I-Views : a storymaking community of, by and for the audience

Abstract

This thesis presents I-Views, a system that permits individuals to use published, communally owned media clips to author narratives by assembling clips, and to build communities of similar interests based on comparing these narratives. To facilitate sharing of on-line motion pictures and initiate conversations among storytellers/re-tellers and audiences, I-Views allows widely distributed groups of people to view, edit, compare, evaluate and discuss video material over the Internet. There are two types of tools: web-based video studio tools and virtual community building tools. The former allows the user to view, select, save, re-sequence and publish video clips; while the latter allows the user to initiate dialogues by matching common interests and assumptions and build virtual communities around stories. By offering shared authorship, tools and virtual environments, I-Views demonstrates new story forms such as "Sharable Documentary." Currently, we are evaluating the prototype system using video footage documenting the Junior Summit '98, which is a cross-cultural, cross-geographical and multi-language project involving numerous people, including thousands of children, Junior Summit staff, sponsors, Media Lab faculty and students. Specifically, an international group of filmmakers including four junior filmmakers have contributed more than one hundred hours of footage shot. The current video database includes eighty streaming video clips selected from the footage shot.