StoryBank: Mobile Digital Storytelling in a ... - Semantic Scholar

CHI 2009 ~ Mobile Applications for the Developing World

April 8th, 2009 ~ Boston, MA, USA

StoryBank: Mobile Digital Storytelling in a Development Context David M. Frohlich, Dorothy Rachovides, Kiriaki Riga Digital World Research Centre Faculty of Arts & Human Sciences University of Surrey Guildford GU2 7XH, UK [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Ramnath Bhat, Maxine Frank VOICES 165, 1st floor, 9th cross, 1st stage Indiranagar Bangalore, India [email protected] [email protected]

Eran Edirisinghe, Dhammike Wickramanayaka Department of Computer Science FJ.05 Garendon Wing, Holywell Park Loughborough University Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK [email protected] [email protected]

Matt Jones & Will Harwood Future Interaction Technology Lab Swansea University Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a crosssection of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed. Author Keywords

Mobile, storytelling, development, audiovisual, audiophoto, digital library, India, photography, information. ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.0 Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI) BACKGROUND

In discussing the future of HCI and the challenges facing the field, a number of researchers have emphasized the need to reconsider core human values and their support in a Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04...$5.00.

world beset by serious political, economic and ecological, problems [8]. This involves applying technology innovation to a broader range of social issues than previously considered, within a more responsible and global context [see also 23]. At the same time, there has been a growth of HCI research into technology use and requirements in the developing world, driven to some extent by product saturation in developed markets. This is reflected by two recent CHI workshops on User-Centred Design/HCI for International Development and the establishment of an IFIP working group on Interaction Design and International Development. In this paper we report the results of a project in this area, addressing the needs of a rural community in south India. The project was funded by a UK initiative designed to stimulate interdisciplinary research on this topic, international partnerships and a new community of practice (see acknowledgements). The aim of the paper is to discuss the design of a novel information sharing system and its trial use, but also to draw out the lessons for research of this kind and the role of an HCI perspective within it. In particular, we point to a new cutting edge for HCI research, which involves the design of culturally-sensitive adaptations of emerging technology in new social and technical contexts. APPROACH

Although the internet revolution continues apace in the developed world, many poor communities elsewhere are untouched by the benefits of ubiquitous information access and communication. Even where infrastructure and access are provided, local language content is often lacking, together with the ability to read and write it. For

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communities with low levels of literacy, such as those in rural India, textual information sharing is simply not appropriate. Community media initiatives address this problem and begin to provide ways for communities to make and distribute audio-visual content in local languages that are accessible to all. Community radio has been particularly effective in allowing communities to develop and share useful information on a regular basis [e.g. 6]. This approach has been found to alleviate poverty, often indirectly through empowerment of communities to take local development initiatives themselves [21]. Examples of community television broadcasting can also be found, but this requires more infrastructure and a higher degree of training and skill in content creation [24]. Recent developments in internet technology align better with these local approaches to sharing information in pictures and sound. A new generation of Web 2.0 tools such as weblogs, wikis, podcasts and social networking sites, support new forms of multi-media creation and sharing. A distinguishing feature of these tools is that they turn users from passive consumers to active producers of information, aka ‘user-generated content’ [16]. In parallel to this trend there has been an extension and maturing of standards for media encoding, wireless networking and 3G telecommunications. This has enabled more pervasive media sharing activities across handheld and distributed platforms, including the mobile phone. The possibility of sharing multimedia content over a mobile phone also fits well with the lack of wired infrastructure in developing countries, the rapid uptake of mobiles in this context, and early indications of their value for bridging the digital divide [4]. Combining these developments in mobile and web technology for the emerging markets, would allow what might be called community-generated media (CGM) to be produced on a much bigger scale and shared at minimal cost over local wireless networks. If this were done in audiovisual form rather than in text, media items could be created and shared by those who cannot read and write and are naturally more reliant on verbal communication. This led directly to the idea for a story-based system in which audiovisual stories could be created on a cameraphone and uploaded to a community repository or ‘StoryBank’ for sharing in different ways. We use the word story here in a journalistic sense to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. The application of such a system in a rural Indian context could increase the accessibility and authorship of digital information, by building on existing community media initiatives and ageold practices of oral and visual storytelling. With no more than this concept in mind, we set about looking for a suitable development partner and rural community with which to explore its shape, feasibility and application. At the outset of the work we had no idea what


