Post on 23-Feb-2023
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
This article was downloaded by: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles]On: 29 September 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 911796916]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Urban TechnologyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713436614
Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environmentsRamesh Srinivasan a
a candidate in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University,
Online Publication Date: 01 August 2004
To cite this Article Srinivasan, Ramesh(2004)'Reconstituting the urban through community-articulated digital environments',Journal ofUrban Technology,11:2,93 — 111
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10630730412331297323
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10630730412331297323
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Reconstituting the Urbanthrough Community-ArticulatedDigital Environments
Ramesh Srinivasan
Acombination of social, economic, and political
dynamics have created an environment where the
idea of community now embraces more than just a
neighborhood, more than just a geographic locale. An individual
can now be a member of multiple social groups, many of which
need not be defined by local boundaries. Digital networks enable
these unprecedented phenomena, which include instantaneous
exchanges and accesses of greater amounts of information than
were ever considered before. In the 1940s, Jorge Borges invoked
the “infinite library” as a metaphor to describe an environment
in which information would be omnipresent and constantly avail-
able. Today, the notion of order, structure, and path are all called
into question, as digital networks allow users to move freely across
Web pages, search tools, and programs which all use digital infra-
structure to communicate (Instant Messenger, Bulletin Boards,
e-mail, etc.). Specifically, no longer are there few sources of
receiving information (library, bulletin board) or interacting with
another (telephone, telegraph, face-to-face, letter writing), but
instead, there has been a recombination of communication into a
variety of digital tools (Web pages, digital bulletin boards, online
chat, webcam chats, etc.) that have created greater choices for
obtaining information and interaction. As a result, several layers
of communications technology have thus inserted themselves
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 93
Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 11, Number 2, pages 93–111.
Copyright # 2004 by The Society of Urban Technology.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISSN: 1063-0732 paper=ISSN: 1466-1853 online
DOI: 10.1080=10630730412331297323
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
onto the urban fabric and have helped change cities. Communities
have begun to reorient themselves as the virtual has enabled inter-
action to occur independent of spatial proximity. Today, social
network analysts have begun to describe community membership
as “far-flung, loosely-bounded, sparsely-knit, and fragmentary.”
What is to be made of place or the great American city or
public space in light of this? Some writers have noted that
instead of meeting others in a public space or park, we have
shifted to digital agoras and that much interaction is now occurring
in “virtual communities.” A virtual community is a community
that meets across a computer network, often because the distance
between members allows for only that kind of meeting.
A community can be “virtual” if it is defined as a set of indi-
viduals with a shared set of interests, values, or ideals. One’s com-
munity can be characterized as the set of interpersonal networks
that provide sociability, social support, and social capital to its
members. They key aspect to community is one of solidarity,
and traditional notions of community have identified solidarity
around the notion of neighborhood, which imposes the bounds
of spatial proximity. Communities provide the individual with
social capital, a term that describes an individual’s ability to
access needed resources, whether they be material, physical, or
emotional/psychological. Social capital flows to an individual
from numerous sources as he or she joins different communities.
New research explains how social networks increase social
capital.
However, the discussion of how new media affect commu-
nities has been fraught with disagreement. Some have argued
that networked media are ill-suited for the expressive, emotional
actions that are fundamental to the sustenance of community,
while others have seen them as integrative and rich mechanisms
for connecting people. My belief is that new media can strengthen
already strong connections, open up previously “latent” connec-
tions, and make possible rich communities that only meet
across the online space. Critics have lamented the loss of public
space and the fragmentation of urban environments that have
accompanied recent urban dynamics (economic, sociological,
and political) and pointed to a recombination of social networks
that are greater in number yet fluid in the sense that they no
longer depend on spatial proximity. There are a number of persua-
sive arguments that have been voiced among different theorists
who call into question whether an adequate digital place can be
designed for the continuum of communities that now exist
94 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Wellman
Rheingold
Wellman
Wellman
Kraut et al.
Wellman
Haythomwaite
Smith and Kollock
Sorkin
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
(ranging from geographically local to spatially distributed). The
role of the physical public space is now being questioned as a
result. I do not take this dichotomous approach toward my
research but instead focus on the need for community spaces
and the potential to use digital technologies to meet this need.
