New Media Documentary: Technology for Social Inclusion

I recently discovered a very interesting lecture from Sharon Daniel on new media technology on Youtube. She is a professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts at the University of California. Her research is focused on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion. She is engaged in an effort to use technology for social inclusion through the production of new media documentaries in which new media and information technologies are deployed as a means of giving voice to the experience of socially, racially and economically marginalized people. She is commited to ‘’participatory culture’’ – in her scholarship she traces a thread through social theory that ties the potential for self-representation to social change. She sees herself as a ‘’context provider’’; she explains the role of a context provider as someone who does not speak for others, but induces others to speak for themselves by providing both the means or tools and the context, where they can speak and be heard. What connects all her projects is a desire to affect social change – first, by providing technologically disenfranchised communities with access to media tools and information spaces, and second, by facilitating collective self-representation across socio-economic boundaries. She sees the internet as a public space and her work as a public art. During the lecture, she talks about some projects that she helped start – Palabras, Public Secret and Blood sugar – and she thinks of them as works of art.
In 2005 a project named PALABRAS was started. It is a set of tools and interfaces, designed to facilitate collective self-representation and also an expanding network for ongoing collaborations with nonprofit organizations that serve marginalized communities that don’t have access to media and information technology. Palabras addresses communities of place and it focuses on collective authoring. So it is intended as a tool for workshops in which groups are formed and collaboration is encouraged – central is the process, not the product. Workshops are often held in sites where there is no internet connection, and then uploaded later to the project database.
Public Secret is an online audio archive of statements by incarcerated women that reveal the secret injustices of the Criminal Justice System, and other works in progress. The goal of the project is the flow of the content and consecutive the revelation of those secrets and injustices.
Blood sugar examines the social and political construction of poverty, alienation and addiction in America through the eyes of those who live it.
She says her work constitutes an intervention and refusal to except reality as it is, so by employing voices she challenges the audience to rethink the paradoxes of social exclusion. She hopes her work will fulfill the role she thinks new media documentary practices and information technologies should play (practices that involve empowering speech, changing perceptions, asking tough questions and making radical demands).
Although the lecture is not so short, I hope you will still see it, because it is interesting and it gives people something to think about. You can find the lecture on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiHBxCDleus.

And if you are interested further in the described projects, you can find them on this links:

Palabras: http://palabras.ucsc.edu
Public secret: http://publicsecret.net
Blood sugar: http://bloodsugararchives.net/

It is amazing to see that new media technology can be used for such great causes.

Researching new collaboration tools: SlideShare

Lately, I have been thinking how many useful tools (for professional, for educational or just for private use only) exist on the Internet. On one hand I am very sad, because in our four years of studying on FDV, no one told us about them and made our study work much easier, but on the other hand, I am grateful that through our study course New media and society we have the chance now to get to know those tools – I’m sure that from now on we will use them as often as we can. With this said, yesterday, while searching for the perfect tool for online presentations that we must make, I came across a tool named SlideShare and just have to share my thoughts on it with others. It is free and you just have to sign up for it on the Internet. The main function of the tool it is to enable its users to share their presentations online, to their geographically dispersed ‘’listeners’’. I talk about this function as its main one, but is certainly isn’t the only one. On SlideShare one can:

- view & download presentations, documents, pdfs etc on any topic one likes
- embed into blogs, websites & wikis
- upload any formats: ppt, pptx, doc, docx, pdf, odp, Apple Keynote, IWork pages etc.
- create a webinar or audio presentation using free slidecasting tool
- embed YouTube Videos inside one's SlideShare presentations
- use event functionality to send conference invites, archive slide decks, publicise one's event etc.
- build mashups & widgets using free APIs (for developers) (source: SlideShare.net)

As it is possible to see, the range of SlideShare’s functions is wide enough that everyone can use it on one opportunity or another. Because I have an online presentation coming up, I tried how it functions and I have to tell you, it is very easy. You can create a group and send an invitation to the people you want to join the group. Then you upload the presentation and the work is done. One of the things I found very useful is that it is also compatible with Google Docs. You can make a presentation there as a group and then easily upload it to SlideShare. Also what I found useful is that the site is almost a whole community – people add their presentations for all to see and they connect themselves into groups with common interests. Therefore, one can find a lot of presentations on a certain subject and can upload their own. One can also comment on those presentations and therefore contribute to their quality.
SlideShare is really not a complicated tool to use, but has a range of functions that need to be more thoroughly researched if the purpose of its use is more than just for fun or for educational presentations sharing.

Google Documents - a great experience!

I know that Google Docs is a data storage service, available for quite some time now, but until now, I didn't have the need or the will to explore it. I know there are a lot of people like me, so I decided it is time to explore it a little and write about it. What I found was a great application that is quite easy to use is very useful when it comes to storing documents, sharing them with other people and collaborating. It is free and all you need is a a computer with Internet access and a Google e-mail account.
In Google Docs you can create documents, presentations, spreadsheats and folders, in which you organize your documents. Then you can invite people, who can edit the document or just see view it. The documents are edited in the same place, so all the collaborators immediately see the changes made. There's an on-screen chat window for spreadsheets, and document revisions show you exactly who changed what, and when. You can also publish your work as a web page or post documents to your blog, if you have it.
But there is a limit on how much a user can store on their account. Individual documents may not exceed 1GB as of January 13, 2010, embedded images must not exceed 2MB each, and spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, and 99 sheets . A user can have a total of 5,000 documents and presentations, 5,000 images, 1,000 spreadsheets, and 100 PDFs at one time (http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603&topic=15119). Some people would see this limit as a deficiancy, but for the need of a general use the storage space is quite large, so this doesn't present a deficiency of the application.
I was very surprised by the easy use of this application and its usefullness. You can use it for personal matters and also for professional/scholarly matters. I really recommend it to all who share their documents with other people and I am sorry that I didn't explore it sooner. It has a lot of advantages, described above, and the only weekness that I can now come up with, is the need for a Google e-mail account. But nevertheless, many people today have it, and if they don't - it's free and easy to open it. As for the rest of the eventual weaknesses, I will have to use it a little longer.
If you want more information on Google Documents, visit http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html. I bet you will start using it for some reason or another.