More digital Story-telling

Back to researching digital story-telling tools and found this site which lists 50!

Some of them are very professional looking, other like this one, are really just a bit of fun!

This one is alright as a simple timeline but design is not as slick as some others.
I’m still a big fan of Vuvox and look forward to using that in the future. This one about Nepali migrant workers particularly stood out for me today as I was browsing through. It showed Vuvox’s potential not only as a “timeline” which is how it’s mostly characterised, but also just as a plain old narrative tool.

Digital Storytelling

Seems to me that the phrase “digital storytelling” is being bandied around an awful lot bt at the same time, pinning down a definition of what exactly constitutes digital storytelling is not as easy.

While looking up some alternatives to interactive google maps I found this presentation which lists a number of interesting online sites offering simple tools to create interactive platforms for photos, videos, slideshows and audio.

I’ve only skimmed over the options so far but Voice Thread seems to be focused on user participation with many options for commenting, either by webcam, phone, audio recording, and text. And yes, you can moderate comments if you feel the need. Here is a Voice Thread conversations about the meaning of networks in education.

And this one I’m drawn to for its oral history and memory aspects. What a wonderful way to spark conversations!

Now onto Vuvox: I love lots about this application, collage images with hotspots for audio and video and other links. I’ve attempted before to build a similar effect in flash with hotspots for audio over images but I think using vuvox would be a much simpler, cleaner and more user friendly option. Vuvox would be used quite differently to Voice Thread though, as it is not built around comments as Voice Thread is. It’s more about presenting an interactive story.

I thought this one which is audio focussed was a really successful use of Vuvox for a very aesthetic multi-media outcome:

And for a social history through interactive image collage with pop-up annotations this one about a Black American history througha bakery.

Copyright

Ironically, this cute Disney mash-up about copyright is right at home on you tube!

New Media and Museums: Conference

I’ve just spotted a facinating looking conference being held in Melbourne later this week called Transformations in Cultural and Scientific Communication. It appears to focus on the new and possible uses and releationships bewteen Web2 technologies and online platforms and Museum story telling.

Swinburne Uni also has some more info about it.

Khmer Rouge Trial

It was with mixed feelings that I recieved the news of the Khmer Rouge Trial beginning last week. Justice is value to which humanity must aspire but perhaps not without it’s own sense of pain of memory, trauma and loss of the irreplaceable.

In 2004 I spent quite a bit of time in the region and at the time wrote in an article published in the local paper, “It was Cambodia that stole my heart”. I remember being struck by the harmony of the place, mixed with a strong wiff of memory and dysfuntion. One day I spent hours playing with a group of gorgeous kids in a village after a day on the back of a motorbike. My driver invited me back to his home and before long there was a collection of dark curious eyes following me, playing cat and mouse behind my back before we tumbled into games of soccer, piggy back and shoulder rides, and crude lessons in photography with my camera. I sat for a breather for a cup of tea and a chat when the conversation lightly turned to the family members missing due to the genocide. It seemed to me that these facts were repeated tranfered in this manner with the many others who I spent time with along the way. These people were emotionally spent.

I also remember the feeling of vomit rising in my throat at the killing fields and Tuol Seng in particular.

Perhaps Cambodia was my entre to a need to explore the ghosts of trauma among survivors, how we heal and what aids the healing process. War crimes trial may be one way, Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals, Apologies, compensation, therapy. I don’t have answers to such questions, except what people have told me: speaking, being heard, being acknowledged, being supported, sharing pain and having a future.

These episodes move survivor groups to vow, “never again” but horrifically, as a global community we seem to watch the same story line replayed over and over again only with different characters, different locations. To this again all I can say is that I have no answer and that like everyone else, my eternal question is simply “why”.

Also read responses from Khmer people, News reports and a resource from Yale University

Bushfire horror

I feel I can’t write without some mention of the awful tragedy which has befallen my state of Victoria. Everyone knows someone who has been affected and in that respect we have all been affected. But even as I sit here to write I feel there are very few words to say.

At work we have struggled to find a way to describe the way we all feel: flat was the closest we came. But all week there have been snippets of news coming in. Some of it throws us back into sadness and depression; the loss of a home, a friend’s family. Other stories form the lifeblood that keeps us living and growing together as a community; the way a foster carer I know has spent her days and nights serving tea, coffee and snacks, colleuges who are volunteering through giving grief counselling to victims and families, not to mention the CFA.

And the question on all our lips, “How could this happen?” What would move someone to cause such devastation and how could such an illness go unnoticed and untreated? How could we be so poorly prepared after two hundred years of living on this country? What should we learn from this, or from our Indigenous brothers and sisters who have a level of sophisication in their knowledge of this kind of management that I can’t begin to grasp? What in the world can we do about it now.

It seems bad taste to think about what could have been done but I did hear an interesting interview on the radio which promoted the use of dug-outs which is attributed to saving many lives in the 1939 Black Friday fires. Certainly I would suggest it sounds like a far smarter idea than the fire-corridors suggested by Brumby. If there is one thing I believe strongly in it’s that we as inhabitants of this land must learn how to adapt to nature, not try to shape nature to fit in with us. Nature will always win that battle.

After the Year of the Slog: what my honours project taught me

Through my practice based research project I put forward the idea of Participatory Documentary Practice as an ethics based alternative practice and solution to problems associated with produce media about the other groups and communities- in this case, Indigenous and Jewish communities.

I tracked the approach throughout the project which included having two community co-producers who would guide me through cultural sensitivities and help me navigate community politics. Community co-producers would also be integral in working out how their story would be told, who should be interviewed and what types of questions should be asked. This practice comes from the perspective that producers should create a system where he/she is an employee of the participating communities, helping to tell their true and human stories.

What I found was not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with this approach- all participants felt strongly connected to what was produced- but rather the main finding was that it would be very difficult to adopt this approach in industry practice. Holding the interests of the communities we work with in priority place is a lovely idea and efforts towards this will certainly earn respect of everyone involved, allow greater trust and access and a deeper level of story telling, but the consequences of this come into sharp focus when deadlines come around. I was faced with a problem: either exert even more pressure to meet my deadline, or continue to wait for the right time by the communities involved for the interviews to take place after weeks of cancellations and availabilities.

But academic research loves problems and this aspect formed a major finding of the research.

Production of In the Wake of Genocide continues (an insightful interview was done yesterday) to expand on the 28 minute piece so we can anticipate that the full 52 minute feature will be fit for broadcast in the near future.

It’s not hard to see my own growth either. This project tested my ability to tackle production problems, to rethink my approaches to think creatively. It also fine-tuned my technical skill and matured me as a producer, my sensitivity to sound, structure and story.

Importantly, I have begun to feel comfortable in the idea of producing Indigenous stories. Being a white producer or journalist in this context can be scary and can attract questions of validity and rights. These questions are both internal and externally imposed and in fact, this is probably the reason for the whole research. But throughout the experience of producing In the Wake of Genocide I never once felt unwelcome or unwanted. Moreover, I was very supported (which is not to say I wasn’t tested!).I maintain that the participatory approach was significant in building the quality of these relationships.

In my own way I love my country, but I think we can do better than we have for the past 200 years. I’ve realised that I only began to feel some pride in being Australian since the Apology last year and since having the ability to recognise a shameful past and the courage to publicly admit our shortcomings. Using the participatory approach meant I had no choice but to  listen to what people were telling me and it meant all of us felt comfortable working to produce these stories which is vital for building a rich tapestry of media and stories.