Project title: 'The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather'

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

SUMMARYThe Snows of Yesteryear: Narrating Extreme Weather is gathering evidence of the impact of extreme weather in order to document and develop awareness of, and collect a vocabulary for, the ways in which people describe their experiences of climate change by gathering archival data, and personal recollections, of the impact of extreme weather events. The data collected via the project will contribute to a lager piece of work to be developed with climate scientists (especially the Met Office ACRE initiative) who are gathering evidence in order to map the way that extreme weather events are documented and described over time. The project will also bring these these materials together digitally, and communicate them to a wider audience via a performance piece developed and realized by Eddie Ladd. The primary focus for outreach and communication by the Snows of Yesteryear project is currently a blog based at the national Library of Wales. With additional resourcing, the project team will expand the integration of digital technologies, and make them central to the remainder of the project in order to capture and archive sources as well as disseminate the outputs of the project. Enhanced website functionality and capacity will be central to the communication of archival reconstruction, textual analysis, oral histories, creative visualisations, story-telling and performance by the project research team. A sophisticated project website will provide the nexus for this material. The additional website functionality to support this will be developed by the Information Technology and Digital Collections staff of the National Library of Wales, and hosted on the Library's high-availability platforms. The web-site will be predicated on an open-source content management system. This will integrate tools for the capture and storage of audio and video in order to gather a record of practice-led outputs, and will also support the uploading of experiences of extreme events in the form of textual, audio and video content. The web-site will become a key node of knowledge dissemination for the project. And, archived by the National Library, it will be sustained as a publically available resource with lasting public impact, embedded in the Library's engagement and outreach activities. In order to enhance the distributed elements of the project, and to create additional project outputs that will add value to this work, the project team have developed some revisions to the project plan that require additional funding of £19,997.59. These will be carried out throughout the extended project, now finishing May 1st, 2013. These modifications are described in detail in the narrative below 1. Enhancements to the project website. - Technical development work will enhance the website by integration audio and video capture tools. This will allow the 'digital storytelling" capacity of the website to be enhanced. - This multimedia enhancement will be augmented by the addition of additional server capacity for the website, to enable archiving of multimedia project outputs created by the project (including the final performance) and project team (including work by Mike Pearson, including the 2008 "Winter" project. - Embedding of the project website as a project maintained by the National Library of Wales Public Services department, to encourage its continued use as a digital storytelling platform around extreme weather. This will enhance all project outputs (academic and non-academic) and increase dissemination routes through the Library's rich programme of community engagement. 2. Additional project workshopsTwo workshops will be organized by the project. These will be additional knowledge exchange activities, extending partnership activities with non-HE collaborators. In order to maximize their effectiveness, they will be led and facilitated by Roger Owen, Department of Film, Media and Television, Aberystwyth University- A summative capture of the performance development, documenting the decision making and development of the work to ensure its replicability. This will also provide a method for capturing the process of engagement that has enabled creative interpretation of archival source materials and community-based narrative content. - A community engagement activity, bridging the gap between community, weather and the performance, and expanding the community that is reached by the project to date and ensuring wider impact.