I had those glasses for ten years anyways.
I want to address two of the points raised in your terms of reference--namely, skills development and access. More specifically, I want to provide you with my perspective on how the digital revolution is transforming how we understand, represent, and interpret the past.
New media allows us to explore places in new ways. Digital technologies are even reshaping, I think, the ways in which people remember and share their own life stories. A sense of place or collective identity, be it Canadian, regional, or what have you, would be impossible without memory.
I base my comments on how the digital revolution is changing oral history practice at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, a state-of-the-art research centre that is second to none in the world. The oral history centre has been the source of a great deal of digital innovation since its creation in 2006, including the development of new software tools, such as “Stories Matter”, an open-source database software that is the first viable alternative to the transcription of oral history interviews.
I also want to share with you our experience with new media in a project called “Histoires de Vie Montréal”, or “Montreal Life Stories”, a five-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
The community-university research alliance program is a special one in that communities are supposed to become partners in research and not just objects of study. Community participation in the research process must therefore be real and sustained.
Our project is recording the life stories of 500 Montréalais who fled war, genocide, or other human rights violations mainly in Rwanda, Cambodia, Haiti, Hitler's Europe, and, sadly, elsewhere. As you can imagine, these are very difficult stories to tell, and they are very hard stories to hear.
From our vantage point in Canada, it is easy to assume that Rwanda in 1994 has nothing to do with us. It was another time, another place. Yet there are thousands of survivors living here today. Their stories have become part of our collective story now.
Oral history has the power to close distance, I think, to make history personal, and, in making it personal, to make people care. It also has the power to complicate taken-for-granted notions such as “us” or “them”, “here” or “there”. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor commission into reasonable accommodation recommended life stories as a way to bridge some of the social divides that exist not only in Quebec but elsewhere in Canada.
At this point, you may be asking yourselves the “So what?” question. What does any of this have to do with your deliberations on emerging and digital media?
In response, I would say that we have an incredible opportunity to deploy new digital technologies and new media practices to reconnect Canadians with their past. Oral and public history, or histoire appliquée, as it's known in Quebec, emerged in the 1970s in response to growing public interest in heritage and memory. It represents a shift not only in the intended audience but also in the research process itself. We often work in partnership with communities. We communicate our findings in a variety of ways, both textual and non-textual.
Today there are tens of thousands of oral history interviews sitting in boxes on archival shelves across Canada. Thousands more are being added by large projects that are recording the life stories of World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, immigrant communities, and, of course, aboriginal residential school survivors. The truth and reconciliation commission is thinking of doing 60,000 impact statements.
With the death of Canada's last World War I veteran, it has become impossible for younger Canadians to hear first-hand Canadian stories of courage and sacrifice from that war. Very soon, we will no longer be able to hear first-hand stories about the Great Depression or World War II, either.
For decades, Canadian veterans have been going into schools, around Remembrance Day especially, telling their stories to young people. Survivors have likewise been at the core of Holocaust education in Canada for at least 30 years. Week after week they have gone into classrooms, telling their horrific stories to young people, to educate them, to make the world a better place.
Oral history is very good at making this kind of emotional connection. History is about far more than dates and statistics. It's about real people. Ordinary people live extraordinary lives.
But what happens when the last veteran or survivor is no longer able to do this important work? Who will keep these connections alive? Recorded interviews provide part of the answer, yet collection is not enough. Again, there are tens of thousands of recorded interviews sitting in archival drawers, computer hard-drives, or on library book shelves that have never been listened to. Their emotional power has been largely untapped. Worse still, most of these stories were recorded using now obsolete technologies.
A first step would be to digitize existing interviews to make certain that future generations will be able to listen to those who experienced Canada's twentieth century first-hand. This is a huge job, but one that needs to be done soon or the history will be lost forever. A few of these interviews have been transcribed, but these do a poor job as well in communicating, again, the emotional impact of these stories. This is where emergent and digital technologies are opening up new opportunities to access Canadian memories and to transmit them to young people in schools and outside of them.
To explain what I mean about the potential of oral history and new media, I would like to turn once again to the Montreal Life Stories project. We are spending a great deal of time working with the interview recordings of survivors of mass violence. Survivor testimony is being incorporated into radio programming, documentary film, theatre performances, art installations, exhibitions, and online platforms. We are mapping the Quebec secondary school curriculum and developing teaching modules to get these stories into classrooms. We believe that oral history can be a catalyst for public dialogue.
