Praise for The Story of the Stuff
About two weeks ago we questioned the necessary criteria for evaluating digital humanities projects. Now it is time to put it in action. The project I choose for this review is titled The Story of The Stuff. This project tracks the disposition of the condolence items sent to Newtown, Connecticut in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Story of the Stuff explores the phenomenon of spontaneous memorials and examining the larger phenomenon of public responses to tragedy. The project is cross listed with multiple disciplines including library and information science, interactive documentary, cinema and new Media studies, and public history. The research is headed by Ashley Maynor a Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, however the the project is an ongoing work in progress with open calls for peer review on DHcommons. For those who do not know the DH Commons is an online hub space that promotes digital humanities projects to connect other digital humanist with similar research interest who would like to collaborate or evaluate on other scholars projects. The DH Commons is very much in spirit with the learning values of the digital humanities- exploring digital methodology to proliferate open source information and collaborative learning. So without further adieu
Design and Functionality The home page of the project is sleek yet bold. The project title greets the viewer/ participant on the home page in bold large white print with an image in the background presumably a rendition of the unofficial memorial site for Sandy Hook victims. There is a side bar with a grey scale of circles to inform you that to navigate the page you must scroll down. When you hover upon each circle it will tell you where you are in the narrative. You do have access to click on any part of the narrative so you can experience the project in a non-linear way. However I choose to go through it in traditional order. The next page which opens up with telling a synopsis of the Sandy Hook shooting. The passage also attempts to situate the reader in the project’s subject matter from a multiple perspectives analysis on the aftermath of Sandy Hook no matter if you were in direct or in indirect relation to the event. Again this page carries over the shrine replica as the backdrop against a white screen. scrolling down a littler further but on the same page the first chapter in video format is available to click on. It is a short documentary on the moments after the shooting. The following page progresses the project narrative explaining how Newton as a small town did not have emergency plans for the amount of items ship from across the nation in solidarity and condolences to the families involved. The management of the material fell on the local community.
The extent of the interactive nature of the project is as the viewer/ participant you get to choose where you start your narrative, which videos, audio clips, literature, photos you choose to watch or skip over or not. There are hyper links to all the works and sites that have influenced the project or pertinent to the project’s research. I find this much in line with digital humanities seriousness about information distribution.
we learn of Chris Kelsey who is normally the town’s tax assessor but in the aftermath volunteered to manage the town’s incoming donations. And of Yolie Moreno who focus on the goodwill expressed in the aftermath and built a platform to share the empathy that Newton received. The photos organized in traditional exhibit style compliments the video, 1st person narrative text, and minimalist background. I am a fan of this digital forward multimedia documentary! It is design savvy, digitally complex, emotionally loaded, academically rigorous.
Project Goals The primary research goal I read as tracing what happened to the condolence items in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. From the documentary we know that a local archive was built. A large portion of the items were toys and were given away to families who loss children in the shooting but wanted to provide Christmas presents to their other children. Second create a new multimedia and digitally based documentary genre. I believe both were successfully achieved.
Methodology
Ashley Maynor discloses that she herself was a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting and when Sandy Hook happened she felt compelled to do a documentary. After visiting the Condolence Archive Virginia Tech created after the shooting Maynor grew curious about the items sent to Sandy Hook. She contacted those in charge of the items through email and later visited. The project is part ethnography, web design, digital history and film studies. I am impressed with the digital sophistication and design of the project. The interface, eclectic array of multimedia embedded into the digital documentary and the ability to hyperlink to outside resources within the already rich project narrative is well balanced. Beyond what must be a complex web design to maintain the project can also be read as a digital archive within itself in virtue of digitizing some of the items in Virginia Tech’s Condolence Archive and in Sandy Hook. Although this project is unlike the eprevious projects explored in class that used topic modeling, or network analysis I feel this project is digital in nature and it is not the methodology alone that renders it a digital humanities project.