the architecture of the system should be nor its prime purpose, because that would depend on the infrastructure available and the activities of the local population. We knew the system should have a non-textual interface to be accessible to non-literature users, but were not sure how hard that would be to design or whether it could be made easy enough to use without extensive training. Finally we could not anticipate the form the stories themselves might take, what information they would be used to express, or how they might benefit the local community – if at all. These issues regarding the feasibility (Q1) and value (Q2) of mobile digital storytelling, formed the research questions of the project and are now the focus of this paper. After a brief review of related systems and research, we introduce the local context and wishes of the community derived from a user requirements study. We then describe the design of the StoryBank system, and the results of a community trial of the system testing its usability and utility. Although we have published aspects of the system’s early design and evolution [e.g. 11, 18, 27] this is the first overview paper featuring trial results. RELATED WORK

Mobile digital storytelling is not a new idea in the West. In some ways it can be seen as an evolution of mobile imaging arising from the uptake of cameraphones and imageenabled PDAs. Early studies of this behaviour began to reveal differences in the types of images taken on these devices compared with conventional photographs. Many images were taken for their communicative value rather than as memory triggers. These included images of gestures or facial expressions to communicate emotions, of objects involved in joint tasks, and iconic images symbolizing some shared meaning [e.g. 12,25]. The cost and difficulty of combining these images with other media and distributing them to selected groups of people appears to have inhibited early MMS use. However, several commercial systems and research prototypes have been gradually lowering these barriers to uptake and indicating renewed interest in multimedia communication [e.g. 20,26]. Hence in a recent analysis of MMS use, Koskinen [13] reveals great creativity in combining one or more images with sound or text to achieve various communicative effects, while Jokela et al [10] report positive reactions to a new audio-visual story editor on a Nokia cameraphone. In parallel to these developments, a digital storytelling movement originating in California has being successfully promoting the creation of two minute personal stories comprising spoken narrative and sequences of still images from a family photo collection [14]. The effective capture and use of various kinds of audio with photographs has also been demonstrated and promoted by Frohlich [7]. Very little of this mobile technology has been developed or tested in the East. This is despite the rapid penetration of cameraphones in south east Asia and their potential value

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for improving rural livelihoods [e.g. 22]. Most research on mobiles for the developing world has concentrated on understanding existing mobile phone adoption and use [5]. Innovation projects generating new technology are rarer in this context, and do not yet include work on multimedia communication. We are aware of only one exception of relevance to our work. A system called Big Board has been developed for a rural African context, to allow multimedia content to be transferred wirelessly between cameraphone handsets and a situated display [15]. This is itself an evolution of other work on co-present photo sharing across multiple cameraphone displays, and the adaptation of digital library content for small displays [1,3]. Outside the mobile imaging context, Jo Tacchi and colleagues have been working for several years to understand the role of community content creation in the developing world as a form of empowerment [21]. Recent work by this group has demonstrated the potential of digital storytelling for expressing community information, issues and frustrations [9]. The Storybank project can be seen as a development of this latter work, using the cameraphone as a multimedia authoring platform [after 10] in combination with a community repository [after 15].


videoconferencing system over which MYRADA run sessions with remote doctors, vets and other ICT centres. When the project started in June 2006 there was poor mobile phone coverage in the area because the village lay in a geographic dip at some distance from the nearest transmitter. Consequently few people in the village owned mobile phones, although this increased dramatically after a mobile telephone company installed a new transmitter in the village in 2007.

