PhoneMe: A mobile phone-native genre of poetry for the social media age.
What:
Talk
Part of:
When:
Thursday 16 Aug 08:30
08:30 AM
to 09:30 AM
(1 hour)
Where:
Pavillon J.-A. DeSève UQAM -
DS-1540
Discussion:
0
This presentation regards to development of a place-based, geotagged,
online mapping of an innovative, mobile phone-native, spoken word genre
of poetry. The website www.phonemeproject.com hosts poems that are left
as messages by calling 1-604-PHONEME (746-6363) and leaving your name,
location of the call or topical location of the poem, title of the poem,
and then recording a poem of up to four minutes in length. The poem is
pinned on an interactive map that features a google street view image of
the location, the MP3 audio file, and in some cases the text of the
poem. Longer poems can serialized. The intent of this project is to give
voice to community-based writing about real places and spaces within
the community. As such, it began with a year of workshops conducted in
the downtown east side of Vancouver, one of the poorest neighbourhoods
in North America, in order that poets in the community to speak back to
media representations of their neighbourhood. We have moved on to
working with schools, providing workshops for hundreds of students in
British Columbia, Canada. These workshops provide instruction in
creative uses of mobile phones and techniques for performance of spoken
word poetry, as well as touching on broader issues related to tagging
and identity. The intent of this project is to offer a form of social
media for the sharing of poetry and networking among poets, and as well,
to provide a means for others to get a poet’s-eye-view on locations
around the world. The site can be navigated by location, by contributing
poet, or by a reverse-chronological tour through posted poems (or
phonemes). We are currently working on automating this initiative with
innovative tagging and search functions, as well as user-curated content
management. This presentation will include the opportunity for
participants to follow some of our writing workshop templates, create a
phoneme (a Phone Poem), and have it pinned by location on our
interactive map. The presentation will review some of the technical
challenges and opportunities that the project has encountered over the
two years since it began.
As such, this presentation focuses on two of the thematic threads of the ELO 2018 conference, namely “Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits” and “Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence” by providing a sense of how spoken word can function online to provide a sense of presence through performance that is captured in situ, giving an ambient sense of location of the performance of a phone-native genre of creative writing / performance poetry. The presenters are members of the Digital Literacy Centre of the University of British Columbia where this project is currently situated.
As such, this presentation focuses on two of the thematic threads of the ELO 2018 conference, namely “Mobile technologies’ effect on writing and reading habits” and “Spoken screens: the gap between performance and presence” by providing a sense of how spoken word can function online to provide a sense of presence through performance that is captured in situ, giving an ambient sense of location of the performance of a phone-native genre of creative writing / performance poetry. The presenters are members of the Digital Literacy Centre of the University of British Columbia where this project is currently situated.
