Habitation Tales--I wonder how long it will take before my penchant for giving everything a catchy name begins to irritate people... In any case, such tales would become the part of the collection most familiar to me, as a long-term English/writing teacher. I envision these to be first-person accounts of people's experience of living-in-place, which might provide the raw material for a different, less data-driven, analysis of community and the phenomenology of place.
These might overlap with bits of what we usually call "nature writing," or with accounts that are collected for an ethnography, or with sections of autobiography. Or, to reach toward a different discipline, place-accounts would likely contain the wisps of folklore--wisps because a genuine folklore is not simply a first-person account, but a bit of narrative or lore that is passed on, that becomes "traditional" within a community context. Thinking in those terms might give an indirect measure of a bioregional community. That is, will any such wisps, or personal anecdotes, personal accounts, be able to solidify into transmittable lore? Or, are we too disjunct, too mobile, too distracted, to retain and amplify such stories?
And would recording and making public (web-public) such accounts of place-lore affect or promote the process of folklore creation?
Work to be done--I should meet with various teachers and writers and work toward creating writing prompts for such place-accounts, not to standardize the accounts, but to make it easier for people to tell their tales. There wouldn't need to just be one prompt--different audiences might have different needs. I need to find some teachers from Rockbridge and Hickman High Schools to sit down over a beer or coffee and talk about this process.
A variation of this might be to look more at the "story maps" of indigenous peoples--I should explore this with Mark Palmer. Such maps don't worry about decimal degrees nor UTM projections. They illustrate the subjective projections of one person's place-world, or sometimes, a community's vision of its place. I would love to have grade-school kids draw the maps of their worlds, and maybe again in high school. Even better, to have the maps they create, but also videotape each student explaining the map.
[Security--even after parental permissions, how to deal with the security of kids talking about the places they frequent? Agree not to publish any kid-map or video for a full year?]
Other sources--maybe the members of the local Sierra Club would agree to write their habitation tales. Maybe some of the Columbia neighborhood associations. Maybe, framed well, some churches ("building local community").
*****
What might go into such tales? Probably a lot of what people do in a typical day--work, school, shopping, home, visiting friends. Perhaps special places they like to visit. And perhaps, under pressure of needing to write, people will, say, notice after a heavy summer rain, how the mist comes up through the trees and partly hides the road, and be reminded of Chinese landscape paintings. Or recall the balloon festival or walking around to see Christmas lights or Homecoming decorations, or give us their Flood of '93 stories, or cicadas tales, or talk about taking their grandkids to see the Bur Oak. All those things that might bind us to a place--or that might lead us toward being newly indigenous ourselves.
bob
This part may seem the least 'academic,' and I suppose it is, but I hope that we can build an interactive photo archive for Boone County, across the next century, to parallel other sorts of information we collect. I don't think photos can replace written sources, nor are images really any more objective; the selection process itself--who chooses to take what image--shifts the knowledge status of any photo out of the objective.
Yet--other things are recorded in images. Ideal, perhaps, might be that images we record provide others in some misty future with clues to life here that we have never thought to question, things that writers may simply not address. It's hard to really "see" what we are too familiar with--the blind spots in our assumptions may say as much about us as what we actually do write down. (And we need to make of record of who takes the photos, to be able to track those lines--I need to write about Habitation Tales soon.)
Difficult is finding an appropriate format and technology for this project. I've got a gps digital camera now, which may or may not supply the information I want, and I hope we can get more gps cameras into our system soon. Harder is the display. Shannon White has suggested Google's MyMaps. This is free and looks easy to use, but it doesn't look like it would support a project of any great size--even marking images on the maps with the pinpoints might get cluttered. Not sure.
Just got introduced to ArcGISExplorer. That system easily marks maps, lets us attach photos, etc. Not sure this works as a stand-alone web page, vs. a tool to generate presentations.
What I'd like to produce, with many many others...a map of Boone County, probably a satellite image, with a road layer, addresses we could turn on, as a base for a great many gps-tagged photos and text descriptions. We would need a way for people to zoom in on a specific area (like the box zoom in feature) or to call up photos along a certain road or in a specific neighborhood. But then, we should also have a legend of categories people could click on to find other sets of photos.
For instance, categories such as:
- residences
- businesses
- construction
- trees
- wildflowers (I need to go out and start these photos tomorrow)
- events (like Roots and Blues, Earthday, the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival, Art in the Park, the Ashland Rodeo...)
- weather events
People will find more ways we need to look at things. And this also needs to be date-searchable.
So, this is a lot of work. I don't quite know how to set it up, but this aspect would be popular, and might get some support by various groups. E.g., in better times, real estate folks might sponser us, or the Chamber of Commerce. Or the towns of Centralia or Harrisburg. Or the Boone County Historical Society. And Stephens and other schools might decide they want a visual presence on this. And I rather hope this can generate projects in classes--whether as an exercise in a future MU gps class, or in human geography, updating Carl Sauer to the digital age, or a junior high neighborhood mapping project.
Well, we'll see.
bob