Figure 1. The Jagaruthy local resource centre in Budikote

CULTURAL CONTEXT

Given the importance of supporting rural development in India to reverse migration to the urban centres, and the prevalence of low literacy rates in villages, the project decided to partner with an Indian village community. Budikote in south India was chosen because of its ongoing involvement with community radio, its openness to new technology, and proximity to Bangalore as a transport and high tech research hub. Budikote lies 100 kilometers East of Bangalore in the state of Karnataka. It is typical of a southern Indian village and is home to about 600 families or approximately 3,020 people. The majority religious group is Hindu (84%) and Muslims make a sizeable minority (15%). Most people speak Kannada, Telugu and a local mixture of both. Only 50 per cent of women and 55 per cent of men are literate. The main occupation of the people is agriculture and the community is vulnerable to the whimsical monsoons. Budikote is home to the gram panchayat or local council, which is responsible for 40 villages in the surrounding area. There is no running water or sanitation, and people draw their water from a well. The erratic electricity supply is on for about 6 hours a day, but not always at the times it is most needed. PARTNERS

The village has an ICT resource centre run by a NonGovernmental Organisation (NGO) called MYRADA, with several computers but no public access to the Internet (see Figure 1). The ground floor of the centre also houses a meeting room and office containing a VSAT

An unusual feature of the village is that it runs its own community radio station on the top floor of the Centre called Namma Dhwani meaning ‘our voices’. This was set up by the NGO VOICES with funding from UNESCO and is run by local volunteers linked to a local network of 13 all-women self-help groups. Programmes reflect the preoccupations and interests of the people. Some are serious educational pieces about HIV aids, the importance of birth registration or how to claim farming subsidies. Others are more recreational, such as film music, devotional songs, news about Bollywood or TV soap stars, and items on cricket. VOICES were the main local partner for the project, and employed a local ethnographer, Maxine Frank, for its duration. Maxine acted as a cultural as well as a linguistic interpreter to the UK-based research team and carried out most of the local user research. In this she was supported by Ram Bhat from VOICES Bangalore, various staff from MYRADA who run Namma Dhwani on a day to day basis, and UK project staff who travelled to the village in particular phases of the project. The first phase involved visits, tours and communication to understand the general context described above. Its main lessons were to confirm the problem of literacy as a barrier to information access and the value of audio-based information in overcoming this. It also flagged a serious problem for our system architecture as initially conceived, since this would not be able to utilize either internet or GPRS infrastructure in this location. Since this is a common situation in rural India we decided against lobbying to improve the infrastructure, in favour of re-thinking our design.

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REQUIREMENTS

Further design requirements were generated in a study of the current use of community radio in the village. Given the success of this medium in the village and its relevance to digital storytelling, we decided to position the StoryBank system as an extension to community radio, rather than as a completely new ICT intervention. Building on previous case studies of Namma Dhwani radio [17,24,2], the requirements study was carried out by our NGO partners and aimed to identify problems which might be overcome by mobile storytelling technology or opportunities for extending and enhancing current practices and benefits. This was done as a design ethnography, distinguishing it from previous studies focusing on radio uptake. In our new study, Namma Dhwani staff were interviewed about the planning and operation of the radio station, 20 regular listeners and three local groups were interviewed about their listening practices and attitudes to the content, a sample of 80 recent programmes were analysed, and observations were made at group listening sessions. Space prevents a full report of this study here, but its key findings for design were as follows. A first discovery was that radio programs were not broadcast by radio. Government legislation in 2006 prohibited community broadcasting, although this subsequently changed in 2007. To overcome this, VOICES had established an alternative method of broadcasting over cable TV. Namma Dhwani went out at 7pm each evening on Channel 8 from the local cable operator, to receiving TV sets in Budikote and specially adapted radio sets with a cable port. In addition, long wires were suspended through trees from the resource centre to two other villages where people gathered to listen to programs under public loudspeakers. The cable distribution meant that there was already a ready-made channel for image-and-audio content distribution. Indeed studio staff had already been experimenting with this by broadcasting still images from a powerpoint slide show in synchronization with the audio programs. This was done by manually advancing the slides to illustrate particular comments and commentary. Preprepared program features were recorded on audio cassette and archived in the resource centre, as well as digitized for broadcast alongside live presentation and digital music. Some of these cassettes were played again in small group settings, with a facilitator on hand to encourage discussion. This practice was referred to as ‘narrowcasting’. From our interviews we found that the breadth of programs were not interesting to everyone and poorly advertised before broadcasting. Furthermore the archived cassettes were not freely accessible for private listening. This meant that villagers had to listen patiently for items of personal interest to come up and couldn’t access content they happened to miss on a broadcast. Although ‘serious’ program content was considered valuable by particular groups, there was strong interest in less serious cultural


