StoryBank

This information could be very practical; containing health or agricultural advice, advertisements for local products, or exercises for a school lesson. Or it could be more personal; containing invitations to forthcoming events, reporting local news, or requesting help with a particular issue.

Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focussing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information. By setting up a repository, we will allow such information to be stored and accessed repeatedly by different people who may share the same cameraphone, television or other screen-based device on a temporary basis. By connecting this repository to the internet we will also allow people outside the local context to see how the authors live. This could be useful for distant engineers and designers to understand the needs of people from a different culture, and create more appropriate products and solutions for them. In this way we aim to re-conceptualise internet content at a local level, making it more TV than PC-centric, and to test this out across local and global divides.

There are three main research questions for the project:

1. What kind of stories and information are useful for local and professional users?

2. How can we present, organise and deliver the information in an accessible and compelling way?

3. How will the information be physically created and represented?

Our approach to developing and testing the library system will be to build it primarily for use by one local community in India. This will be identified early in the project, with the participation and involvement of local people and developer organisations already working there. A secondary user group will be new technology engineers and designers in the UK, who will be challenged to design solutions for this community using information in the library.

This project is in collaboration with the Universities of Swansea, Loughborough, London (Queen Mary's College) and Nottingham Trent. Our Indian NGO partner is VOICES who are based in Bangalore. It is funded from 1st June 2006 for 21 months by the EPSRC and arose out of its "sandpit". The full StoryBank team includes David Frohlich, Matt Jones, Eran Edirisinge, Dhamike Wickramanayaka, Ram Bhat, Maxine Frank, Dorothy Rachovides, Will Harwood, Mounia Lalmas, Roger Tucker, Paul Palmer, Arthur Williams and Kiriaki Riga.

This project was led at Surrey by Dorothy Rachovides.

More information on this project can be found at the StoryBank website or http://www.tellingstorybank.info/

Publications

• Jones M., Dearden A., Dunckley L., Frohlich D.M. & Light A. (2009) Stepping in: An outsiders guide to crossing the digital divide. User Experience Magazine, forthcoming.
• Frohlich, D.M., Bhat R., Jones M., Lalmas M., Frank M., Rachovides D., Tucker R. & Riga K. (2009) Democracy, design and development in community content creation: Lessons from the StoryBank project. Information Technology for International Development (ITID), 5(4): 19-36. 
• Frohlich D.M., Rachovides D., Riga K., Frank M., Bhat R., Edirisinghe E., Wikramanayake D., Jones M. & Harwood W. (2009) StoryBank: Mobile digital storytelling in a development context.Proceedings of CHI 2009:1761-1770. New York: ACM Press.
• Jones M., Thom E., Bainbridge D. & Frohlich D.M. (2009) Mobility, digital libraries and a rural Indian village. In Proceedings of the 2009 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Austin Texas, June 15-19, 2009). JCDL '09. ACM, New York, NY, 309-312.
• Frohlich D.M. & Jones M. (2008) Audiophoto narratives for semi-literate communities.  Interactions Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008,pp 61-64.
• Frohlich D.M. & Rachovides D. (2008) Using digital stories for local and global information sharing. CHI’08 Workshop on “HCI for Community and International Development” held at CHI’07, 5-6th April 2008, Florence, Italy.
• Jones M., Harwood W., Buchanan G., Frohlich D., Rachovides D., Lalmas M., Frank M. “Narrowcast yourself: Designing for Community Storytelling in a Rural Indian Context”, To be presented at DIS2008, 25-27 February 2008, Cape Town South Africa
• Rachovides D., “We come and go, what happens after the projects end?”, HCI2007 Workshop on “Designing human centred technologies for the developing world” held at HCI2007, 3-7 September 2007, Lancaster University, UK
• Rachovides D., Frohlich D. , Frank M. “Interaction Design in the Wild”, In the Proceedings of British HCI2007, Volume 2, September 2007, Lancaster, UK
• Lalmas, M., Bhat, R., Frank, M., Frohlich, D., and Jones, M. 2007. “Bridging the digital divide: understanding information access practices in an indian village community.” In Proceedings of the 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 23 - 27, 2007). SIGIR '07. ACM, New York, NY, 741-742.
• Jones, M., Harwood, W., Buchanan, G., and Lalmas, M. 2007. “StoryBank: an indian village community digital library”. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM, New York, NY, 257-258.
• Frohlich D., “Applying digital storytelling technology to community radio in India” CHI’07 Workshop on “User Centered Design and International Development” held at CHI’07, April 28th 2007, San Jose California, USA
• Jones, M. 2006. Voices across the digital divide. interactions 13, 3 (May. 2006), 16-17.