MediaNOLA

In an effort to make cultural production history accessible to the masses, we’ve posted some curricular resources for use, including:

• how to do archival research
• how to write and edit a history wiki
• tips for good community interviewing and documentary.

Check them out at: http://medianola.tulane.edu

There, you can find over 50 new sites as well, including posts related to film and music production histories.

Ten stakeholders attended a planning meeting for MediaNOLA. Ranging from archivists to new media and legal experts, from academia to community nonprofits, the breadth of the interests in MediaNOLA matched the conversation of where our web portal should go. Participants suggested many new stakeholders. While all agreed the possibilities are vast, some concrete recommendations can be posted here:

1. The connection between archives and community participation is essential to the project; it may take multiple phases to match classes with community partners who have digital materials.
2. It is important to draw first on materials already digitized or in the process of being digitized for open access. 
3. It would be useful to allow everyone to register and post their own information (data, images, audio, video) to the map without censorship. Wikis could be more restricted, depending on classes and community negotiations, but links to outside content can be encouraged.
4. All tools should be developed with open-source tools and kept open-source. 
5. Tools should be shared with high school programs that have relevant content and not just universities.
6. Professors or other content providers could use incentives to adapt MediaNOLA into their courses.  
7. As examples of the uses of MedaNOLA it may make sense to have themes for the to flesh out parts of the database that are underutilized.

This was the first of three meetings to discuss how to envision MediaNOLA through a pilot program that serves educators and the public through resources, knowledge, and tools for telling cultural history.

It looks like the need for a digital database that collects the histories and realities of local cultural production is strong. Over the past week, there have been requests from representatives working with several organizations and individuals interested in preserving histories of cultural production past and present. They include:

• the United Methodist Church
• Guardians of the Flame
• the Oretha Castle Haley Corridor
• Puentes

If you or someone you know has a cultural history to tell, please contact MediaNOLA (vmayer@tulane.edu). It’s important to coordinate your materials for recording, digitization, and uploading into the database.

MediaNOLA is one of 12 projects featured at the Institute for Digital Humanities Workshop: http://idhdu.com/projects/

Tulane Instructional Learning Center Lead Instructional Technologist Mike Griffith is helping MediaNOLA update its communications network with a Twitter account and this blog!

Working through NOVAC, MediaNOLA has commissioned instructional materials for the creation and editing of cultural memories and oral histories. These materials will be posted via NOVAC and MediaNOLA’s websites.  For MediaNOLA, the guides with assist in the effort to help citizens, educators, and students record memories of cultural productions and goods, their locations and producers for wikis.  The materials, which will include video  and audio guides, will be available for NOVAC’s citizen journalism workshop, tentatively scheduled for Sept. 28, 2011.

Last week, MediaNOLA, The Southeast Media Preservation Alliance, and NOVAC hosted a workshop for digital archiving video collections in the city.   Long-time media preservationist and educator Mona Jimenez (Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU) led the workshop. MediaNOLA will be a collaborator to support NEH grants to support digitization and hopes to conduct a stakeholder survey to assist in the grantwriting process. The project also found potential new stakeholders in thinking about how MediaNOLA can best serve the community.  Possible collaborations include:

• links to articles for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities KNOWLA project;
• bibliographies on media production through Michael J Mizell-Nelson’s nolaresearch.org project;
  
• research on and links to newly restored and digitized videos available in part through The Southeast Media Preservation Alliance.

As a portal for historical, geographical, and category-based research, MediaNOLA will partner with the recently-launched New Orleans Center for the Gulf South Humanities Center and its Music Rising project. MediaNOLA can be a service partner option both for undergraduate majors searching for independent study research on the region and for faculty looking to make their courses into service learning experiences. Music Rising senior program manager Rosalind Hinton plans to include MediaNOLA into their web design process. 

Welcome to the MediaNOLA blog, a space for documenting the next stages of MediaNOLA. Over the next few months, I will be posting news, developments and transformations in the portal for New Orleans cultural production histories. Given the number of stakeholders and interested parties, this seems like the best forum for providing updates on our network.

To recap the past stages of MediaNOLA,

• 2006: MediaNOLA is imagined as a way to encourage research and preservation of local cultural history in the wake of widespread archival loss and resident exile post-Hurrican Katrina.
• 2007: First development team conceptualizes MediaNOLA as a category and time-sensitive database connected to a GIS map and a series of wikis.
• 2008: Launch of MediaNOLA 1.0. Wikis are collaboratively written by Tulane students working in local library archives. Librarians in special collections become partners to the project.
• 2009: More than 100 histories are found through MediaNOLA. Pilot of oral history project generates audio clips of memories of sites described on wikis. Initial contact made with Intellectual Property Law Clinic to discuss copyright issues related to images.
• 2010: Stakeholder survey of local libraries and nonprofit organizations reveals need for digitization and cultural memory projects.  Survey leads to pilot projects at Nadine Vorhoff Library, Louisiana Special Collections, and Amistad Library in spring 2011. MediaNOLA adds a response page for corrections and additions to the data.
• 2011: MediaNOLA becomes an official service partner through the Center for Public Service. Project receives funding via the NEH initiatives for the digital humanities.

The current project was written with four major sets of stakeholders in mind:

• Preservationists and Archivists interested in cultural production;
• Educators interested in teaching cultural production and history;
• Nonprofits and Community Organizations interested in cultural memory and preservation;
• Local Citizens interested in researching culture as it has been lived and made in New Orleans and the Gulf South.

This blog welcomes input from these groups and others as we develop MediaNOLA 2.0!