Edna and I at A5u: Thoughts towards my new digital story

For my digital story assignment, I have decided not to do something related to my final project, but something more personal. My final project is still a little fuzzy, and when I heard we were going to have to do something more “creative” as one of our requirements for this course through the creation of a digital story, I wanted to take the opportunity to be free and make it a personally meaningful work. I also wanted a topic that would challenge me to tackle the technological elements that go into digitally creating a project like this and yet have content that was not so much challenging as fulfilling.

 So now some backstory to my project…I have an allotment plot in a very large community garden in Brooklyn at Floyd Bennett Field. It is an odd place for a community garden, since there isn’t really any “community” around it, unlike the other community garden I belong to which is really part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Instead, this community garden is located in the Gateways National Park, at what used to be New York City’s first municipal airport, though the airport long ago ceased to operate. The space was left, and eventually became incorporated into the national park system. In the meantime, tempted by so much empty, unused space, squatter gardeners began to colonize a large area near the now-empty hanger buildings, and the Floyd Bennett Garden Association (FBGA) slowly evolved from those first pioneers. It is now one of the biggest community gardens in the country, and much more similar to British allotment sites than the typical American urban community garden.

I have been a member of the garden for four and a half years now. My first plot was a very tiny “starter” plot, all of fifty square feet. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it was small, and I looked with envy at plots that were two, three, or even four times the size of ours. I was incredibly excited, then, when during the early Spring 2012, we received a notification that our application for a bigger plot had been approved! We had a double plot! One hundred square feet! I immediately began to dream very big dreams indeed.

We went to visit and were incredibly impressed with the garden. It was full of weeds, but had three big raised beds in the middle and beds around three sides. As an extra bonus there were two large shrubs planted in both of the back corners, which we later found out were a mysterious kind of cherry tree. The soil was amazing, and while the paths were a bit of a mess, the whole plot gave off a feeling of fertility and generosity.

As we worked the plot that first spring, we came to find out that the plot had belonged for many, many years to one of the founders of the garden, a woman named Edna, who had died the previous summer. As a little tribute, people who knew her and those who had neighboring plots kept the plot weeded and planted while she was too sick to garden, but of course, the plot couldn’t remain empty and it was assigned to us the following year. While she had been alive, she had been a central figure in the garden, and many people came over to tell us how fortunate we were to get this plot, and how wonderful Edna had been. And we came to believe it last year as we worked the plot; it had a spirit, a character, all of its own, which, as an experienced (previously professional) gardener, I have only encountered in garden spaces that were much loved by the amazing people who gardened there.

I don’t even know her last name! So for my digital story I would like to tell the story of that plot at FBGA, A5U, and get to know the woman whose spirit still resides in my garden plot. On the way, I think I hope to capture a little of what it is like to be a part of a community garden, and the connection that community gardeners feel to their plots.

Finally, I am very committed to the recording of oral history, and feel strongly that oral history is a precious resource we need to try to preserve. I feel it is an important way to connect to a community and to grow that community. Perhaps I have been subconsciously influenced by the ethos of the turn-of-the-twentieth century folk music collecting that is part of my musicology research involving figures like Ralph Vaughan Williams! I see this project as part of a bigger project in which I am involved, where I am writing down bits of FBGA garden history and publishing them in the garden newsletter. This will be a wonderful opportunity to explore how that oral history can be captured multi-modally, using real voices in all sorts of ways.

I plan to tell the story using photographs, voiceovers, text, and background music. I have photographs of the garden, and can take more of what I need, so the visual content is pretty much already available. Of course it would be wonderful if I could find some photographs of Edna, and it is possible that back issues of the garden newsletter might contain some of these. A definite part of my project will be interviewing some old-timer FBGA gardeners about Edna. There are a few that are still active in the garden, and many, many people knew Edna, so I feel that once I put out some feelers and start talking to people, I will be able to draw on others’ memories of the past. I will juxtapose this with my own experience gardening there over the past couple of years. I’m hoping that a few of the people I talk to will actually let me record them speaking and let me use their voices in my story.

I don’t know yet what software platform I will use to produce my digital story; I’m hoping that we have a discussion in class about this, and that I can try a few of them out during our workshop time in the computer classroom, in order to get a feel for the advantages and disadvantages of what is available. I am leaning towards IMovie, since I am a Mac user. I also want to explore Audacity for many reasons, some related to this project and others to my musicological research. I may ask some of my musicology colleagues what they use to edit sound clips.

I think an important area to consider regarding my project touches on the issues discussed by Nelson and Hull in their essay “Self-Presentation Through Multimedia: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Digital Storytelling.” Nelson and Hull draw on Bahktin’s concepts of heteroglossia and addressivity to problematize the multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and “addressees” that are engendered by the interplay of modalities in multi-modal works such as digital stories. As I have described above, one of the central goals I have for my project is the incorporation of the voices of others in my story, both descriptively and literally. Nelson and Hull made me think more deeply about what this might bring to my project, both in terms of presenting problems but also in celebrating the heteroglossic potential in my little digital story.

 I see this working on several levels. The first will be very concrete, as I choose what to include in my story from the various interviews I conduct with FBGA members who knew Edna. Do I just describe what they say? Do I quote from interviews, and if so, which ones and which parts? Do I actually include a voice over from another garden member? The degree to which I allow others’ voices to be “present” in my story will introduce aspects of heteroglossia, literally and symbolically. It will be interesting to see how much control I feel I need to exert over what they say and what I want my story to say. How comfortable might I be with competing meanings? Where will I find the balance between what I want to communicate and my story being open to other meanings suggested by the voices of others?

Other decisions related to heteroglossia center around the bigger issue of whose story will be told in this digital production. I see three stories here; Edna’s, of course, the garden and the gardeners who a part of the community, and my own. They are intertwined and there is no way to separate out one and exclude the others. This will be a story that is created as the greater amalgam of all three of these small stories, in a way, I hope, that mimics the fuzzy boundaries of individuals and communities to which they belong. I feel that heteroglossia is one of the goals of my project. This is easy for me to say, absolutely, and I do know that, like the two young women used as case studies by Nelson and Hull, the difficulties will come when actual decisions need to be made about the choice of voices to represent and when, and my own need to communicate central meanings that I see in the relationship between Edna, the garden, and myself.