In this workshop, Michael Frisch (Professor of American Studies, University at Buffalo, emeritus, and Talking Pictures, LLC, at The Innovation Center, Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus ) explores a digital social-media approach for broad-based sharing and collecting in the COVID-19 pandemic. (discussant David Dean, Carleton University, Canada, and moderator Thomas Cauvin, University of Luxembourg).

You will soon receive the link to join the workshop.

Responding to broad prompts, people are invited to choose or take photographs evoking what they wish to share, from their vantage. In writing or voice, they describe what these images say and mean to them. The result can be a compact core of image, story, reflection, and insight—on their own ground, and in their own terms. My colleagues and I have recently developed a cloud-based utility, PixStoriplus that does just this (www.pixstori.com and www.pixstoriplus.com ) It combines crowd-sourced photos and brief voice recordings or texts; there has recently been considerable interest in what it can add to Covid-19 documenting projects. But the short-form approach is broader in implication and use than one tool, and could be applied and deployed in many ways.

At its core is the notion that responses to photographs, especially self-chosen or taken, opens a natural, open-ended story-telling oral history mode. People describe the photo, and “grounded but not bounded” by the image, they often then “take off” to broad reflections. Surprisingly meaningful in concentrated short form, these become even more so, for public history, when brought together like tiny “tiles” in a mosaic to tell broader stories. This is easy to do because they are “born small,” modular units easily coded, sorted, and combinable by themes-- for a community, a nation, and perhaps especially for comparative and cumulative documentation of a global pandemic touching everyone’s lives. The workshop includes COVID-19 multimedia short-form examples, PixStories in this case. Participants are encouraged to examine a few in advance as a base for discussion and questions.

My Daughters Visit! [reflections by Mother, 93, Buffalo, NY]

https://www.pixstoriplus.com/group-pYMoEipyErsEoEPMH/tiles/ZX2t5pqjSqpN7s4aS

How COVID-19 Influences my life [International Graduate Student, Buffalo, NY]

https://www.pixstoriplus.com/group-QdTJi7JEbMnJoEaKL/tiles/Bnr2uibiWqcAHxoYw

Ology Brewing Company’s Home Made Hand Sanitizer [Tallahassee, Florida]

https://www.pixstoriplus.com/group-Pruq5herzKYsRTGiw/tiles/adPSo2v7zSDqpSugp

Pass Card [from student project in Hangzhou, China]

https://www.pixstoriplus.com/tiles/myRQptqYHcdnTQKXe

My Dad has started growing flowers [from student project in Hangzhou, China]

https://www.pixstoriplus.com/tiles/GvtFjdbBMysopbRTY