In fact, I believe that the physical–digital separation is an anti-
quated model and that new convergences between the two have
created and will continue to generate exciting new social
dynamics.
Urbanism, Neighborhood, and Community Media Systems
Whether rich or not in interaction or resources offered, this discus-
sion so far has merely adhered to the traditional binary model of
physical proximity and place versus immaterial and virtual com-
munities. What is left out, however, is the fascinating potential
of how digital technologies can begin to enable the formation of
communities that are primarily local. In particular, research
focused on communities that have a low level of technological
fluency or infrastructural support adds a nice complementary
layer to the topics discussed above. My interest is in how digital
media can be designed as a tool of empowerment for these
communities.
In this paper, I examine my thesis that placing the commu-
nity in control of the content and architecture of its shared
digital agora enables a greater attachment and sense of commu-
nity to develop. Village Voice, the project which I present in
the next section, is my examination of this conceptual approach.
As this paper will demonstrate, possibilities remain for the virtual
place to embody the goals of the public space as being a sphere of
interaction and communication. This project was implemented
and active within a community of Somali refugees distributed
across the Boston metropolitan area between December 2001
and December 2002. The project was unable to continue
because of the basic lack of technological know-how across the
community (for maintaining the server system, resolving bugs,
etc.). The goal of the one-year project was to test the potential
of designing a community-focused digital place that would
ideally maintain a long-term sustainability. An important lesson,
however, was that sustainability requires enabling community
members to also maintain technical control and knowledge of
their media system.
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 95
Mitchell
Deutsche
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
Community Media Projects: An Overview
Only a few studies have examined the impact of information and
communication technologies (ICTs) on local neighborhoods, but
there are a few relevant benchmarks in this research.
E-neighbors and NetvilleThe study by Hampton et al. of four Boston-area neighborhoods
(E-neighbors) has shown that Internet use can have both positive
and negative effects on local communities depending on how
interactive the type of usage is (e.g., chatting or e-mailing vs.
watching videos). Regardless, the finding that community does
not have to be physically bounded does not mean that local com-
munities are necessarily disenfranchised. In fact, several studies in
underprivileged neighborhoods have demonstrated that digital
media systems can empower local neighborhoods to share
assets, communicate about issues, and feel more of a sense of com-
munity. Finally, the now famous Netville study has shown that
residents of a wired suburb can expand their social networks to
include both those who are in the neighborhood and those who
are far away. In these studies, the focus was on the mere provision
of Internet in a localized setting, rather than the design of the
content or its underlying architecture. Two points are notable
about these projects: (1) The focus was largely on the impact of
Internet access and a localized Intranet rather than the form,
design, or nature of content that was contained. (2) In both
cases, the groups studied were of largely middle or upper-
middle class standing, implying a community not necessarily at
risk in terms of access to basic resources.
Silver StringersWhat happens when a senior citizen community, filled with stories
and experiences, is given the tools to publish a community
journal? This experiment, known as Silver Stringers, demonstrated
the role of technology in testing the social cohesion of a publishing
process.
What we see in the Silver Stringers is a group of older adults
embracing technology for a purpose—creating stories of their
lives and communities for others to learn from. These stories
are ways for them to make sense of their life histories, to
reconcile a multitude of experiences into coherent narratives
(731).
96 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Hampton and Wellman
Shaw
Hampton and Wellman
Smith et al.
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
In this experiment, publishing technology inspired face-to-
face interaction in a geographically bounded community. The
process of creating a journal to represent the stories of this commu-
nity led to increased interaction and community building. Patterns
of role sharing and organization evolved out of this process, which
provided members with a sense of shared responsibility and con-
tinuity as they created an electronic journal. This undertaking
(1) used a story as a powerful granule within the community
system, (2) used the system solely to publish community-related
stories, and (3) had authors adhere to the system’s architecture
of editor’s boxes, etc. In other words, the structure of the stories
of the Stringers was pre-defined by the technology developer
rather than community member.
