Abstract
Neighborhood Narratives is an introductory locative media course that opens up situated storytelling - stories tied closely to the environment at hand that bring neighborhoods to life. By engaging with the neighborhood as social practice, the work extends beyond the traditional classroom, creating an interdisciplinary curriculum that links the Philadelphia main campus of Temple University with its international campuses in London, Tokyo and Rome.

Key Words
Neighborhood Narratives, Temple, Storytelling, Locative, Mobile, International

Participants
Juniors and seniors from the School of Communications and Theater, Temple University

Description
Neighborhood Narratives is an introductory locative media course that introduces students to the concept of situated storytelling - stories that are tied closely to the environment at hand, which can bring neighborhoods to life. The course goal is to create a set of connected annotations about a specific city neighborhood. Students use methods of cultural and visual anthropology to document facets of these neighborhoods with text, pictures and recordings. These place-based annotations are connected and archived, using a variety of digital technologies - primarily the web and mobile telephones. The class tracks the parallel paths between how they look at what is around them, and how mobile media extends their ability to participate and engage with place and location. The predominant focus is on creating and understanding different viewpoints about the city.

Neighborhood Narratives links the Philadelphia main campus of Temple University with its international campuses in London, Tokyo and Rome. Each campus has a Neighborhood Narratives class that communicates with each other and compares methods and results. Students share their experiences of investigating the urban environment they live in, along with real and virtual understanding of places they are discovering for the first time.

The final outcome is a web-based map of archived narratives that includes many non-traditional narrative styles such as community histories, urban prospecting catalogs and games, linked by a grounding in the larger geographic structure of the city.

Neighborhood Narratives specifically uses the family and the local neighborhood as a source of knowledge with practices that yield comprehension about particular social "places". Everyday knowledge is constructed from multiple levels of society -- from language, family history, professional ideologies, the exploration of historic buildings, street art, and finally to over-arching worldviews. By engaging with all these levels of the neighborhood as social practice, the work extends beyond the traditional classroom, creating an interdisciplinary mix that includes ethnography, geography, an integration of the arts and new media studies.

Class Assignment

Psycho-geography
Part 1: The class is divided into four groups. Each group assumes the identity of someone they would encounter in the area around the Temple University Center City campus. They are constrained to an eight block radius. Sample identities chosen are: a tourist, a sanitation worker, a street vendor, and a police officer. These choices break down further to gender, age and ethnicity. Each group of students go into the designated area to document or collect artifacts that the assumed person might need or encounter during the course of one day. These artifacts could include objects, detritus or photographs. After the field trip, two groups are paired with each other to make a paper collage of their artifacts on a large 6 foot by 3 foot piece of paper, one identity on one side of the paper, the other identity on the other side. These large collages are then folded into 1’ squares and cut open to become “collage books”. In the book on opposite pages, the artifacts of one group’s imagined person’s identity collides in a random way with the identity of another and illustrates in a tangible way, the tensions in the topology of an urban landscape. The density and collision of city life is revealed in the random intersection of objects and images.

Part 2: Each group then has to find the “real” person to re-visit their vision of the “imagined” person and interview them with a video camera. The result produces interviews where the distance between what was imagined and who the actual person is becomes vividly illustrated.

Part 3: The students are shown how to archive the interviews and photo documentation of the books into small segments, link the segments to each other and annotate the segments to a neighborhood map. Small clips of audio with still pictures and text are reformatted for downloading locatively to the cell phone. In this way, the city is repopulated by the audio landscape of the people we pass by as we walk, while the web interface extends the neighborhood into a mirrored on-line community.

Biographies
STEVE BULL, formerly with Interval Research, Steve Bull founded Cutlass [ctlss.com], a company that specializes in mobile locative media with applications running on O2, Verizon Wireless, TELUS Mobility, and Orange. Fall 2005 he spoke on pervasive gaming at the Institute For The Future and Digital Storytelling Festival in California, and at CUNY. Recent recipient of a N. Y. State Council for the Arts grant for Cellphonia: In The News, a karaoke cell phone opera, Bull is also collaborating on Phone Me, an interactive locative cell phone history/mystery set on the Lower East Side. The New York Historical Society's Slavery in New York exhibit will feature his cell phone tour of its downtown locations. He's taught in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U, Parsons, and currently at Temple University
[http://www.templenmic.com/courses.html]

HANA IVERSON is a new media artist, whose work crosses between digital, video and sound media. She currently is Director of the New Media Interdisciplinary Concentration at Temple University. Her work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography, Dorfman Projects, Mary Anthony Gallery, Pulse Art, Art in General, and 494 Gallery in New York; the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; and in Canada. Her long-term installation and multimedia project, View from the Balcony, was on view at New York’s Eldridge Street Synagogue from 2000-03. She has received support for her work from the Covenant Foundation, TU Vice Provosts Research Initiative, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and Tisch School of the Arts. Ms. Iverson holds a Masters Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. http://www.temple.edu/nmic

NICK WEST is an information architect and researcher with Proboscis, a London-based creative studio. He has 15 years’ experience in designing experimental prototypes for new media research, including work with Apple Computer, Paramount Pictures, the National Fine Arts Museum in Rio de Janeiro, and New York University. He holds a BA in Political and Economic Systems from Yale University, a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University and is currently working on a PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College.

Singaporean NISAR KESHVANI is a consultant, Internet journalist, web developer, educator and new media specialist. In the last decade, he has worked across five continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and Australia/Oceania). He is editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (http://LEA.mit.edu) and International Co-Editor of fineArt forum (http://www.fineartforum.org) - one of the Internet's longest runing arts publication. He has worked for various international magazines and newspapers since 1993. Keshvani has extensive experience developing and maintaining websites and was an online journalism educator at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, examining internationalization issues and changing work practices in the online newsroom. He was also Digital Media Lecturer and module leader for Web Design Applications with Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of Film & Media Studies in Singapore. In 2003 - 2004, Keshvani was on consultancy with the Aga Khan Development Network (a group of international development agencies working in health, education, culture and rural and economic development, primarily in Asia and Africa).