Moving Tribute

I did a search for legacy on google to see what I could find on other people creating legacies for other people. One that ended up at the top of the list was legacy.com, not surprising... When I went there to check it out, I found that it was a site that stores obituaries. That is definitely a form of a legacy, just a different way of what I would like to do. I was actually impressed by the moving tributes that relatives would do for loved ones that have passed. I can't link directly to any of them since they open up in separate windows with players, but you can check one out if you go to the site since they are linked right on the homepage. What they are is a 60 second tribute that plays a slideshow of 10 photos with descriptions with them. The creator can either pick a song from a list or do a voice recording about the person's life. At the end it displays the name and dates of the deceased, with a little description of that person or how he/she will be missed.

I watched a few and found that although they were simple, they were really interesting to me. Here I am, watching a 10 picture slideshow that sums up someone's entire life. There were usually child hood pictures, graduation pictures, vacation, family... all the important things that composes one's life. A few thoughts came to my mind while viewing these tributes. The first was that I wanted to view more. I found myself wondering if these people had scrapbooks of their lives, something that would tell even more stories. 10 pictures could never do a person justice. Could you imagine summing up your life in just 10 pictures and one description?! It's nice for the public, but as far as friends and family goes, I would like a lot more to describe me!

Another thought was that I thought it would be nice if the person could have contributed before they passed. Now is too late for them. That is why I think that it is important to create these memories while you are still alive before it is too late. It is such a treasure to be able to have something that was created from someone by their own hands.

A final thought I had was that if would be nice for others to be able to contribute to this tribute. Others would have thoughts, stories, pictures, and videos that the immediate family would not have access to. I think it would be nice for people to contribute and comment on these things. All interesting thoughts to go into my project.

Photo Subjects

While listening to presentations today, I was interested in what Chris had to say about his interest, photos. We both seem to have a passion for photography, Chris for the aesthetic value, and myself for the stories and memories they hold. He made an interesting comment saying that when people browse around for photos, they usually like to look at artistically provocative ones, not pictures of random people just chillin at a party. That got me thinking about how to make photos like the ones I take, which are not the most artistically inspired, to become interesting to more people that the circle of friends that I take the pictures with.

I went to Flickr to check out how that site was set up and to see what people were interested in. Of course, 15 minutes later, I found that I was just looking at unique pictures that were aesthetically very interesting. I was not searching for a story, just pretty pictures that I enjoyed viewing. So in search for a good story, I did a search for college party to see what I could find from people in my age group. Needless to say, I found a bunch of grainy pictures of random people holding solo cups that I had no interest in investigating further. All things considered, most traditional scrapbooks are not about college parties, but I would like to create a way for normal pictures to become interesting. I think there are two solutions to this problem that I can see now. The first is that the scrapbooks will be more interactive and will have stories behind them. If college parties were your thing, than you could read about what other people are doing at their parties: what games they play, what shows they watch, crazy antics, so on... If I knew more about the people who posted those pictures and what they do for fun, I might be interested in reading about their adventures and contacting them to conduct some of our own someday!

The second option of course would be to make sure that all the albums have tags, so that way you could search for what you are interested in, what area you are in, age group, whatever. That way, if you would rather read about someone's awesome vacation in California and all the cool places they went instead of some college kids drinking from solo cups then the power is yours :)

As a final comment about Flickr, I love how big the community is! Everyone comments on photos and it is fun to read through them. That is exactly what I would like with a scrapbooking environment. Users should be able to comment because they like (or don't like) what they see, and be able to do so freely and happily.