MUSIC: Rebuilding Physically Proximal CommunitiesMUSIC (Multi-User Sessions In Community), Alan Shaw’s doc-
toral project, is a significant benchmark in this research. This
system was deployed in Boston’s “Four Corners” neighborhood
as a bulletin board system (BBS) to help residents share infor-
mation, setup events and projects, share their creations (such as
articles or pictures), and discuss community issues. Certain
aspects of the system were private for the individual user (such
as e-mail inboxes) while others were public. Community
members were supplied with computers at home from which
they could log onto the system. Shaw found that many projects
were both created as well as organized online and that most of
those who logged into the system regularly were involved with
these projects, meaning they used the system to facilitate and
further their involvement in community projects.
The philosophical approach Shaw took in this project is
described as social constructionism. This idea builds on the con-
structionist model of the individual as a constructor, not a
passive receiver, of knowledge. Social constructionism combines
this idea with the sociocultural view that shared experiences
allow these constructions to take on meaning. The resulting
theory is that a social setting is enhanced by the developmental
activity of the individual.
Social constructionism is an epistemological paradigm that
suggests that becoming acquainted with one’s neighbors is
an act of extending one’s self. Computer networking is a
technical tool that can support this endeavor. However, the
network is not the active force; the people are. The critical
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 97
Shaw
Vygotsky
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
agency is based entirely upon the prerogatives of the people
involved (15).
Appropriately, MUSIC was applied in an urban setting where
fractured, less cohesive social relations existed. Observing how
this technology worked over time, Shaw concluded that MUSIC
enhanced the development and organization of the neighborhood’s
shared social constructions. Notable about MUSIC were (1) the
adoption of this project by a community traditionally neglected
by technological innovations, (2) the engagement of the system
across a variety of community needs, rather than merely being
focused on a specific topic such as publishing, and (3) the
design of the system by nonmembers of the community.
Village Voice: Ontologies and Storytelling
To varying degrees, each of the above mentioned projects intro-
duced an envelope of community empowerment without truly
pushing it. I propose in this paper that a digital community
space could achieve deeper effects in terms of community empow-
erment if it gave the community the power over its design and
content. Village Voice was a narrative-based community multime-
dia system I designed, developed, and evaluated for a Somali
refugee community based in the Boston metropolitan area. Here
I present the methodology by which Village Voice built upon
the movement in community publishing and storytelling. A
number of studies have demonstrated that empowering commu-
nities to create their own stories stimulates a process of reflection,
which in turn facilitates the sharing of values, knowledge, struc-
tures, and dreams.
Community IntroductionThe Somali refugee community in the Boston area was concen-
trated in a few pockets in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Revere, and
Charlestown. (See Figure 1.) The population of the group
expanded from about 3,000 in the mid-1990s to 5,000 by the
end of the decade. The refugees, many from families separated
by events in Somalia or by their relocation to the United States,
were all different ages. Many were victims of the civil war that
tore families apart and decimated a once thriving culture. Resettle-
ment was a traumatic event for many who came from a culture
with markedly different educational, monetary, and social
systems than those in the United States.
98 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Shaw
Campbell
Yussuf
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
There were only a few major hubs around which Somalis
traditionally gathered. These included the Somali Development
Center (SDC) in Jamaica Plain; the Sagal cafe, restaurant, and
computer literacy center; the Butterfly Somali crafts store in
Roxbury Crossing; and the Somali Sunni Muslim mosque in
Jamaica Plain. In general, however, Somalis I met would remark
that there existed very few opportunities for community dialogue
to begin to address the issues that affected them. There were
obvious needs that this project could fill. For example, there was
a critical need to integrate incoming refugees with the existing
Somali community, and ultimately with the larger community of
Boston. A technology that could introduce new members to
issues and associated stories of the community would help the
process of acclimation. In addition, building a tool that could
document the unique culture of Somali-Americans could help
future generations be connected to their traditions and reflect on
how they changed over time. A variety of community members
indicated to me that the community faced some significant pro-
blems. For example, the clan heritage with which many Somalis
FIGURE 1Boston Neighborhood Map
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 99
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
identified was a significant stumbling block in the center’s efforts
to try to build a unified community that could benefit from the
programs it offered. The community perceived a need to create
an archive or safe place to discuss these issues. Learning this,
my question was: Is it possible to use technology to remind
Somalis of their heritage yet still show that they were, as refugees,
one clan living together in Boston? More generally, I was curious
about the ability of a community to use technology as a tool of
dialogue and community empowerment.
