Syllabus
Curriculum for the Neighborhood Narratives Course
New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration
School of Communications and Theatre, Temple University
Teachers: Hana Iverson + Steve Bull, Philadelphia; Nick West - London
Participants: Juniors and seniors at the Philadelphia and London campuses
Goal:
The goal of the Neighborhood Narratives course is to introduce students to the concept of locative media by researching and creating a set of connected annotations about a specific neighborhood of the city. Students will use methods of cultural and visual anthropology to document facets of these neighborhoods with text, pictures and recordings. These place-based annotations will be connected and archived using a variety of digital technologies (primarily the web and mobile telephones). No prior technological expertise is required, as the predominant focus will be on creating and understanding different viewpoints about the city.
Methods:
Students will view examples of current “best practices” in locative media, and create group projects that will add to a Temple map archive of urban narratives. Students will create their own narratives from sets of “connected annotations” that define a path through the city. These connected narratives can include many non-traditional narrative styles (see below) because of their grounding in the larger geographic structure of the city. Moreover, the system of urban annotation that students will be contributing to differs from most locative media projects – and thus more closely tracks the everyday life of the city – in its emphasis on producing narratives rather than a series of disconnected data points. Throughout the process of creating these annotations, students will be encouraged to combine the skills of Benjamin's storyteller (the grounded expert with detailed everyday knowledge) with Baudelaire's flâneur (the mobile observer of the city with a broad overview).
During the class, students will investigate the following methods of creating connected annotations of the city. Different formats and experimentation will be encouraged; past student mapping projects have included sound maps, “wearable” maps linking articles of clothing to everyday events, and “action” maps linking places to physical artifacts.
Community histories – creating a multi-layered document of the ethnographic history of a neighborhood through techniques of interviewing and historical research. (Example: HYPERLINK "http://www.viewfromthebalcony.org" http://www.viewfromthebalcony.org )
(This approach is especially appropriate for students that are residents of the city being studied, and who already have some knowledge of its neighborhood structure.)
Urban prospecting -- viewing a small sector of a neighborhood in exacting archaeological detail to create an inductive, bottom-up view of the city. (Example: HYPERLINK "http://www.oneblockradius.org/obr.html" http://www.oneblockradius.org/obr.html )
(This approach is accommodating towards students who might be visiting an international city for the first time, as it allows them to hone their powers of observations in a structured context.)
Psychogeography – stretching traditional ways of creating viewpoints of the city by strictly following algorithmic or subject-specific approaches, as outlined in the works of Situationists and other literary theorists. (Example: HYPERLINK "http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/" http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/ )
Street Games – developing playful interactive activities that overlay features of the city with the fictional narrative of a game.
(Example: http://pacmanhattan.com; http://pacmanhattan.com )
(These last two approaches to creating annotations can be useful for both native residents and visitors. They can help construct alternatives to the frameworks of “seeing” that both groups bring to the city.)
Exercises:
Introductory directed walking tours will give the students an experience of actually looking at a cityscape, rather then simply passing through on the way to somewhere else. These tours will combine examples of the practices described above, as well as “freestyle” tours to encourage students to develop their own viewpoints.
Students will write “self-created” narratives (stories and impressions about the city) in a photoblog to practice articulating their experience of traveling about a city.
Exercises will be conducted to familiarize students with the techniques necessary to create each of the types of connected annotations being created in the class.
Community histories:
Analysis of diaries, interviews, census reports, city maps, newspaper accounts, graphs, cartoons, autobiographies, government documents and other sources
Basic interview methods and ethics will be reviewed: oral history, documentary film and photography, the snapshot aesthetic, etc.
Potential interview subjects will be identified and first stage interviews will be initiated where appropriate.
Urban prospecting:
Review of the methods of mining “place” – how we view place and people (the notion of landscape and the concept of portraiture), how we gather artifacts.
Psychogeography:
Students will practice creating their own algorithms or single-subject foci toward the city, and will enact the scripts developed by other students in their group.
Street Games
Student groups will collaboratively design simple games that incorporate both visible and invisible features of the city.
Students will document their exercise on the group annotation map, and present their results to the class.
Video conferencing between the Temple International and Philadelphia campuses will allow the students to compare methods and results. Guest speakers will address students and receive questions from all locations.
Outcome:
1) Familiarization with highlights of the literature and case studies of different ways of looking at the city and analyzing the urban landscape.
2) Integration of this literature into student exercises.
3) Project planning and group collaboration, incorporating feedback from other groups both locally and internationally.
4) Documentation and permanent archiving of annotated responses from all groups in the program. The end result will be a group project of international scope.
Technology requirements:
Each student will be provided with a detailed map of the targeted neighborhoods.
Each group will need access to a mobile phone and digital camera for recording annotations in the field. They will also need access to a computer with internet access, both to conduct research and to upload their documentations to the mapping software for the class.
Suggested Reading:
Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin -- the concept of the flaneur in the city
Guy Debord and the Situationists -- the concept of the derive, or drift, through the city that opens up new perspectives.
Michel de Certeau -- the spatial practices of everyday life.
Henri Lefebvre -- the production of space, again through spatial practices.
Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (eds) Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?
Blackwell Publishers, 2000.
Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture
MIT Press, 2000
William J. Mitchell, Me + +: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
MIT Press, 2003
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked
Plume Publishers, 2002
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing, MIT Press 2004
