Instead of putting together a traditional, continuous film, creators of 18DaysInEgypt are asking individuals to submit media they created while living it. Tags those contributors add about the date, their feelings and their location will eventually help connect individual stories.
Jigar Mehta, a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and former New York Times video journalist, originally started the project hoping to pull content directly from Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But he and co-creator Yasmin Elayat quickly found difficulties in determining context from social media posts.
“We thought, instead of being ahead of contributors pulling content, let’s push them to contribute,” Mehta says.
The first of the site’s contributions came from about 100 photographers, journalists and bloggers who served as beta testers. Elayat and Mehta also had “ambassadors” collect media from people who weren’t connected to the Internet. Thursday was the public contributions launch.
Using a contribution tool, anyone can compile videos, photos, tweets and Facebook posts into a slideshow module for the 18DaysInEgypt website. They then have options to add aforementioned tags and additional text. So far, people have used the tool in a variety of ways, many of them — like a video slideshow of activist musicians — in ways the team hadn’t anticipated.
“The Egyptian edition of the Daily Star has edited a picture of a Kefaya demonstrator in its 19 December print issue,” wrote one contributor. “[it] carefully blurred the anti-Mubarak writings on the Kefaya demonstrator’s poster.”
“One man had the audacity to grope my arse, not once, but twice, within 30 seconds,” wrote another.
“The latest fighting started when a boy who was part of the cabinet sit-in was brutally beaten by soldiers,” wrote a third.
Eventually viewers will be able to click hyperlinks in each of these modules to see others that took place at the same time, with the same person or at the same location — in other words, how the censorship, beating and arse grabbing were connected. It’s a view of storytelling that has gotten some attention, including a grant from the Tribeca New Media Fund.
Mehta and Elayat are working on making the concept available for telling other stories as well. They plan to launch a storytelling platform based on 18DaysInEgypt, GroupStre.am, within the next few months.
Image courtesy of Flickr, Maggie Osama
keep up with the newest technologies and contemplate about how these will be used in the future. On this blog I'll share my thoughts about the future of technology, based on the high Tech Road Show Blog inventions of today.Related articles
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