I first became involved in the community in (September
2001) as a tutor and mentor for teenagers. This involved bi-weekly
visits to the community center and other Somali institutions, where
I would work on different subjects with the children. I sometimes
found it difficult to teach certain concepts because the textbooks
were all written in English, which they knew to varying extents.
Over time, my tutoring helped me meet more people within the
community (such as the parents of those I was tutoring), and I
learned more about how the community operated. I became a
familiar face and eventually Somalis whom I had met would go
out of their way to greet me warmly. After I devised the technol-
ogy project, it became clear that it would be most effective if the
community itself could take charge of the content and architecture
of the system that would serve its need for dialogue.
Narrative and Somali Oral CultureThe technology project called Village Voice was built upon the
premise that story is fundamental to the sharing of experience.
In cultures throughout the world, story exists to serve a range of
purposes from teaching a moral, contemplating divinity, or preser-
ving history. Stories are clearly one of the many ways in which we,
as humans, present who we are to others.
Human beings are storytellers by nature. In many guises as
folk tale, legend, myth, epic, history, motion picture, and tel-
evision program, the story appears in every known human
culture. The story is a natural package for organizing many
different kinds of information. Storytelling appears to be a
fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to
others (11).
Alfred Lord, whose work on oral storytelling focused on the
singing bards who narrated stories to their respective cultures,
explains that the oral tradition has persevered because “the
100 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Campbell
McAdams
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver
of tradition and the creative artist; it is rather one of the preser-
vation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it.” The oral
tradition has persevered through its adaptation to the change that
is inevitable to all cultures.
The role of story is significant in Somali cultural history.
Story has mostly been presented within the form of poetry, the
most developed art form from traditional Somalia. Poetry serves
as the ultimate expression of Somali cultural realities, often
mixing objects and relationships in ways that may seem odd to
the Westerner. Indeed, to the Somali, poetry traditionally has
been a living art affecting almost every aspect of life. It has
been a principal medium of mass communication, playing a role
similar to that of the press and television in Western societies.
The written alphabet only made its appearance in Somalia in
1972, and even with the entrance of basic technologies into
Somalia, the dominance of the oral tradition was not challenged.
Thus, my approach with Village Voice was to focus the technol-
ogy I would design around the powerful storytelling tradition of
the Somali people.
Community-Driven Content and ArchitecturesAs I have mentioned, my focus in this research was twofold:
community-generated content, and community-driven information
architectures. Village Voice allowed the user to interact with
material based on how the community itself articulated the
relationships within its different pieces. The interface was based
on a dynamic collage, which was able to reveal the complexity
of the artifacts of a community because of how it could adapt to
a user’s browsing history and the intricate relationships within
the different materials submitted by community members.
Village Voice was designed to be a technology to accomplish
all of the purposes listed in the above paragraph. The server and
database were placed on a server at the MIT Media Laboratory.
The project was made accessible to community members on any
machine by accessing a Web page and logging in with password
information. Village Voice was partly a study of how a knowledge
model, or ontology, created by community members, can better
facilitate the sharing of knowledge across a community as
compared to keyword indexing. I define ontology as an explicit
representation or structure of knowledge. Ontologies can be used
to describe physical processes, educational fields, or in the case
of Village Voice, the discourse of a community.
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 101
Lord
Putnam and Noor
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
My contribution is a demonstration that a community-built
ontology is more than a static structure with which to represent
community knowledge. When continuously populated with their
stories, ontology becomes a dynamic structure that is used by
members to model the evolution of their community. Additionally,
this paper also incorporates my ongoing research related to
software agents that can potentially add a deeper level of social
facilitation to already rich digital community systems. In the
next section, I discuss the process by which this project was
accomplished.