items such as the activities of films stars, cricket scores, school topics and international news. These were often the subject of a practice called ‘radio browsing’ whereby phone-in questions were answered by internet query in Bangalore, and verbally broadcast locally from a DVD of ‘results’. Some tension existed in the provision of radio content which was planned by committee and tended to be more serious than the population wanted [c.f. also 2]. Such content also formed the basis of narrowcasting sessions, sometimes with associated paper documentation. These sessions required very skilled facilitators to keep the audience engaged, because 20 minute audio programs were found to be too long for discussion. In considering how we could address some of these issues through a StoryBank system, we identified 5 requirements with our NGO partners that needed to be satisfied. These formed the basis of the ensuing design: • • • • •

Listen-again access to radio and TV programs – to provide legacy access and listener selectivity Public advertisement of program content – to attract audiences and help listener planning Short synchronized audio-visual format for cable TV broadcast and narrowcast sessions – to illustrate audio content in bite sized chunks Non-textual interfaces to story creation and sharing applications – to democratize content Zero-cost local architecture – to avoid reliance on internet and GPRS infrastructure

DESIGN

The resulting system design was iterated over two main prototyping phases and had a mobile and situated component. The mobile component took the form of cameraphone software for the creation, playback and BlueTooth transmission of stories. The situated component took the form of a local story server connected to a touch screen display situated in the community centre. Both have been described in previous publications, with details of their iteration and implementation [11,18, 27]. Here we briefly describe the final trimmed-down version of the system that was taken into the field trial. This turned out to be a standalone system, with the touch screen situated on the public balcony of the community resource centre. By locating the story server in the control room of the Namma Dhwani studio, we originally hoped to be able to broadcast stories to village televisions over the cable network as described above. However, during the second half of the project the local cable operator went out of business because of competition from a larger operator in the nearest town. Namma Dhwani therefore went off air for the remainder of the project, requiring our system to be self-contained. Phone interaction design

Figure 2 illustrates aspects of creating an audio-visual story on a Nokia N80 cameraphone using a text-free interface.

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Each story could consist of up to six still images taken with the phone’s camera and an audio track of up to two minutes. This story format had deliberate resonances with that used by the digital-storytelling movement, and addresses the need for shorter illustrated radio programs. The use of a still image template with accompanying audio was also found easier to understand and encode (in SML format) than a mixture of still and moving images with multiple audio clips [18]. The user could record elements of the story audio-first or image-first, and then manipulate the image and audio synchronization so that images appear at the appropriate part of the audio playback. This was done by playing back the audio and tabbing through the images at the time the user wishes them to appear in the resulting ‘slideshow’.


filter buttons were used at the top of the screen to refer to distinct story collections used in the trial.

Figure 3. Topic icons for story classification

Figure 2: Story creator screen design.

Stories were also tagged by the author to indicate the topic by which they might be retrieved later (see Figure 3). Nine topic categories, with corresponding icons, were developed in a series of discussion groups with villagers, to reflect the kind of information they wanted to record stories on. These icons were presented for selection at the end of the story creation process and represent an early community guess as to the value of the system. They include Education (A), Health (B), Legal (C), News (D), Local Governance (E), Women’s Self-Help Group (F), Farming (G), Student (H) and Entertainment (I). Once made, the resulting stories could be uploaded to the repository. Stories could also be downloaded from the server to the phone. In both cases, stories were transferred via BlueTooth or cable connections. Stories could also be shared in a peer-to-peer fashion between phones.

