Carroll Parrott Blue is one persistent collaborator.

On my 45th birthday in 2002, I met Carroll at an event in the eastside of San Diego that was part of a project we had done with the Waitt Family Foundation and the Institute for the Future. Carroll was working on completing “The Dawn at My Back, Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing.” One thing led to another and she ended up presenting the work at the Digital Storytelling Festival that year, and generally blowing everyone away. Within a year she was winning an award at Sundance, and moving from her long time home in San Diego to a new job as a professor at the University of Central Florida.

Carroll’s interest in Digital Storytelling sustained our collaboration and Emily Paulos and I made a couple of trips to UCF, plans were hatched, and we had hoped to make a stab at creating a local project in Orlando’s African American community. As it worked out, Carroll, who was born and raised in Houston, was considering working in her hometown of Houston, about the time we were connecting with colleagues at the University of Houston. Dr. Bernard Robin, grad student Anne Rudnicki and others had been doing educational applications of digital storytelling for several years, and were interested in collaborating with CDS.

With a bit of luck, Carroll was able to make a connection with the UH College of Education through Bernard, and found herself over the summer of 2006 working on a mapping project with the Third Ward. The project initially was manifest as a class to create an installation at Project Row House, the renowned arts organization directed by Rick Lowe, but Carroll’s interest has since led her to build her own non-profit, The Dawn Project, which will be developing a number of projects to articulate the relationships between redevelopment, social memory, personal memory, and the visioning processes necessary to sustain and expand historic communities like the Third Ward.

In the Fall, we discussed using her efforts to create a prototype Storymapping project with residents of the Third Ward. As it happens, from 1978 to 1980, I had lived in Houston and one of my efforts was working with the SHAPE Center, an activist oriented community center. I started my work in theater there. So I knew the neighborhood, and had a sense of its history.

What I proposed to Carroll was a departure from our process in Digital Storytelling, what I called the Walking Story Circle. What I believed was that instead of people sharing the stories for the first time in a room, that everyone should hear the place stories in the place the stories described. My feeling was that we might accomplish two things, capture a recording of a story in the location (similar to Murmur) using audio and video recordings, and provide the group with a context for discussing the writing of a considered narrative as we would have in our normal workshops.

The results were promising. As we drove from site to site in the Third Ward, having people tell their stories with an audience helped some folks become animated about the issues and emotions connected to the story. For others, it was a bit more pressured than a one-on-one interview might have been. But for everyone, hearing the story and being present at the site, made them seem to connect more deeply to the meaning of the story, and the next day, when we held a story circle to discuss each story, people were tremendously engaged. The re-writes benefited from people’s encouragement, and we felt this made the written stories more powerful.

In any media process there is a blance between the clarity of the considered narratives, and spontaneity of the interview. Having the option to use either seemed appropriate. As we know from on-site radio, what you do not get with the written and recorded narration is the ambiance of the recordings on site, which helps the audience place themselves in the story. We considered using ambiance from each site captured during the original recording, but that seemed a bit odd.

We still have more to learn and discuss about this process, and we look forward to the other collaborators joining in the dialogue.