(no subject)
hey, it's been a long time since i've even breezed by livejournal, and i'm starting to feel really guilty. I haven't even caught up on all the friends' posts that I've missed. I'm still working on that. I also really want to start writing about all the crap that's gone down since the beginning of CTY. a fucking lot has happened, on many fronts. I think it was a good summer, which is a pretty big thing considering the simultaneous onset of college visits and mono near the end.
i'ma start recounting my summer in installments, more for me than for anyone else. i'f you're procrastinating, gimme a visit.
in any case, the trigger cause of this update/promise is recent progress in this project on which i'm working with this pretty cool lady by the name of shannon stephens. her mom's name is pat, which makes her pat stephens, which is a really cool name too.
in any case, shannon and I are working on this cool thing that she came up with called the Jeliya project. the concept is that the story is the basic unit of human communication, and that narratives are the universal vehicle for wisdom and understanding.
(a super-casual, very literalistic proof, or at least a demonstration) the goal of communication is to make another person have in their mind the same idea or piece of information that you do so that they can evaluate it. you do this by making a statement: something happens, will happen or has happened. The statement is the building block of the story. no major language takes the form of anything but sentences, or statements. there is no other way to communicate; this narrative format is central to all communication. the other person evaluates the significance of the statement by contextualizing it as an event in a series of causal events having both causes and effects. what is a series of causal events? a story. how do we ensure that the communication is successful? by providing context: the series of causal events surrounding the statement, its precipitating factors and its implications, its story. (the end)
Shannon would probably put it in more poetic terms, but I just wanted to get a somewhat technical basis out there so this whole thing doesn't just seem like a whim. Stories are amazingly powerful. they always have been, for good reason, and we're collecting them. the idea is hopefully to create a real, large repository of true stories, arranged regionally and thematically, to foster cultural understanding. there is no better way to understand someone than to hear their story, and no better way to understand a culture than to hear both the stories of its people and those stories it considers significant. we're starting with stories from places from which stories are rarely heard, third-world countries, war-torn countries, and the like, but the goal really is to spread and generate a real resource, some sort of primary source collection, an almanac of cultural experience. that's the best I can do to explain it right now; i'm tired.
In any case, I've been working on bringing a website up to speed that won't cost much (if anything) to run, since this project is unfunded, at least initially. it's gonna go live soon, probably at www.thejeliyaproject.com if we can finish registering the domain. I also need to scrape some working software together. I'm looking at wordpress, possibly preinstalled on a LAMP VM. it's all gonna be served off of shannon's desktop in princeton with the help of our friend DynDNS, if that gives you an idea of how low-budget this thing is. it's hopefully gonna be up and running within a week.
anyway, that's the good news of the day.
by the way, Jeliya is a Malinké term that translates to "transmission by blood." It is most often used in reference to the knowledge of Griots, West African wandering poets, praise singers, musicians and repositories of oral tradition.
(wikipedia paraphrase)
i'ma start recounting my summer in installments, more for me than for anyone else. i'f you're procrastinating, gimme a visit.
in any case, the trigger cause of this update/promise is recent progress in this project on which i'm working with this pretty cool lady by the name of shannon stephens. her mom's name is pat, which makes her pat stephens, which is a really cool name too.
in any case, shannon and I are working on this cool thing that she came up with called the Jeliya project. the concept is that the story is the basic unit of human communication, and that narratives are the universal vehicle for wisdom and understanding.
(a super-casual, very literalistic proof, or at least a demonstration) the goal of communication is to make another person have in their mind the same idea or piece of information that you do so that they can evaluate it. you do this by making a statement: something happens, will happen or has happened. The statement is the building block of the story. no major language takes the form of anything but sentences, or statements. there is no other way to communicate; this narrative format is central to all communication. the other person evaluates the significance of the statement by contextualizing it as an event in a series of causal events having both causes and effects. what is a series of causal events? a story. how do we ensure that the communication is successful? by providing context: the series of causal events surrounding the statement, its precipitating factors and its implications, its story. (the end)
Shannon would probably put it in more poetic terms, but I just wanted to get a somewhat technical basis out there so this whole thing doesn't just seem like a whim. Stories are amazingly powerful. they always have been, for good reason, and we're collecting them. the idea is hopefully to create a real, large repository of true stories, arranged regionally and thematically, to foster cultural understanding. there is no better way to understand someone than to hear their story, and no better way to understand a culture than to hear both the stories of its people and those stories it considers significant. we're starting with stories from places from which stories are rarely heard, third-world countries, war-torn countries, and the like, but the goal really is to spread and generate a real resource, some sort of primary source collection, an almanac of cultural experience. that's the best I can do to explain it right now; i'm tired.
In any case, I've been working on bringing a website up to speed that won't cost much (if anything) to run, since this project is unfunded, at least initially. it's gonna go live soon, probably at www.thejeliyaproject.com if we can finish registering the domain. I also need to scrape some working software together. I'm looking at wordpress, possibly preinstalled on a LAMP VM. it's all gonna be served off of shannon's desktop in princeton with the help of our friend DynDNS, if that gives you an idea of how low-budget this thing is. it's hopefully gonna be up and running within a week.
anyway, that's the good news of the day.
by the way, Jeliya is a Malinké term that translates to "transmission by blood." It is most often used in reference to the knowledge of Griots, West African wandering poets, praise singers, musicians and repositories of oral tradition.
(wikipedia paraphrase)