Figure 4. StoryBank situated display screen.

Villagers could touch any index photograph for a story they are interested in and watch the story as it is played back in full screen mode (see Figure 5). This image also shows the display in situ on the balcony of the ICT centre shown in Figure 1. In this mode, the story can also be downloaded to the user’s mobile phone. Each story also has a unique number associated with it. These numbers can be used to directly access a story from a touch screen keypad available from the main display (bottom right of Figure 4). TRIAL METHODS

Situated display interaction design

Stories on the server were displayed on the touch screen in a moving collage, where story images appear, move and shrink continuously (see Figure 4). Viewers were given a limited degree of control over content displayed through the use of topic filters. These were represented by the same topic icons used to tag stories on the phone and appear on the left hand side of the display in Figure 4. Pressing one or more of these icons had the effect of filtering the content appropriately. In this example, the farming and health filters have been pressed – the other categories are faded. Further

Ten cameraphones installed with project software were distributed to a cross-section of the village population by six facilitators. This was done each day over a one month period during November/December 2007. Participants were invited to make material they thought would be of interest to others in the community. Facilitators were Maxine Frank plus five Community Resource People (CRPs) trained in the operation of the phones for story creation, playback and transfer. CRPs were themselves trusted volunteers from the village hired by MYRADA to help with the trial. Most were women from Self-Help Groups who had never used a phone before.

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Figure 5. A story being played in full-screen mode. Recruitment was done through snowballing from contact with interested people involved in previous tests of the project technology, and additional people volunteered after hearing about the trial in the village. Facilitators were encouraged to recruit as wide a sample of users as possible in the village, giving old and young, workers and nonworkers, literate and illiterate the chance to participate. This resulted in a sample of 79 ‘authors’ and marked a departure from the process of making radio programs which tended to be done by a smaller number of people. Authors ranged in age from 8 to 65 and represented a variety of roles in the village including students, housewives, cleaners, shop keepers, farmers, teachers, drivers, carpenters and construction workers. Students (n=22) and housewives (n=19) made up the biggest group of participants; reflecting both their interest in story creation and availability to take part in the study. We initially intended phones to be demonstrated to participants and taken home for use within their families. However, because of concerns about the safety and recovery of each phone, MYRADA insisted on the facilitators collecting the phones at the end of each day and uploading content into the repository. They also selforganized a meeting of facilitators to brainstorm a range of possible stories that might be made in each topic category. This was a similar process to that used in generating radio content. Facilitators were therefore able to offer story ideas from this brainstorm to participants when they were deciding what content to make. This added to any example stories participants had seen from others prior to making their own. Consequently the process of story creation was more facilitated than intended. This is a finding in its own right and reflects the approach of MYRADA to content creation and technology use. During the trial period the repository and situated display were kept running on the balcony of the resource centre, which was already a hub of community life. Trial stories were batch-uploaded to this repository over a cable


connection by facilitators at the end of each day, rather than deposited by BlueTooth transfer by participants themselves. Two additional story collections were also available to view on the display, providing initial content before the trial stories grew in number. One was a set of 16 legacy radio programs digitized from the Namma Dhwani archives, while the other was a set of 24 ethnographic stories of village life recorded by villagers for a design competition with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) [19]. These were accessible together in a combined collage, or separately by pressing a corresponding filter button at the top of the screen (see again Figure 4). Although the display could be accessed at any time by most members of the community, the NGOs also organized for groups of regular visitors to the centre to be shown the display at the end of their visit. Again this led to a more facilitated process of consumption than we expected, in more of a group setting. For this reason it was difficult to monitor the type and number of repository viewers, although system logs show that 1310 separate video ‘playings’ took place over 28 days. 80 repository users, 26 story authors and four NGO staff were interviewed about their experiences in the trial. Repository interviews were done individually with people around the display, while author interviews were done in three groups dominated by students, housewives/Self-Help Group members, and facilitators reporting on participants. In addition to these interviews, we were able to draw on system logs and the collection of trial stories themselves in our analysis to interpolate usage patterns and value from multiple data sources. We found this was particularly important in this context where unfamiliarity with digital technology can lead to overly positive comments [c.f. 18]. RESULTS Story creation

