Showing posts with label memory mapping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory mapping. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

St. John's Memories with Melanie Tucker

(01 02 004) Water Street, St. John's. View looking east with Ayre and Sons to the right.
Photo courtesy of Geography Collection of Historical Photographs of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Last week Dale and I presented at The Rooms' Research Workshop on Collecting Community History. In the morning there were presentations from The Rooms' staff on how to use their collections for researching community history. The participants also got a tour of the archives.
Dale Jarvis interviewing Melanie Tucker.
In the afternoon session Dale gave an overview of how to do an oral history project including planning in advance, focusing the project, and support and funding that is available. He also did a mock interview, and explained the process of memory mapping or the People, Places, and Culture workshops we run at the Heritage Foundation. I also gave a brief presentation on what to do with the material once you have completed the oral interviews and how to present the material back to the community. If you want more information on how to complete oral history projects please visit our Oral History Project Guide.
Participants of The Rooms' Research Workshop on Collecting Community History.
Melanie Tucker, an archivist with The Rooms, was interviewed by Dale about her memories of growing up in St. John's, going to school, working with the Provincial Archives, and in particular her memories of Water Street, St. John's. If you want to hear more about buying seal flippers, riding the bus, Woolworth's Department Store and the taste of their donuts, buying shoes at the Arcade, or the sights and sounds of the Mount Cashel Christmas raffle listen to the short interview below!



After the mock interview Dale explained the benefits of having community members think about and map out the important people, places, and traditions found in the community. He explained how you can print large community maps at the Provincial Government's Land Management Division Office. Dale brought a large map of St. John's and gave each of the workshop participants a couple of recipe/index cards to fill out with memories. Once everyone had a chance to fill out a memory they were placed on the map. The participants glued their cards to their map and taped a ribbon to the corresponding building in which the memories took place.. If you want to start an oral history project or run a people, place, and culture workshop give us a call at 739-1892 ex. 5 or email ich@heritagefoundation.ca
If you want to know more about People, Places, and Culture Workshops click here!
A recipe card with  Water Street memory.
Recipe card with Water Street memory.
~Terra Barrett

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Living Heritage Podcast Ep054 Memory Maps



Marlene Creates is an environmental artist and poet who lives in Portugal Cove. Underlying all her work is an interest in place—not as a geographical location but a process that involves memory, multiple narratives, ecology, and language. Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings both across Canada and internationally, and is in many public collections, including the National Gallery of Canada.

In this episode of the Living Heritage Podcast, folklorist Dale Jarvis sits down with Marlene to discuss how she got her start in art, how she found herself in Newfoundland, her work in Newfoundland and Labrador on place, the importance of place, several recent projects including her memory maps and important place awards, and her new book “Brickle, Nish, and Knobbly: A Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow”.

Listen on the Digital Archive:
http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/ich_oral/id/686/rec/1



Wednesday, January 8, 2014

New one day workshop: How to create a GPS- triggered smartphone app

How to create a GPS- triggered smartphone app for walkers without having to be a technical genius. A 1-day WORKSHOP for heritage workers, community groups, oral historians, museum & tourism professionals, writers, artists, sound designers.

• Bring sounds, voices, memories, to the place where they happen • Take oral histories off the shelf and place them in a landscape. • Create location-based history, fiction, short stories, dramas. • Create a soundwalk in any location. • Place-based interpretation

Organizers Chris Brookes and Annie McEwan launched Inside/Outside Battery in October as a free smartphone app "walkers companion" to the Battery area of St. John's. You may have seen it on Here & Now, The Telegram or The Scope. Using GPS, it triggers sounds and stories as the walker passes different locations in the community. You can get an impression of how it works by watching a short video on our website: www.insideoutsidebattery.ca

One Day, One App: We can show you how to make this kind of app without being a computer wizard. You don't have to know html coding. You don't have to be techno-expert. We're not. We created Inside/Outside Battery using user-friendly web-based tools. We're offering a one-day weekend workshop that will guide you through the hands-on experience of making your own location-based app, using the methods we employed. You'll leave the workshop with a basic app that you've created yourself - something that you can continue to build and offer to your community. The heritage, tourism, and artistic uses of such an app are limited only by your imagination.

Workshop leaders: Independent radio producers Chris Brookes and Annie McEwen. Brookes' radio documentary features have won over forty international awards including the Peabody Award and the Prix Italia, and have been broadcast around the world. McEwen holds an MA in Folklore from Memorial University and has been working in the field of folklore and oral history for four years. Her work has aired on CBC Radio, PRX Remix, and Cowbird.com.

Date: Sunday, January 26th Time: 9am – 5pm Fee: $100 preregistration required (there are 8 spots available)

Location: 29 Outer Battery Road, St. John’s To register call Annie at 709-770-3201, or email annierosamcewen@gmail.com

Registration deadline January 22

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Making Memory Maps

On Saturday November 10th, the ICH team at the Heritage Foundation put on a Memory Map Workshop facilitated by visual artist Marlene Creates. We had a good turnout with around 20 participants ranging from Memorial University students and faculty to community organization representatives and other people who have an interest in mapping projects.

Marlene first talked about some of her previous mapping work, including an excursion to Labrador to make memory maps with elders, as well as projects which involved asking community members to give awards to special places in their towns. After setting a foundation for how memory maps are made and how they can be useful tools in learning more about a community, she asked the participants to make a map of their own. We all sat down with paper, pencils and pencil crayons to draw a map from memory of a place that we feel closely connected to. One of Marlene's techniques that I found quite useful is to put tracing paper over a foundation map in order to create layers with specific themes. For example, on tracing paper above my memory map, I indicated where all of the vanished buildings once stood in my Mother's hometown. Other layers that I could have chosen to add include green spaces/trees, waterways and footpaths. Doing such layers asks the map maker to think about the space and visualize what it looks like (or looked like in the past) and how it makes use of space. My map, along with all the others made on that day, became a celebration of our special places, both past and present, from very personal perspectives.

Marlene Creates giving a talk on making memory maps.

Workshop participant working on the foundational layer of her memory map. 


Workshop participants working on their personal memory maps. 




A second layer is added to the map using tracing paper and colored pencils. This participant marks off the social spaces of her hometown, with indications of gender and frequency through the size and color of her dots. 



Workshop participant showing the map that she created for the workshop. After this we added a third and final layer which involved writing down information about the places marked off on our maps. We were encouraged to be as creative as we wanted to be!
One of the last things we did together during the workshop was share the contents of our maps with the other participants. It was very interesting to see how diverse the range in topic and style was. Some maps were very traditional with streets and buildings, others with more innovative with only one building and it's associated memories, plants, animals, and other unexpected features showing up. It was clear to us how mapping from memory can be used in many ways for all kinds of different personal and/or community building activities. More documentation and information regarding Marlene Creates' mapping projects can be seen on her website: http://www.marlenecreates.ca/ .
-Lisa