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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Virginia University, Department of Foreign Languages
Bemoaning the demise of storytelling has become almost cliche in critiques of contemporary culture. (1) Ironically, with the current variety and widespread use of narrative media, elegies for the art of storytelling are premature. Indeed, storytelling may never have been so prevalent as it is today. What the repiners are truly nostalgic for, it seems, is the traditional style of oral narrative performance, the style in which a narrator and an audience share an interactive space while the narrator personally conveys to the audience a story that is often intertwined with familiar places, the style which lends itself to local yarns, ghost stories, and accounts of personal experiences that occurred where the narrative is delivered. When places become both the setting of a story and of its telling, the narrator and audience are able directly and advantageously to reference the environment immediately at hand. A powerful synergy for both storytellers and listeners results.
Recent breakthroughs in communications techaology have exciting ramifications for the ways in which we communicate through storytelling. An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Central Florida is exploring the potentials of one newly created storytelling medium called Earth Echoes. This medium connects narratives and place-specific information with physical locations. It is made possible by advances in technology for both global positioning systems (GPS) and remote Internet devices, which enable the reception of audio files, such as recordings of personal narratives, at any geographical location. The techaologies able to receive geographically specific data are widely distributed, contained in cars, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other portable digital devices. The ubiquity of such technology will enable users to access geographically specific information while moving through any given environment.
For the user of the Earth Echoes medium, the experience is similar to self-guided museum audio tours that allow visitors to learn about the various pieces on display in each gallery. The major difference is that the Earth Echoes medium knows no walls; it can be employed anywhere on the planet.
Earth Echoes has a simple digital interface comprised of the following components:
1. scalable maps (think MapQuest with its aerial and street maps of varying specificity)
2. digital landmarks on the maps that correspond to physical landmarks and GPS coordinates
3. audio, visual, and textual files linked to the landmarks
The Earth Echoes system functions as both a desktop application and a wireless application. In the desktop environment, the user clicks through maps to find files linked to virtual landmarks.
In the wireless environment, the user accesses the Earth Echoes data from geographical coordinates via the GPS system as he or she moves through a real location.
The UCF team is planning to use Earth Echoes as a narrative medium. We want to record natural narratives (oral stories that are not retellings of written stories) about places and make them available to the public. The object is to enrich users' experiences about specific locations through stories told by knowledgeable informants.
Earth Echoes storytelling approximates oral storytelling, but with some notable differences: the Earth Echoes audience will hear prerecorded stories; the audience will be on-location (virtually or physically); they will have the opportunity to hear many stories left by many storytellers at different times about particularly important locations; and their interaction will be limited to requesting the available files and, when desired, leaving files of their own creation for the next audience.
Several projects are under way to produce content for Earth Echoes. One such project is the gathering and recording of historical and scientific stories about the Harry P. Leu Botanical Gardens in Orlando. This site not only houses an important botanical collection; it is also an old homestead of great importance for the history of Central Florida. So far, we have captured three hundred stories told by botanists, historians, and people with first-hand knowledge about the history of Leu Gardens. The stories are tagged to GPS coordinates in an archival database and are accessible to listeners, no matter how far removed in time, who visit the geographical locations at those coordinates.
In our production of content for Earth Echoes, we faced an important question: should we record stories on location (in the place where the narrative events occurred) or off location? Certainly, off-location recording is easier, and often less expensive; it enables us to record in a controlled environment free from unwanted sounds, unpleasant weather, and complicated schedules. But, we wondered, do the relative conveniences of off-location recording come at a cost to the narrative itself? Are there significant differences between on-location and off-location narrative performances, and if so, what are the mechanisms that produce these differences? Do people change the way they tell stories if they tell them in the places where the narrated events occurred? Finally, do the advantages of recording on-location outweigh the disadvantages?
To answer these questions, we conducted a study in which we examined whether on-location narrators incorporate environmental elements into their stories, and whether the inclusion of these environmental elements significantly changes the stories they tell. We found that there are significant differences in the performances of on-location narrators, and these differences are very advantageous for us because they produce a direct relationship among storyteller, location, and audience lacking in off-location narratives. We have included here excerpts from these performances, which follow a brief discussion about our research methods.
To gather empirical evidence to help us answer our research questions, we recorded seventy natural narratives both on and off location. Fourteen second-grade students, seven fifth-grade students, nine eighth-grade students, and four adult shopping mall security guards provided the narratives. To elicit narratives from the students, we followed William Labov's example (2) and used these requests: "Tell me a story about a fight in the lunchroom," or more generally, "Tell me a story about a fight on campus." With the security guards, our request was, "Tell me a story about a time when an animal got into the mall." We asked the students and security guards to tell the same story both on and off the location where the story took place so we could compare differences in...
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