Building Online Communities Article

I found an article on building online communities at the OReilly network and found that it had a lot of interesting pointers. According to the article, before even building an online community, you should understand about how they work. The first step to creating the community is to know why your site exists. The author says that you should have a positive, solid, goal for your site to attract users. Without that, they won't know what they are there for and will be turned away. The next point is that users draw other users. Users refer other users, and without a solid community, potential members will not want to join since it will seem like no one else wants to. In healthy online communities the users thrive and volunteer to help with the site. They comment and in a way start to take over the site for themselves by promoting and using the content. Many users have a history on the internet, and are interested in the history of a community, knowing if it has been positive or not. There will be a few users that will voice their opinion about how they don't like the site, but many will be positive, and it is those users that you should pay attention to. The author discussed the barrier of having a customer create an account. A lot of users don't want to have to go through the process, and prefer to reply anonymously, but users like the idea of having members with accounts who will come back and participate often. The creator should make a list of rules to prevent too much mischief from going on at the site, and remember to always discuss the community openly so that change does not come as a shock. Users can be surprising, and you can never really tell how well a community will take off.

I thought this article had a lot of helpful hints in it. I would like to look more deeply into the sites mentioned in it to see how communities work there. One community I could think of that I am in is FaceBook. When the creators made the big change of adding a news feed, the community was mad, and many expressed it through the site. This shows how the community pushes what should and should not be done on a site. The creators should have had a discussion forum set up to tell about changes that would be made before they went and did it. Once you have a strong community, it is important to keep the members while still trying to attract new ones. As I continue researching for my project, I will have to think more about who I think would be in my community and how I could create a space for them to flourish.

Parti 2

For my second parti, I wanted to represent more of the actual scrapbook and pictures instead of the values and emotions that go into creating a legacy.

Parti 1

For my first parti, I wanted to represent the ideals of scrapbooking and what it means for the person who created it. Scrapbooks cover a broad range of emotions and events in life, all creating a legacy for the subject.

Multimedia Scrapbooks

Continuing on the idea of adding multimedia aspects to my project, I decided to search and see what was out there for multimedia scrapbooks. My search came up with a lot of school projects, most of the scrapbooks seem to have been done over a country or time period. I thought they were a neat way for kids to learn about these places. I really liked the idea that they had links, images, videos, and soundclips that they gathered, and that anyone could add to the page. That was pretty cool. One site, Multimedia Scrapbooks, gives a brief description of the items that would be used in these kinds of scrapbooks: photographs, powerpoint presentations, stories, maps, graphs, facts, sound clips, videos, and so on. The site itself was pretty basic, and is probably used on a small scale for an elementary school class, but the idea is good. With a multimedia scrapbook, you have so many more resources at your hands. There are already sites like this for celebrities, but imagine if you were able to build your own legacy online with all your stories. People would be able to find out about your life, or perhaps just the select few you allow.

The one multimedia scrapbook that stood out to me was on stories from WWII. For students, I found this site to be very well put together! It had an album background, which gave it the effect of actually reading an album. You could click on links to hear the stories that different students had to tell of their grandparents who had been in WWII. They told the stories from their own words and some even had audio clips. It is neat that these children are taking what they hear from their grandparents, and preserving the stories online for future generations to find. There are so many ideas out there for preserving stories, we just need a community to share and collaborate on all of them so they can be told and preserved!

Here is a screenshot of one of the stories from the WWII scrapbook. I liked how Ben told the story in his own words and included sound bites and pictures to add to the experience.

Sound Bites

While thinking of ways to make these digital scrapbooks unique the other day, I came up with a thought of being able to record your stories from your own words. Since the digital medium will be different for scrapbooking, why not have a different way to tell stories? This way, the stories will be personalized with your own voice telling the story, creating a new aspect to looking at photos. That way, when you show an album online to someone who is far away, you can still tell the stories your way by having these story bites.

One site that I found to be interested was "America's Life Stories." This site promoted some software that helps you write your autobiography. Looking at the site, it seems like it is a gift that you can give to someone in a corporate setting, and the cover looked kinda cheesy, but the product itself is actually pretty cool. You have a book of questions to prompt stories that will help you tell your legacy. This is geared towards older people who won't be around much longer. The site stresses the importance of having these stories on tape, since once the person is gone, the story will become second hand knowledge. The site also mentioned Alzheimer's Disease, which the mother of the creater of this product lost her life to. I found this part interesting because my scrapbooking consultant and her collegues often have fundraisers to complete scrapbooks for those with the disease. They create scrapbooks with borders on pages so that their family members can quickly add pictures. Those with Alzehimer's can look at these scrapbooks to remember their family. I think it is so important for people to leave behind a legacy of themselves before it is too late. Audio recordings are a great way to do it, and if they were saved on the computer with corresponding pictures, it would be a treasure that would last for many generations to come.