Methodology and Community Design
As mentioned, after spending several months as a volunteer, I
introduced the potential of a project that could use digital media
to integrate the collective issues and stories of the Somali commu-
nity within Boston. In consultation with members of the Somali
community, I decided to design a project that allowed users to
share community-created video stories. I soon met many prospec-
tive story creators and gave my first workshop to seven (three men,
four women – with an age range of 19 to 55). After an introductory
workshop on the basics of creating video, I gave very few instruc-
tions to the seven initial Somali story creators except to focus their
stories on issues that were relevant to them as Somali immigrants
in Boston. Over a month, 50 stories were collected from these
initial creators. They were instructed in the basics of I-Movie
editing and used computer workstations located at the MIT
Media Laboratory.
One research goal of these stories was to help design an
ontology that would illustrate the issues of interest to the commu-
nity. My goal was to engage the community in the reflective
process of creating an ontology that could articulate the relation-
ships between relevant community issues. As issues in the
community would change, the community could redesign this
representation through future ontology design meetings. And, in
turn, this representation could anchor the digital media system to
actually be a powerful tool of reflection and assembly for the
community.
When continuously populated with their stories, ontology
becomes a dynamic structure that is used by members to model
the evolution of their community. Thus, the ontology would
enable the stories and artifacts of a community to be represented
102 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
and exhibited in the landscape of a multimedia system. It allows
for the access and understanding of community-centered exhibits
to occur through the community’s own semantics. Values, dis-
course, and dreams are all framed in an architecture that allows
for the digital system to faithfully represent the evolution and
experiences of communities worldwide.
OntologyOntology can also be seen as a conceptual map where the links
between individual pieces of knowledge are delineated. An
assumption researchers in this field make is that knowledge is
without meaning unless it is contextualized. Village Voice fol-
lowed the same assumption—a cultural concept can be expressed
in relationship to others. An example of a concept map ontology is
seen in Figure 2.
FIGURE 2An Example Concept Map
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 103
Novak
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
Community Ontology DesignCommunity members were asked to come to a meeting to help
with the design of an initial ontology for Village Voice. This
was done by going to restaurants, shops, the community center,
and by advertising over the community cable access television
program. Over several initial sessions in November and Decem-
ber, 80 community members met at the Somali Development
Center in Jamaica Plain to view the created videos. The sessions
were chaired by the director and staff of the Somali Development
Center and were largely conducted in Somali. Each session began
with a reminder to the participants about the purpose of the project.
The video stories (created by the initial creators and others who
had later joined the eventual team of 15) were then shown on
the VHS tape, and participants were encouraged to pause, stop,
or repeat the video at any time. They were instructed to do this
whenever they felt an issue that was relevant for their community
was revealed in a story. During the pauses, the community would
discuss the videos they were watching and craft a part of the ontol-
ogy diagram on the white board in the front of the classroom.
The question of following tradition versus adapting to
America dominated the discussions. Elders would express conster-
nation over the direction the children took. One elder woman
implored, “These kids don’t have the respect for authority we
did at their age. Look at the language they use. What has happened
to what the Koran has taught them?” Some teenagers, on the other
hand, while remaining quiet when elders were in the room, would
tell me that while they had great pride in their heritage and reli-
gion, they felt a need to fit in with their peers at school and to
follow the opportunities living in America allowed them.
During these discussions, the community would come to a
consensus on whether an issue that had come up should be
included in the ontology. For example, one story was set at a
Somali youth party. It showed teenage men and women dancing
together to hip hop music. The idea of a youth dance party
without Somali music was disagreeable to some of the participants
because of its disrespect to the Islamic taboo of premarital
relationships. Many of the youths at the meeting argued that one
could have a premarital relationship without being disrespectful to
Muslim culture. During this discussion, the participants decided
that issues of religious tradition, sexuality, and generational
differences were relevant to the ontology. These topics were
then added to the ontology and linked to each other on the white
board. Another video story involved the onscreen interview of
104 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
an elderly woman and youth about their opinions on the Somali
tradition of female circumcision. This video elicited a significant
amount of discussion among workshop participants and created
new issues for the ontology. The ontology, which was con-
tinuously drawn on a white board at the development center,
changed many times in the process, as the community members
reflected further on the issues that united them. The overall
initial community ontology (translated into English) can be seen
in Figure 3.