137 stories were created by 79 people, differing in age, gender and occupation as mentioned above. This represented a large burst of creative activity in the village at a time when Namma Dhwani was off air. Stories were made across the spectrum of topics, with the exception of legal and panchayat (council) topics. These turned out to be too specialised for most villagers themselves to make, whereas all the others were populated to different degrees by both lay and professional authors (see Figure 6). When authors were asked about their motivation for a making a story, 44% of authors referred to its importance for the community, 13% mentioned its importance to a group to which they belonged, and 43% spoke of its’ personal interest to them. Elaborating on the intended audience for their stories, authors expected them be viewed mostly by friends (64%) and family (28%), rather than other group or community members (14%). As it turned out, authors reported actually showing their stories to between 5 and 15 people comprising friends (59%), family

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(21%), co-workers (13%) and other group members (7%). These findings reveal the highly personal nature of mobile storytelling, even in this community context. This was further underscored by the fact that only 30% of stories were made on subjects planned in the NGO brainstorm meeting – most of which related to development issues.

Figure 6. Number of trial stories classified by each topic. Stories could be classified by more than one topic.

The fact that so many stories were made on the phones by a wide range of people is testimony itself to the usability of the interface and feasibility of the approach. Overall, participants were generally happy with the story making process, with 68% of them characterising it as an easy one. Beyond this judgement, it was difficult to measure their experience more exactly, because a classic usability questionnaire with multiple rating scales was rejected by the community as being too clumsy to fill in by verbal interview. They were more comfortable giving open-ended comments in a discussion. These revealed that a major problem was not with the phone interface but with the 5 second delay associated with taking a picture. Many participants had never used a camera or a phone before, and found it harder to frame a good photograph, given this lag, than create an entire story using our software. Consequently many individual story images are blurred despite communicating an effective message in the sequence. Story creation was found to be easiest by students and hardest by women in the Self-Help Groups. The latter group really wanted others to create stories for them, while the former group requested advanced editing and playback features. Despite finding the application easy to use, it took some students 3 or 4 attempts to finalise their story and achieve a desired effect. For this reason they requested more than 6 images and 2 minutes of sound, together with PC editing. They also disliked the fact that they could not keep the phones for a longer period of time on their own, and mentioned other uses for the phone such as making phone calls and playing Bollywood movies!


Story consumption

While all authors previewed their stories on the phone, most of them showed them to others on the village display (64%). Only 22% of authors shared their stories exclusively on the phone display with a final 14% using both phone and repository for this purpose. This was despite problems experienced by almost all groups with story transfer. The BlueTooth transfer application took over 30 seconds for most stories and was not completely understandable or reliable. Consequently participants seldom transferred stories between phones, or downloaded them from the display as we envisaged. Instead they relied on the CRP facilitators to upload their stories by cable to the repository each evening. This created a regular social opportunity to share stories immediately with anyone in the vicinity of the resource centre at that time, and often resulted in a group sharing session. We found from observation that very large groups of 15-20 people would gather around the display which was only 17” wide. Often several people would try to activate the stories at the same time, leading to competition for control. In general, the interface was found to be extremely appealing and easy to use, and attracted attention through very loud playback of the audio narratives. Villagers used a combination of ambient browsing from index images, searching by topic filters, and entry of specific ID numbers. We noticed that some of these numbers came to be written on a chalk blackboard next to the display, as adverts for some of the best stories of the day or week. A surprising finding was that legacy radio programs tended to be ignored in favour of both the trial and RSA design competition stories. This was revealed by the system log which showed the following number of stories viewed in each collection over the month: Trial (578), RSA (420), Namma Dhwanni (13). This contradicted our prediction that ‘listen again’ facilities would be useful in the village. The finding is understandable in the context of the competition from much shorter and illustrated video footage, viewed in a group setting. What is less understandable is the attraction of the RSA stories which were never designed for local consumption. These were recorded in a separate exercise to give design students an insight into life in the village. Clearly those insights were of great interest to villagers themselves, who reported wanting to see themselves or their friends on the public screen, and hear how their village was portrayed to others. Within the trial collection there was a spread of interest across the topic categories, with viewers wanting to see stories of relevance to their situation. Hence farming stories were of most interest to farmers and so on. Entertainment and health were the most preferred categories by the 80 viewers interviewed afterwards, and also accessed more frequently on the logs (203 and 196 times respectively). Some negative opinions were expressed about stories showing open drains and garbage, since they portrayed the