Scrapbooking Cluster

I found that doing the cluster for my project idea helped me to organize my thoughts a little bit. There are so many aspects to scrapbooking that you really don't realize until you map them out. Some of the parts are essential only to the actual hands on scrapbooking (such as the materials and space to scrapbook), while other parts represent the idea of scrapbooking (creativity, sharing stories). Most of the things I came up with refer to both the actual experience, as well as the digital one that I would like to create. For example, the digital scrapbooks will take time and creativity to make. The user will still be scrapbooking the same content, which will include the events. Sharing is one of the aspects that I plan on expanding on in a digital community. There should be a way for other scrapbookers to not only easily share stories, but to also share layouts and ideas as well. Some of the most important aspects of scrapbooking are to preserve and share memories, as well as to be creative and have fun. These are concepts that I will need to keep fresh in my mind as I work on this project, making sure to not lose sight of what scrapbooking is really meant for.

Scrapped, the Movie

While checking out the Creative Memories site (the company with which I buy most of my supplies from) I found that there is a movie out about scrapbooking called "Scrapped". I investigated further by checking out the website. It looks like it would be a pretty funny movie since it is about this guy that tries to enter the scrapbooking world, even though he does not fit the demographic once so ever. There is one promo video where he talks about how there should be stickers of things like hand cuffs for men, and sections at scrapbook retreats for people like him who don't have kids and who ride motorcycles. There are definetely no embellishments or areas like that in scrapbooking, but there should be to get more men involved!

The movie raises an interesting point that the majority of scrapbookers are women. How often do you see men sit down with their pictures, get out their scissors, and start chatting and snipping away at pictures? Never. Perhaps if scrapbooking was brought to the digital world, then it could become something that would be popular for men as well. I'm sure once they got into it and realized it is not a bunch of women gabbing about their babies, guys would love to create digital stories and timelines of their lives. They already post pictures online, and this would give them a chance to tell more in depth stories. It would be nice to break that barrier to create a diverse community. This would be a challenge though considering the gender gaps there are now with scrapbooking. I'll have to put the movie on my rental list and see what happens to the main character. I wonder if he does get into scrapbooking in the end, or if he just ran for the hills...

Newspaper Article

Today I dug out an article that I had saved from the paper back in April. It was a feature piece run in the weekend Bangor Daily that was called "History in the Making" by Patrick T. Reardon of the Chicago Tribune. I kept the article because I thought it was a really nice summary of scrapbooking and the values that it holds. The article discusses how scrapbooking is more that a hobby, it is an act of expression and creativity in a time where people often don't have as much creativity in the workplace or at home. Women (the majority of scrapbookers) get together often to work on their pages, chat, and create long lasting friendships. One scrapper, said that it is a way of touching someone 100 years from now who they will never meet and saying, "My life was worth something. I was here!" These pages are a record of our time on Earth, a way for us to create an expression of ourselves that will last after we are gone. Even though it is a great way for creative documentation, there are also negative aspects to scrapbooking. If looked at as historical documents, than scrapbooks often represent a very edited version of a life, without the bad times. It has been called "a condensed life review of what is worth remembering." However, a scrapbook is seen as "a way of bringing focus and unity to a typically scattershot modern existance," and it becomes a piece of someone's legacy.

I agree with most of the points raised in this article. I love the idea of knowing that after I am gone, future generatiosn can look at my scrapbooks and see what my life was all about, my friends, my passions, and my personality (both through the stories in my albums as well as in the way I tell them in the album). I would like to keep these aspects of scrapbooking alive in a digital world some how as well; a way for even more people to view your legacy, a way for the scrapbook to be around even longer, a way for others to link to your stories and create friendships just as in crops, and a way for people to still be creative and unique in the way they express themselves.

More Inspiration?!

