alex de carvalho

This is a live post from a SXSW panel about Sto­ryCorps, March 14th , 2010

	Suneel Gupta Kahani Movement
	Dr San­jay Gupta Kahani Movement

“Story”: a nar­ra­tion of the events in the life of a per­son or the exis­tence of a thing.

Saneel and San­jay are broth­ers. The panel starts off with a clip show­ing an fam­ily in India and the Kahani Move­ment: “Some sto­ries are never told … because no one asks.”

Sto­ries have a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end. The ingre­di­ents of a story include a cen­tral char­ac­ter or a hero and this project itself has a hero. StoryCorp’s hero is Louis “Studs” Terkel, the “pre­mier chron­i­cler of Amer­i­can life,” accord­ing to John Stew­art. Ordi­nary peo­ple have extra­or­di­nary sto­ries to tell. More impor­tantly, if you don’t cap­ture these sto­ries, there is a time limit and the sto­ries dis­ap­pear. The Gup­tas are tak­ing this mis­sion to the web. The word Kahani means story in Indian. Every com­mu­nity has sto­ries worth pre­serv­ing.

If tech­nol­ogy is a cat­alytic, what would Studs do?

1. Chron­i­cle the story by shift­ing the con­ver­sa­tion from the stu­dio to the liv­ing room
2. Expand from audio con­ver­sa­tions to film, pho­tos, and writings
3. Every­one is a Sto­ry­teller, so they are cre­at­ing a net­work of sto­ry­tellers who are col­lab­o­rat­ing, con­nect­ing, and shar­ing each oth­ers’ sto­ries — to tell one com­mon story
4. We’ve made it approach­able — give clips a sense of opti­mism and hope. Steven Spiel­berg is advis­ing Kahani Move­ment with the expe­ri­ence he gar­nered from his work with the Shoah project, where he cap­tured many sto­ries before they expired.
5. We’ve made it focused. The focus is Indian Immi­gra­tion to the United States from the 1960’s to the 1970’s. Cre­at­ing a com­mu­nity around a cen­tral topic

So, where is this project headed?

As hap­pens with any pop­u­la­tion of peo­ple, there’s a ten­dency to paint that peo­ple with one broad brush stroke. A project like this adds het­ero­gene­ity to a pop­u­la­tion. Things that sur­prise are already start­ing to emerge. For exam­ple, because the immi­grants were not flee­ing per­se­cu­tion or pros­e­cu­tion, there was no gal­va­niz­ing force to tie the peo­ple together. So what helped cre­ated the community?

Tech­nol­ogy allows for deeper engage­ment for each member.

Remix. Every­thing is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. A lot of deriv­a­tive works are being posted and shared on the site.

Studs passed away in 2008, so the Gup­tas have been doing a lot of home­work to under­stand what he was think­ing and what was dri­ving him. “Peo­ple are ready to say ‘Yes, we are part of a world’.” This could lead to broad­en­ing out Kahani, to cre­ate more Kahani’s, by archiv­ing and spin­ning out other ini­tia­tives. There could be a long tail of Kahani Move­ments. Our call to action to you today is start, and start soon, because time is lim­ited.

Questions:

What about con­tro­ver­sial or sen­si­tive sto­ries, like about abortion?

The Kahani Move­ment or Sto­ryCorps are great oppor­tu­ni­ties to share inti­mate and dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions by record­ing con­ver­sa­tions within fam­i­lies, as fam­ily mem­bers inter­view each other.

What incen­tives are there for peo­ple to be involved in online com­mu­ni­ties if they don’t live online?

What Kahani is try­ing to achieve is online but much of it hap­pens offline, around fam­ily liv­ing room tables. Some of the gam­ing pan­els at SXSW are inter­est­ing, because some of the moti­va­tional aspects around gam­ing could be applied.

Are the guide­lines for sto­ry­telling, par­tic­u­larly around the ques­tions to ask and also about how to use tech­nol­ogy to accu­mu­late stories?

Skype has been a good tool. One of the most pow­er­ful tools is to pull out a pic­ture and ask: “tell me about this photo.“

How does the social net­work work?

It starts with the pro­file and with the visual and tex­tual ele­ments you are shar­ing with oth­ers. That’s when the con­nec­tions start to hap­pen between peo­ple. Col­lab­o­ra­tion ensues from con­nec­tions, which are based on shared interests.

Is there a struc­ture or best prac­tices about how to cap­ture an entire lifes­pan? What about tech­ni­cal best prac­tices? For exam­ple, my par­ents are not com­fort­able in front of a cam­era, so how do I cap­ture their stories?

The top pri­or­ity is the story, not the tech­nol­ogy. As far as best prac­tices, it traces back to you and your own com­fort. Ulti­mately, we are com­prised of moments of life, so let’s go back and explore thor­oughly the moments that mattered.

Note to self: An impor­tant aspect is the cre­ation of social cap­i­tal by build­ing cred­i­bil­ity through mutual ver­i­fi­ca­tion of stories.