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village in a bad light. When asked if somebody should moderate the content of the Storybank repository, 90% of respondents agreed, particularly if they could provide technical support with the equipment. Story form and function

Within the 6 photo:2 minute audio format there was scope to create a variety of story forms. The average form contained 4.5 photos with 65.7 seconds of sound. Across the corpus, 78% of sound clips were spoken voice, 15% were music and 7% were ambient sound. Looking into the technical construction of the stories showed how different sounds and images were used to achieve different communicative effects. For example, several stories included songs sung by the authors. These included a film song sung to a single face photo of the singer, or a another sung by a teacher during a dance done by her pupils (shown in three photographs). Step-by-step procedures were sometimes illustrated with a sequence of photographs, such as a school yoga class or landmarks within route instructions to the nearest clinic. A series of ambient sound audiophotographs were also recorded to capture a festival which took place during the trial period and local activities in the street.


Children and youth in particular were enthusiastic supporters who were keen to try out the technology and have their two minutes of fame. All this led people to suggest extending the trial system by loading the story creation software onto their own low cost phones in the village, supporting easier wireless communication, and positioning additional displays in further public areas such as the school, bank and marketplace.

Regarding the content of stories, there appeared to be a split between development and cultural information. The former included stories on health issues, farming problems and business processes and products, while the latter included advice from elders, moral tales and local events. An example development story is shown in Figure 7. This shows two photographs depicting a shoe seller and his wares, with information about the price of shoes. This kind of advertisement was quite common in the collection. The photographs from an example moral tale are shown in Figure 8. These are of paintings on the wall of the school to illustrate a popular myth told to the children. On the first photo the tiger was said to be driven away by four bulls. On the second photo the lone bull is said to have been eaten because it was separated from the others. The story finished with the moral: ‘unity is strength’.

Figure 7. Shoe shop advert. The spoken Kannada voiceover has been transcribed into English sub-titles.

Story and system value

When participants were asked about the value of the stories and system, they found it hard to identify it but stressed their enjoyment of the stories that were made. Many unexpected uses of the system were discovered within a short time of using it, such as the recording of audio-visual meeting minutes by a Self-Help Group and the making of audioposter stories by health workers. And many people gathered round the situated village display to discuss stories with each other and the local issues they described. Viewing sessions like these encouraged people to volunteer as authors, and authors always wanted to view their stories on the public display. So we detected a virtuous circle that might feed itself in the future if the phones became more prevalent, ahead of any particular killer application or use.

Figure 8. Two photographs of paintings in a moral tale When interviewed about their conclusions on the project, our NGO partners were more articulate. Each partner highlighted a different core value turning on the two kinds of content we observed being created. A MYRADA representative did see Storybank as an extension of Namma Dhwani and a vehicle for circulating development information in the village. However, this would require

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more targeted programming and better community training of specialist reporters: “You can make a team of Community Resource People, you can train them nicely, you can do some surveys, based on that you can make some programs.” In contrast, a VOICES representative felt the best thing about the system was that it got away from a top down ICTfor-development model which conceives of people and communities in terms of their problems to be solved. Because of its accessibility, it gives people a way of expressing other sorts of information without gatekeeping: “What is really interesting in this project is that it seemed not to put any barriers into what kind of content should come on the ICT model. It allowed people to create a product which is not so much development but also perhaps a creative expression, which has some aesthetic value not just in terms of social impact” DISCUSSION

