I’m writing this as I contemplate today’s session at Green Dragon Yard. What direction will Stockton DV take? I’m going to ask all the participants to read this and take a look at some examples and perhaps comment on this post.
As I have said elsewhere, “A Digital Village is a space where a community expresses their identity though ICT and Digital Media. This may be from an artistic, heritage, or economic perspective or a mixture of all three.This can be done through poetry, digital stories, community newspapers online, image collections (old and new), audio (Internet radio, oral history), animations, video, and text.”
One of the oldest Digital Village projects on Tees Valley is Skinningrove. On this website you will find ongoing projects and stories from the past. For instance on the Jetty Project they are using Second Life to make movies. Looking in the archives you will see they made quite a splash with the first ever online pub-quiz. They used media in their campaign to gain River status for the beck and created a series of animations.
Not too far away Margrove Park are doing things a little differently. The are writing about the culture and heritage of their community as well as providing services such as the Virtual Post Office and the Virtual Job Shop.
Sunny Saltburn is the home of Destinations (must mention as it’s Destinations that sent me to Stockton in the first place) Lots of things happening in Saltburn including Saltburn FM and an online Soap Opera. (any budding thespians – they’re looking for help with their scripts) We’re also offering this interesting approach to History.
Speaking of History, Marske has it in spades. Take a look at this image collection – there are only another 6,000 pictures to add and then the group will start to categorise and annotate them
Coming right up to date we visit Margrove Park again for a project so new the paint is still wet! If you take a peek in their virtual post office you may find their Virtual Post Card Stand – there is just one post card there at present but there will soon be more. We’re planning a Community Photographing day where teams will go out and collect enough pictures to build a complete flavour of what makes Margrove Park. A little like google street maps but less obtrusive! The images will include streets, the village hall, local walks, the pond, the caravan park etc etc. Afterwards people can tell stories about the places in their community which go to the Digital Village Research Network.
DVN is looking into the Digital Village concept and you can see the cluster in East Cleveland here. I’d just like to point out a couple things about that page – if you look to the right you will see we have our own “Twitter Reporter” and below that you’ll see “News From The Network” which is actually drawing content from about seven different community websites (Digital Villages) All of this is by the wonders of RSS. That’s a community media network and we’re hoping Stockton will soon follow suit.
Two new villages have joined the network Carlin How and Moorsholm and interestingly they want to emulate the early Skinningrove days with an online pub quiz.
Finally one thing I’d like to mention is Media Mapping. Take a look at this map, you’ll find many of the things I’ve mentioned above associated with a map. You may also be interested in this one.
Which brings me finally to a Digital Village that’s not a village at all – Friends of Redcar Cemetery – take a look at their map !