StoryBank: Sharing stories across digital divides

该项目的目的是使发展中国家的乡村社区能够轻松地创建和共享视听信息。这些信息可能非常实用；含有健康或农业建议、当地产品广告或学校课程练习的。或者它可能更个人化；包含即将到来的活动的邀请，报道当地新闻，或请求对特定问题的帮助。照相电话和数字图书馆软件将用于支持以短音像故事的形式捕捉和分享这些信息。我们用story这个词指的是用静止或动态图像说明的口头报告。通过关注这类视听信息，我们希望给那些不能读写、不能使用互联网记录和获取文本信息的人更大的发言权和作用。通过建立存储库，我们将允许不同的人临时共享同一部带摄像头的手机、电视或其他屏幕设备，反复存储和访问这些信息。通过将这个资源库连接到互联网，我们也将允许本地环境之外的人看到作者是如何生活的。这可能有助于相距遥远的工程师和设计师了解来自不同文化背景的人们的需求，并为他们创造更合适的产品和解决方案。通过这种方式，我们的目标是在本地层面重新定义互联网内容，使其更多地以电视而不是pc为中心，并在本地和全球范围内进行测试。本课题主要有三个研究问题：1.研究方向：什么样的故事和信息对本地和专业用户有用？我们如何以一种易于理解和引人注目的方式呈现、组织和传递信息？信息将如何在物理上被创建和表示？我们开发和测试图书馆系统的方法将主要是为印度的一个当地社区提供服务。这将在项目早期确定，当地居民和已经在那里工作的开发组织将参与和参与。第二个用户组将是英国的新技术工程师和设计师，他们将面临使用图书馆信息为这个社区设计解决方案的挑战。

The aim of the project is to allow village communities in the developing world to create and share audiovisual information easily. This information could be very practical; containing health or agricultural advice, advertisements for local products, or exercises for a school lesson. Or it could be more personal; containing invitations to forthcoming events, reporting local news, or requesting help with a particular issue. Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focussing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information. By setting up a repository, we will allow such information to be stored and accessed repeatedly by different people who may share the same cameraphone, television or other screen-based device on a temporary basis. By connecting this repository to the internet we will also allow people outside the local context to see how the authors live. This could be useful for distant engineers and designers to understand the needs of people from a different culture, and create more appropriate products and solutions for them. In this way we aim to re-conceptualise internet content at a local level, making it more TV than PC-centric, and to test this out across local and global divides.There are three main research questions for the project:1. What kind of stories and information are useful for local and professional users?2. How can we present, organise and deliver the information in an accessible and compelling way?3. How will the information be physically created and represented?Our approach to developing and testing the library system will be to build it primarily for use by one local community in India. This will be identified early in the project, with the participation and involvement of local people and developer organisations already working there. A secondary user group will be new technology engineers and designers in the UK, who will be challenged to design solutions for this community using information in the library.