It's great the different ideas you can get by talking to other people about your ideas. This morning I was in the gym and I saw my band director and stopped to talk. He asked me what I was going to do for a final project in my capstone class and I told him that I wanted to create some sort of an online scrapbooking community. He then said that that was a neat idea and that I should do that for all the pep band pictures from all the places we've been. Now the pep band site does have the pictures on it from the different trips we've taken, but they are all kinda blobbed together and don't really tell a story. When I go to the site I'm just overwhelmed and don't really know what's going on. While I don't know if making an online scrapbook of all those pep band pictures is really what I'm going for, it did get me thinking about ways that many people can contribute to these online scrapbooks. I did not go to the play off games last spring, but I saw many of the different albums people posted online and of course the pictures on the site. I wish there was a way though to bring them all together into one big happy chronological album with all the different stories. That way, everyone can contribute their pictures and it will be in one place for everyone else to view. Maybe then, the community could vote on which pictures to discard as unimportant so that there are not a billion pictures to get too overwhelming. Those that post the pictures could tell stories, link to other stories, and add their own parts to other people's stories. I think that kind of online album would be much more enjoyable to people who are interested in pep band. Collaborative online scrapbooking... could be an interesting project!

Sisterly Inspiration

While talking to my sister (my favorite scrapbooking partner in crime, although she thinks it's too dorky to admit it...) today about my capstone idea, she said it would be neat to be able to download and print the album or to buy it and have it sent out. I know that there are services like that out there like Yahoo! Photos, Apple albums from iPhoto, and Pixagogo. All of those sites/programs make beautiful albums from your pictures. That got me thinking about what separates scrapbooking from photo albums. Photo albums are nice to put all your pictures into and to write about and share with. Scrapbooks take those features and go above and beyond by allowing more room for creativity, stories, and personalization. When you print off an album, would it be as personal as if someone made one and gave it to you? Instead of focusing on being able to print off these albums, I think I want to create a more interactive environment that tells and links stories of lives. The actual experience of creating and giving a scrapbook is hard to replicate, so this online community should have a different feeling to it as well. Should I try to replicate the experience and product as much as I can or should I try to create a new experience that holds the same ideals as scrapbooking? These are tough decisions that I am glad I don't have to work out just yet, but it's nice to start thinking about them now :)

Scrapbook Finished!

I finally finished the scrapbook of my time in high school last night! That probably sounds horrible since I graduated high school a little over three years ago... But I've been so busy with college life and doing scrapbooks for other people. I decided to finally finish it by joining the "SOS: Summer of Scrapbooking Challenge." The goal was to complete 30 pages from July to August, and I did it! It is such an accomplishment to finally finish a scrapbook, especially a huge project like the one I just did. I joined the challenge through my scrapbooking consultant, who hosts crops and parties. I think one of my favorite parts of scrapbooking is getting together with my friends at her crops or ones of my own and just chatting and reminisicing while we are working on our albums. Everyone shares ideas, asks opinions, and has a great time! I wish there could be some way to bring that experience to my capstone, especially if I do my project on scrapbooking! It should prove to be a challenge, but I think I'm up for it!

I suppose I ought to show some pictures of my scrapbook so I took a couple so you can have an idea, but it is only a small part of the story ;)

Another Idea?

So last semester I worked with the Bangor based non-profit organization PICA (Peace through Interamerican Community Action) to help update their website. They work to promote fair trade, to put an end to sweatshops, and to create a peaceful relationship with other countries. I learned a lot by putting up all the information about what they do and found that I was moved by the ideals that they fight for. The work PICA is doing is an attempt to change the world, one step at a time. When I left PICA, not only was the information on the site updated, but there was a blog set up for the workers at PICA to write about current issues of concern. Users can view these posts right from the homepage and comment on them. This blog has become a tool to share information quickly and to create an interactive environment (although I'm not sure how popular the PICA blog has been since it was created, just that the director posts often!).

