IdeaBox for StoryBox

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The content inside the StoryBox is growing nicely- as of today I have:

audio recordings: 55
documents: 7
drawings: 6
graphics: 4
music: 13
photos: 195
videos: 65

Much if it is mine- I am adding something almost every day, and where-ever possible doing audio recordings of people, both friends and strangers I meet. Just yesterday, I was at Broadway Roastry in Saskatonn, and a guy came up and asked about the Laughing Dog Brewery t-shirt I was wearing- he said he had just started working in local brewery (oops I forgot which one) and he let me record a brief conversation about the craft. I have recently also recorded a drunk guy in a bar telling us a joke, the lady working at the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, ambient street noise in Saskatoon, a bit of an overhead conversation at a Starbucks…

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But I’m also getting some from places I visit; D’Arcy Norman and his son shared a bunch, as did Rick Schwier at his house, and I got a great video from Doug Symington. There are a few photos that I have no idea what or where they are.

I’m hoping to have some future opportunities to try out some activities in a meeting/workshop session. From the folks I have been meeting, some ideas are emerging. There’s room for more.

First of all I am again taking liberty when files come in to provide descriptive names like “monks-walking-down-street.jpg”, “rainy day.MOV”, “windy day lake.MOV” I am also organizing the content into sub directories, instead of having a huge single listing- the sub-directories are by media type:

audio recordings
documents
drawings
graphics
music
photos
videos

For the ones with audio files I have a script that generates a gallery page and em embedded media viewer; for the image file ones I am generating a page with image thumbmails.

Preliminary ideas include:

As simple as an open discussion on browsing the media- without any context, the image of say the biccyle ride leads to questions of where it is, who it is, what they are doing etc.
Create an activity like Five Card Stories, e.g. create a story from five images, or select say, 5 pieces of media that have a common theme.
Challenge people to do a remnix story based just on the content in the StoryBox- since you are on the local network and not the Big Interent, you cant be googling for media.
The public anonymous chat on the storybox has some potential- maybe I could chat in a URL to a piece of media (the local address is something like http://piratebox.local/_photos/beer%20and%20abandoned%20drycleaning.jpg — there could be chat based discussion or group storywriting from the prompts? Or maybe O could run a script that inserts a local URL for a random piece of media.
Scott Leslie suggested something that would turn the audio on the box into a local stream- I could see one that gets the names of all audio files in the directory, shuffles the order, and generates a dynamic playlist URL
Scott and I also discussed some wacky ideas for trying to use a geographic location algorithm to connect media.

This are all rough; I am really eager for more conversation to spawn ideas.

Oh, and there is always room on the box for more stickers. D’Arcy Norman’s family helped cover the box, and I can see layering it with more, so the photos capture an ephemeral view. Two stickers are off limits for covering up- the one for the piratebox logo and the ds106radio one

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