System and InterfaceThe interface of Village Voice was suited for the representation of
a community or a culture because it was designed to illuminate
complex interrelationships between different topics visually.
(See Figure 4.)
Village Voice portal was entered via a “search” page. This
page was organized hierarchically, according to the tree-based
design of the ontology. The user could select multiple nodes
from the ontology tree that he or she was interested in watching
stories about. For example, to access the teenage dance party
FIGURE 3Somali Community Ontology
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 105
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
story, the visitor to Village Voice could select any or all of the
topics of religious tradition, sexuality, or generational differences,
and the dance story thumbnail would illuminate accordingly, as
will be explained shortly.
The browsing page was designed to give the user a wide
range of information about the different video stories by display-
ing each story’s thumbnails, while conveying its relationships
to other stories. The thumbnails were illuminated to varying
levels. This reflected how closely each thumbnail corresponded
to the terms employed by the user on the search page. A brighter
illumination indicated a closer match with the search query.
The story that best matched the query was known as the focus
story, whose thumbnail had a pink-colored border. Once the
browser was loaded, a user could change the focus story by click-
ing on any other thumbnail in the collage. This altered the illumi-
nation of all the other thumbnails in the interface, based on how
closely their annotations matched those of the new focus story
(as a function of distance within the ontology tree from the
chosen thumbnail).
Community members were given three options with which
they could work on any given submission. The story could be
played by selecting the play button, which was the left most of
FIGURE 4Ontology-Based Browse Page
106 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
the three buttons below the thumbnail. This would stream the
video in a frame to the right of the collage.
Users could also record their reactions to any story that they
viewed. These reactions could be uploaded as audio files to Village
Voice by selecting the Talk button below the thumbnail. Finally,
the user could listen to the audio annotations associated with
any story. These could be loaded by clicking on the middle of
the three buttons under the thumbnail.
AssessmentAssessment was carried out by testing thirty Somali immigrants
living in Boston. Each subject was asked to browse Village
Voice and a control keyword version that would only organize
stories based on the words most often stated within them. Before
using either version, the subject would log on the system with
an anonymous name so that I could monitor which sequences of
stories the subject browsed, how long he or she stayed logged
on, and how many stories were played.
These data showed the mean and standard deviation values
(across the 30 subjects) of the number of stories browsed, the
number of stories played, and the time online for the keyword
(KW) and Village Voice (VV) versions. The values for time
online were expressed in terms of seconds. (See Table 1.)
These data show a higher engagement for subjects across-
the-board with Village Voice. In general, subjects spent a lot of
time studying the interface and not interacting with it heavily, as
TABLE 1Mean and Standard of Deviation Values of Village Voice
Versus Control(Expressed in Terms of Seconds or Number of Clips as
Appropriate)
Mean Value Standard of Deviation
KW time online 263 205.36VV time online 967 891.39KW # clips browsed 2 0.697VV # clips browsed 7 2.719KW # clips played 1 0.433VV # clips played 3 0.788
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 107
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
can be seen by the rather small number of clips played or browsed
on in either version. It appears that the community-designed ontol-
ogy version inspires a greater engagement with the digital media
system and provides a great potential of being an architecture
that can enable Village Voice to communicate important issues
across a community.
Many subjects mentioned to me that they would have
browsed in more detail if they had been more familiar with the
system and technology, in general. Indeed, the issues of control
over the technical infrastructure and familiarity with the technol-
ogy were critical in my experiment. Community members were
able to see that the pieces and architecture of the system were
theirs but the language of an interactive collage, the ability to
change the system or interface easily, and the general lack of
ease with computers proved to be mitigating factors. I believe
that enabling a longer term presence of Village Voice would
have allowed it to maintain a greater presence over time, but
without a resolution of some key “digital divide” factors of
access, familiarity, and control over technology, my work with
the Somali community only could point to strong potentials.
