<videovortex> Palabras--Project Description (Modified by Geert Lovink)

[Sharon Daniel]

Palabras--Project Description

Palabras, which means "words" in Spanish, is a set of software tools 
and interfaces designed to facilitate collective self-representation, 
and promote social inclusion through participatory media production. 
Typically, in workshops at local cultural centers at each Palabras 
site, participants learn to use inexpensive digital video cameras to 
document  their daily lives and a custom-built web application to edit, 
organize, and share their videos online.

The simple, user-friendly design of the camera and online interfaces 
expands the pool of possible participants. The web application was 
devised to facilitate the discovery of connections between 
participants' personal stories, at each site and across cultures, 
allowing participants to label or "tag" their own video content and 
create an emergent, social taxonomy - or  "folksonomy" (folk+taxonomy).

Based on the concept of the "community computer," Palabras tools and 
workshops allow communities, not traditionally thought of as scholarly 
or academic, to produce knowledge and interpret their own experience. 
"While the "personal computer" provides a gateway to the Internet where 
communities can evolve, regardless of distance, the "community 
computer" is intended not to bypass, but to strengthen and empower 
communities of place, particularly marginalized communities. Unlike 
other media sharing web sites that utilize folksonomies, like Flickr, 
and youtube, Palabras employs tagging in the context of place-based 
workshops designed to give new communities access to the internet and 
to use media and information technologies to represent themselves and 
their own circumstances.

The current Palabras prototype maps the semantic associations thus 
generated between over 5000 videos created in Buenos Aires, Kiel 
(Germany), San Francisco, San Jose, and Darfur. Today, Palabras is also 
an expanding network of on-going collaborations with non-profit 
organizations that serve socially marginalized and technologically 
disenfranchised communities.
Palabras was initially developed during an intensive six-week residency 
at the "Centro HiperMediatico Experimental Latinoamericano", in Buenos 
Aires, Argentina and development continues in the context of a 
collaborative research project group within the Digital Arts/New Media 
MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Palabras - http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu

http://arts.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/further/palabras/palabras_demo.html - This 
URL links to a Quicktime movie screen capture of the current set of 
interactive interfaces for Palabras. This video shows how the 
interfaces are used. Please view first before proceeding to the site at 
http://palabrastranquilas.net.

http://palabrastranquilas.net - this URL links to the Palabras 
interfaces online - to browse clips simply select a site in the 
homepage or browser. To view the Palabras editor, add tags and build 
sequences you will need to log in to one of the existing sites as a 
workshop participant; to access the site "un mundo-eine welt," which 
represents a cross-cultural exchange between at-risk youth in four 
schools in Buenos Aires and four schools in Kiel, Germany, in the 
editor select the "filmstrip" icon in the upper left corner of the 
browser.

To access the site "respect," which represent the workshop-residency of 
Crear Vale la Pena in Kiel, in the editor select the "filmstrip" icon 
in the upper left corner of the browser.

http://palabrastranquilas.net/dev/ - This URL leads to the Palabras 
"development site" where you can access new "in-progress" interfaces. 
Here you will find a new version of the Palabras Home page and a new 
site browser which includes new tag search and sorted list search 
interfaces as well as a new clip and sequence player which allows 
participants to add comments on and bookmark each others clips and 
sequences. To add comments log into either of the account/password 
pairs given above.