Last updated on Mar 04, 2017.
Etherpad: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/IRC17-RenarrationWeb
Renarration is as natural as speaking.
Over the last few centuries, reading and writing have mostly defined what the world considers as transferrable knowledge while oral traditions and storytelling have taken a back seat. With recording devices, via smart phones, becoming commonplace the wheel is likely to turn again towards storytelling as the primary manner in which history will be recorded in the future. This is easily imaginable when we realize that even today, where with aeons of effort towards educating the peoples of the world, a large majority can only be considered as low-literate. Even among the literate, only a small percentage can be considered to be enthusiastic readers/writers and more so when it comes to cross cultural and cross linguistic barriers. While a comeback of the oral tradition in an all new manner begs us visit how a narrator refers to others and constructs a narrative, a specific case would be when one renarrates it for a new audience. We need a way to model the realization of a web of conversations on the Internet.
Renarration is an investigation of content accessibility for Inclusion of all. While aiding a process of discovering and developing alternative narratives for diverse groups of people we also look at how narratives can semantically carry story information that can be used in identifying and helping developing target-specific narratives. Also to be presented: The current status of W3C Web Annotation model coming out as a recommendation and how such a standard can influence the future of a decentralized social semantic web, and there by the Renarration Web. An architecture of a Web that intrinsically supports renarrations and the role of story comparison tools, a number of use cases of renarration along with some attempts of building tools for these use cases.
Concerns: #ResearchToolsAndInfrastructure, #BecomingDigital and #IndicLanguages
The idea of renarration will be situated using traditional and contemporary examples and the context will help us reflect on the state of the Web as we know it. Drawing from a recent literary work ‘In Search of Shiva’ by Mukunda Rao, the practices of renarration and its meaning in the lives and imaginations of people will be discussed, raising the question of web technology’s potential as an agent of renarration. Panelists will the introduce the current work of W3C Working Group on Web Annotation and the significance of this for the future Web and for ideas like that of renarration. One of the panelists will present tools for storytelling based on renarration. And another will present development of tools for story comparison. Significant time will be made available for audience participation.
Panel will conclude by presenting the current work on an architecture of Renarration Web.
We will have slides, show-and-tell videos and abstracts. Post-conference, we will either have a single academic paper together or separate ones from panelists.
Not applicable.
Anuja Mirchandaney has worked at the Alternative Law forum for around nine years largely focusing on labour law research and looking at laws that apply to the unorganized sector. In that connection she has also collaborated with NGOs who worked for the upliftment of such sectors of workers and was a resource person at their workshops. She wrote socio legal articles that looked at the wages situation of the workers be they domestic workers or garment workers in Bangalore. One of my more important works while at ALF was the writing and publishing manuals of different laws that apply to unorganized sector workers, for Minimum Wages and Workmen’s Injury compensation. After having left ALF she discontinued her legal work, and have worked in a traditional handicrafts gallery briefly and more recently, worked for four years in a school managing their library programme through which she was responsible to teach primary level children, English through reading and library based activities.
Deepak Prince is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology, Shiv Nadar university. His research work attempts to understand how humans live in a world of screens. He has recently been part of the Jallikattu protests and has been recording the many narrative practices of the event through the eyes of the State, police, media (print, TV and internet) and the dalits.
Dinesh is the Technical Director of Janastu(.org), a non-profit organisation. He has had various academic, research and industrial positions where he has worked on object-oriented programming, generation of software and courseware from specifications, structuring information for its use on the Internet and in creating visual stories from archives. As technical director of Janastu he works in Bangalore, India on issues like Web content accessibility for the low-literate, use of 3D methods for location interpretation, methods on using social semantic web concepts for storytelling and developing open source social platforms.
Janastu has been providing Free Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions and support to small non-profits (NPOs/NGOs) since 2002. This includes one-on-one consulting regarding their information management needs, building their online and offline knowledge bases, providing support to their projects by designing web-sites, configuring news-filters, helping them migrate to open source solutions, help deal with localization and Indian language issues, geographic information collection and necessary R&D.
Shalini has been working with a number of shepherds and participating in their network meetings. She is also developing apps that help track their nomadic tracks while also capturing the land use data. She will be briefly discuss the bio-cultural protocols that some shepherding communities have put it in writing and the need and tools developed to help renarrate these.
Dr. Srinath Srinivasa holds a PhD (magna cum laude) from the Berlin Brandenburg Graduate School for Distributed Information Systems (GkVI) Germany, an M.S. (by Research) from IIT-Madras and B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from The National Institute of Engineering (NIE) Mysore. He works in the broad areas of web science, multi-agent systems, network analysis and text mining. He is a member of various technical and organizational committees for international conferences. Currently, he heads the Web Science Lab and is a founder member of the Center for Data Sciences.