How to Collect Personal Stories and Artifacts Effectively

TL;DR

To effectively collect personal stories, engage in documenting your own experiences using sketchbooks and found objects. Explore digital footprints by analyzing feelings from online sources, as demonstrated in the 'We Feel Fine' project, and immerse yourself in physical experiences like documenting communal activities, as in 'The Whale Hunt' and happiness interviews in Bhutan.

Transcript

So I'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways. This is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life. You might enjoy the awkwardly tight, cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons. Anyway, it was a time when I was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories. So this is a picture of me holding one of the fi... Read More

Key Insights

• 📷 Collecting personal artifacts: The speaker has been keeping sketchbooks filled with various items and sketches that document their experiences, giving glimpses into their life.
• 💭 Finding meaning in found objects: The speaker collects found objects, such as a photograph with a mysterious note on it, that offer only partial glimpses into someone's life.
• 🌐 Online footprints: The speaker utilizes computer programs to collect and analyze online footprints, such as blog posts and social media updates, to extract feelings and demographic information from them.
• 👥 We Feel Fine project: The speaker created a project that collects and visualizes feelings expressed in blog posts, using dots to represent feelings and colors to indicate their sentiments.
• 🐋 The Whale Hunt project: The speaker documented their experience of living with a family of Inuit Eskimos during their whale hunting season, photographing the entire process at regular intervals.
• 🌏 Diving deep into stories: The speaker has shifted their focus to exploring individual stories, using a web interface to extract specific narratives and elements from a larger story, such as location, time, and excitement level.
• 😊 Happiness project: The speaker traveled to Bhutan to interview locals about their concept of gross national happiness and documented their experiences through interviews, photographs, and wishes written on balloons.
• 🙏 Balloons in the mountains: The wishes collected from the happiness project were taken to a sacred place in Bhutan and hung among prayer flags, symbolizing the hope for these wishes to come true.

Questions & Answers

Q: What inspired the speaker to start collecting stories from the internet?

The speaker was studying computer science at Princeton University and noticed the abundance of personal information and stories shared online, which sparked their interest in collecting these digital footprints.

Q: How does the project "We Feel Fine" analyze and collect feelings expressed online?

"We Feel Fine" uses computer programs to scan newly posted blog entries every few minutes, searching for phrases like "I feel" and "I am feeling," and collects demographic information about the author. It has collected over 10.5 million feelings so far.

Q: How did the speaker document a whale hunt and what was their approach?

The speaker spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, documenting their annual spring whale hunt. They took photos every five minutes to capture the changing pace of their experience and used a web interface to extract specific narratives from the story.

Q: What was the speaker's project in Bhutan about and what did they do?

In Bhutan, the speaker focused on the concept of happiness and interviewed people, asking them about their happiest day, what makes them happy, and their wishes. They also took photos and inflated balloons according to the participants' self-rated happiness level. The balloons were later hung among prayer flags in a sacred place called Dochula.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The speaker shares their interest in collecting stories and artifacts from their own life and the lives of others through sketchbooks and found objects.

• They talk about their project called "We Feel Fine," where they use computer programs to collect and analyze personal feelings expressed online.

• The speaker introduces their work with physical experiences, such as documenting a whale hunt and interviewing people in Bhutan about happiness.