Not surprisingly, new media has been central to the work that we do. I would like to give you three examples. To access thousands of hours of audio or video recordings directly and easily, we have developed Stories Matter software. This open-source software, paid for by the Canadian taxpayer, enables interviews to be searched, sorted, browsed, accessed and the meanings mapped in large collections or in single interviews. We can now follow threads across interviews, making connections. The next phase in our Stories Matter development will enable researchers and larger publics to map these stories across space using a Google Map-type technology.
Our second strategy is digital storytelling. Digital storytelling has recently been described as the emerging “signature pedagogy” for the humanities and social sciences. A digital story is a three- to five-minute multi-media presentation online, using a combination of audio, video, and still images. These are often highly emotive stories.
From the outset, the Montreal Life Stories project has enjoyed a formal relationship with the National Film Board's online participatory websites called “CitizenShift” and “Parole citoyenne”. Here, the process of creating the digital story is critically important.
There's a lot of talk today, and I listened to a couple of the podcasts, about content. I think process is really crucial, in terms of whose content this is. We could simply take stories out of the interviews unilaterally, for example, and produce digital stories that speak to us. But I think it is far more interesting to work with interviewees in the selection of the clips themselves. After the interview--we have interviewed survivors for five, ten, fifteen, twenty hours of recorded interview--we ask them, “What story would you like to tell the world? You have five or ten minutes. What are you going to say?” This question forms the starting point of the digital story-making process.
I'd like to encourage you again to consider how this content is generated. I always come back to these questions: from whom, by whom, for whom? The question of who is driving the process is vitally important. Is the public's role that of a consumer only, or can we envision a more substantial role where communities are more integrally involved in future directions in emergent and digital media?
Having targeted programs for digital projects that include community participation is something I strongly believe in. Projects that build community capacity to undertake digital projects--in disadvantaged areas, for example--would go a long way in pushing forward digital literacy skills. In the paper today there was an article about a study on the digital divide.
Our third strategy relates to “memoryscapes” and audio tours. Once confined to museums, audio tours have left the building and taken to the streets with the emergence of MP3 players, iPods, and smart phones. These mobile technologies have opened up new opportunities for researchers and communities to tell stories. Places are not simply points on a map, but exist in time as well.
A project that exemplifies the enormous potential of mobile technologies and new media is the Centre d'histoire de Montréal, the city museum of Montreal. They are planning a 2011 exhibition called “Quartiers disparus”, which will examine four working-class districts demolished in the 1960s to make way for Montreal's Ville Marie and Bonaventure expressways, as well as the Radio-Canada complex and the Habitations Jeanne-Mance housing project. Using its innovative “memory clinic” methodology, the Centre d'histoire de Montréal has organized group interviews with former residents, using old insurance maps and expropriation photos to prompt memories. This will be followed by walking interviews, where people walk through the present day, what's there now, alongside the expressway or what have you, again to generate stories.
In addition to the exhibition itself, a series of self-guided audio tours are planned. We are using Mscape software and GPS technology to immerse visitors in these former neighbourhoods. So you can imagine, you're walking through a space and audio files are being triggered by where you are walking and time-coded files are also triggered. Again, this tension between past and present is politically quite interesting.
One could imagine connecting interview recordings like this with war memorials, for example, where a class would visit a war memorial wearing Walkmans and hear stories of World War I or World War II veterans--the power, again, to remember.
In conclusion, I would encourage you to break down the universalized public and think about the role communities might play in the development of emergent and digital media. Humanities and social science researchers once had a monopoly over the research process. Communities were treated as little more than new data. A growing emphasis on community-university partnerships, however, has widened the circle considerably, enriching the conversation, and producing what I think is more innovative and humanistic scholarship. New media has contributed enormously to this shift, as it encourages collaboration and citizen engagement.
I want to leave you with a story of the 16th commemoration of the Rwandan genocide. Every April, Montreal's Rwandan community holds its annual walk to the St. Lawrence River when the children in the community throw flowers into the river. There are reasons for that in terms of Rwandan culture and the importance of rivers. They also organize a day of reflection. For nine hours, nearly 100 Rwandan Montrealers watch digital stories produced from, by, and for their own community. After each segment, there is a panel of elders or youth, depending, and then everyone in the audience writes down a memory and pins it onto a timeline. You can imagine a wall with a timeline with dozens and dozens of people's stories pinned onto the wall.
So here's an example of how new media becomes a catalyst for community dialogue, confronting major issues such as the role of the church in the genocide, for example, and the breaking of silence within communities. Cultural industries are far removed from these kinds of grassroots memory projects, so I think it is important that you also consider what is going on at a more local or community level.
The digital revolution enables us to rethink past practice, I think, in important ways. But again, issues of power—from whom, by whom, for whom—are fundamental to any discussion of emergent and digital media.
Thank you.