The aim of the project was to explore a form of mobile digital storytelling in a development context, to increase access to information in semi-literate communities. In particular we wanted to see whether a cameraphone application could feasibly be used without text to create audiovisual stories for sharing on a community display (Q1). The above results show that we succeeded in supporting this activity in Budikote village, albeit through a very simplified form of story and infrastructure. This only scratches the surface of what might be done through more complex forms of story creation and distribution over a wider area network, but at least proves the viability of the approach. The interworking of mobile devices with public displays was found to be particularly effective in the village context where face-to-face storytelling is the norm. We see this as an integral part of future device ecologies for such contexts, as explored in [15]. A future enhancement might be the chaining of stories into question and answer pairs, borrowing from the radio browsing practices we found with community radio – so that those with information interests or needs could solicit answers from others with the requisite knowledge. The use of associated paper documentation for verbal information shared in narrowcasting sessions, also suggests a value for augmented paper. We laid the foundations for this in our use of unique ID numbers for stories, which could be printed on ‘story flyers’ showing a comic strip of images. Story content could then be filed and advertised in the physical world on paper posters and cards, and even accessed wirelessly from a remote server by dialing the story number on the phone. The way in which the system was used in the trial begins to answer a second question we had about the value of audiovisual information in these contexts (Q2). We saw a tension between the serious creation and dissemination of ‘development’ information by local professionals or


knowledgeable lay people, and the more frivolous sharing of ‘cultural’ information by all. This was already evident in the struggle to control community radio content, and emerged again in the use of the StoryBank system. It surfaced in the surprising level of interest in personal stories made for a design competition, in entertainment stories in the trial, and in the attempts of MYRADA to recommend development subjects to story authors. As both NGOs pointed out at the end of the project, these are two quite legitimate but different values and uses of information, neither of which was fully supported in our system or its deployment. We therefore recommend that future work should target these types of content and uses separately, to support better forms of community-generated content in each category. On the one hand, custom mobile storytelling technology might be employed to help organizations like MYRADA create and share development information more easily, with greater involvement from local people. It could also be used to support internal communications between distributed NGO centers. On the other hand, mass mobile storytelling applications like ours could be designed to run on all phones in the developing world, not for MMS communication as Jokela et al explored [10] but for the creation of local cultural libraries accessible to all. The difference between these and conventional libraries would be mainly in the form of information they contained, but also in the process of its publication. Illustrated spoken stories would complement conventional books, and might be donated by anyone with information to share or a story to tell. Unlike printed books, stories could be checked out from a distance and played on private or public displays. We still believe the local aspect of this solution is important to the developing world context, and reinforced by the fact that untranslated stories can only be understood in a local language area. Requests by the people of Budikote for someone to moderate content and provide technical support should also be taken seriously in such deployments. The role of HCI in these projects is critical, as the discipline itself brings a combination of concern for the user and belief in the possibility of innovation. Too many existing ICT-for-Development projects apply existing technologies without sufficient adaptation or re-invention, and often without regard for user needs. In fact we believe the creative application of emerging technologies in new cultural contexts is a new kind of cutting edge for HCI. It has the ability to deliver worthwhile benefits in those new contexts, as well as forcing innovations that may well be useful back in the West. This was exactly true of our project which has explored an alternative way of sharing MMS messages and revealed a set of community practices around situated displays that might be taken back into the West. Although social networking sites such as YouTube and Flickr are popular ways of exchanging stories around video and photographs, they are not usually done face-to-face on

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a public display. This is something we could learn from the Budikote villagers and explore in subsequent work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was funded by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant EP/E006698/1, within the Bridging the Global Digital Divide programme. The work has benefited from the input of other team members and partners including Roger Tucker, Mounia Lalmas, Paul Palmer, Arthur Williams, Jan Blom & Jack Turner, and an equipment donation from Nokia Research. REFERENCES

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