Just last week, I got an email from Radio Free Maine, who saw my work on the PICA site. They asked for my assistance creating an update for their website, which is pretty bland... I haven't got back to them yet, but it did get me thinking about ways that this site could become a capstone project. Right now, all you can do is look at pictures, bios, and previous talks that can be purchased by mail in order on cassette tapes. Talk about a need to be updated. Not only could this site be brought into current times, but I think there is an oppertunity for it to become a community of voices. It would be great if there were a way to create discussion on the site over previous broadcasts and about future topics. Perhaps there could be a way to share Radio Free Maine with other parts of the world. It could be something interesting to look into!

Creating Scrapbooks Online

If I did do a project on scrapbooking, I think I would focus more on the online community of sharing the books than on how the books would get into the digital world. I have a lot of ideas of how to create a community of scrapbookers to share ideas and stories, just like scrapbookers do now during crop sessions. One of the big problems is getting these unique albums online. There are plenty of album making software out now, but most of them are limited to posting pictures with comments, frames, and backgrounds. How can you maintain the creativity of actual scrapbooks in the digital world? One site I found actually does a really good job of replicating scrapbook creation. Scrapblog allows users to pick a background, rotate the pictures on the page, and to add stickers and text bubbles and titles. None of the albums I looked at really impressed me though because I knew that they were all created from templates on the site. When made by hand, every scrapbook is unique because of the way the paper is cut, the pictures are cut and positioned, etc. The possibilities are endless! Users can comment and tag the albums on the site, so that was a cool addition that would be useful. Otherwise, I had a hard time finding albums more than 5 pages long. I actually had a hard time finding many albums at all, which makes me wonder if there are few members or if everyone just makes their scrapbooks private. Oh well... it was still a good idea and I did find some of the albums cute :)

Here are a couple of screenshots from one album that I was impressed with (none of the others had text like this one to go with the pictures). I was kinda sketched out by the content though and hope it's just a joke...

Timelines

While searching online to see what hold the scrapbooking community had in the digital world, I came upon the site ourstory.com which I found to be an interesting site to share stories with the world. At this site you create a timeline of your life by writing stories to describe certain parts of your life. You can add pictures and video to describe the stories. This site had more to do with a written story, with a picture to describe it, while the scrapbooks I do focus on the pictures, with smaller stories to go with those.

I thought the whole timeline thing was a cool idea. One user did a timeline on Steve Irwin's life that I thought was kind of interesting. When you click on a picture, you go to the story that describes it (like the movie picture has a story about his movie). With online scrapbooks, I think it would be neat to be able to connect the scrapbooks through events in time. You could have a timeline of your life with the different scrapbooks that go with that time. Other people could connect their same scrapbooks of that time to the timeline, creating a whole web of events that you could view by time in history. It would be a neat way of getting a chronological look at someone's life.

Start of a Capstone Idea

Thinking about it, a capstone really should be a reflection of the creator's personality. This is it, your final project, the culmination of new media! You're spending a year working on this one project, shouldn't it be something you have an interest in? So what are some of my passions? I love to work out (lift, swim, and compete in triathlons), play music, and scrapbook, among other things. Out of those, I think that scrapbooking would be the most interesting to work on. It is unique and my scrapbooks are some of my most treasured items.

Many people think scrapbooking is something old people do to show off pictures of their grandkids. However, I've noticed that more and more younger people are getting into it. Scrapbooking is such a great way to show the stories about our lives. It is not just displaying pictures in an album, but telling a story of an event or life. While I have scrapbooks for myself that document my high school and college years, I also created scrapbooks for my boyfriend (our first year together) and my sister (pictures of us for her to take to her first year in college). The book for my boyfriend went through the year, telling our story in my own words month by month. My sister's scrapbook had pictures of us from when we were babies until recently. I grouped them by categories such as vacations, holidays, and other events so that we could compare how we've grown over time. They both love them and show them off as often as they can. I think it would be neat to create an online community of sorts to share these scrapbooks on a wider scale somehow. The hobby is extremely popular (just check out any of these sites: http://www.scrapbooking101.net/ http://www.addictedtoscrapbooking.com/ ) and I think it would be great to bring it into the digital world :)