Access and LimitationsVillage Voice was a design project that pointed to the potential of a
new approach for delivering technology to an underprivileged,
localized community. The lack of access or fluency with digital
technology compromised what had been a generally positive set
of results. Indeed, Somali Development Center leaders explained
that fewer than 40 percent of Somali refugees in the Boston
area had at-home broadband Internet access, which was necessary
to access Village Voice. However, I found through a set of
interviews with Somali community members that there had been
an increase in accessing the system among those who had
visited the places that maintained Web-enabled kiosks, and that
some of the collected video content had been screened on more
accessible media such as the community’s weekly cable access
television programs. Indeed, Village Voice was a study of a new
approach toward bestowing a community with a deeper level of
control over its digital public space. I believe that infrastructural
access issues should not compromise the process of technology
design, and that my results demonstrated the potential for such a
system to integrate a community along lines that other projects
have not.
108 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Srinivasan
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
Concluding Thoughts
This paper discussed the approach of community-driven content
and ontology to revolutionize the ability to make a technologically
mediated community space more deeply engaging. In my work
with Village Voice, I observed that ontology could become a
dynamic structure that can model a community and the cultural
material that it can produce. Thus, ontology-based designs can
enable community media systems to articulate the important
issues across a community. I have demonstrated this idea
through the introduction of a methodology that can allow a
designer to work with communities, solicit and archive important
community information, and frame these experiences in terms of
relevant community themes that have been articulated by
members themselves.
Significant amounts of research remain to be done to better
understand how to maintain dynamic models of communities
and how to further empower community media systems. Indeed,
a fascinating next step would be to begin to apply Village Voice
to connect Somali refugee communities throughout the United
States and world, potentially bringing fractured families and
friends together. However, this research points to the empowering
potential of digital places for disadvantaged communities.
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 109
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
Bibliography
P. Chesnais, S. Elo, A. Shaw, and M. Shaw, “Enriching Communities: Harbingers ofNews in the Future,” IBM Systems Journal 35 (1996) 369–380.
J.L. Borges, Ficciones (New York, Penguin Books: 1945).
J. Campbell, The Power Of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988).
R. Deutsche, “Reasonable Urbanism,” in J. Copjek and M. Sorkin, eds., GivingGround: The Politics of Propinquity (New York: Verso Press, 1999).
K. Hampton, “The Diversity of Personal and Neighborhood Networks in the Informa-tional City,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American SociologicalAssociation (Atlanta, July 2003).
K. Hampton and B. Wellman, “Neighboring in Netville,” City and Community 2(2002) 277–311.
C. Haythornwaite, “Strong, Weak, and Latent Ties and the Impact of New Media,”The Information Society 18 (2002) 385–401.
R. Kraut, M. Miller, and J. Siegal, “Collaboration in Performance of Physical Tasks:Effects on Outcomes and Communication,” Proceedings of CSCW (November 1996)21–30.
A. Lord, The Singer of Tales (New York: Atheneum Press, 1960).
D. McAdams, The Stories We Live By (New York: William Morrow And Company,1993).
W. Mitchell, E-topia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
J. D. Novak, Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilita-tive Tools in Schools and Corporations (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, 1998).
D. Putnam and M. Noor, “The Somalis: Their History and Culture” (Washington,D.C.: The Refugee Center, 1993).
H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier(Reading: Addison & Wesley Co., 1993).
A. Shaw, Social Constructionism and the Inner City, Doctor Dissertation(Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept of Architecture.Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1995).
B. Smith, W. Bender, I. Endter, J. Driscoll, M. Turpeinen, D. Quam, “Silver Stringersand Junior Journalists: Active Information Producers,” IBM Systems Journal 39(2000) 730–748.
M.A. Smith and P. Kollock, Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge,2001).
110 Journal of Urban Technology/August 2004
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009
M. Sorkin, “Traffic In Democracy,” in J. Copjek and M. Sorkin, eds., Giving Ground:The Politics of Propinquity (New York: Verso Press, 1999).
R. Srinivasan, Village Voice: Expressing Narrative through Community DesignedOntologies, master’s thesis (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Dept of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002).
L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
B. Wellman, “Physical Place and Cyber Place: The Rise of Personalized Network-ing,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25 (2001) 227–252.
A. Yussuf, “The Somali Development Center of Jamaica Plain, MA” unpublishedmemorandum (2000).
Reconstituting the Urban through Community-Articulated Digital Environments 111
Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution Psy Press Titles] At: 18:56 29 September 2009