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.