A Database of Memories
As part of the Digitized Diasporic Memory thesis project, a month-long study was conducted with seven people of African descent residing on Turtle Island: Joyce Tshiyoyo, Yvonne Mpwo, Philippe Kakana, Patricia Kanana Mwenda, Kahmaria Pingue, Solange L Tungu, and Candide Uyanze.
During the study, a collaborative database was developed where participants responded to the stories and anecdotes of other participants with their own.
Check out the database below!
A Deeper Dive
Participants met for a series of workshops and remote audio recording sessions where they developed prompts and shared memories. These audio segments were submitted to a collaborative database created with Airtable, allowing other participants to respond to each other both synchronously and asynchronously. Participants engaged in cross-cultural sense-making, building upon the previous speaker’s remarks with reference points from their respective cultures.
The relational nature of the database allows audience members to understand the relationships between different audio submissions. In the end, over a 130 audio segments from ~2hrs of recording were catalogued in the database and have been visualized as a network graph. The audio recordings have been made available for download and are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. The public-facing database was built using a self-hosted version of NocoDB, an open source alternative to Airtable.
