Telestory

Synopsis
My thesis project for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, Telestory is a secure web and phone based interface for recording stories to share with future generations of one’s family.

Description
Mark Twain demanded that 100 years pass before the publication of his memoirs so that anyone referenced therein was no longer living. What stories do you want to pass on and how long will you wait to reveal them? Telestory generates calls at a determined frequency determined by the user (once a month, twice a year) and prompts him or her to record a story. The stories are then saved on the site until the user’s 85th birthday before automatically become public. While we can’t (yet) live forever, our voices can.

Personal Statement
I am a huge proponent of social media and social networking sites. In fact, I participate in over 30 different sites for a variety of reasons ranging from hobbies to professional interests to social interactions and relationship management. And while my participation is only for myself, I can’t help thinking about how future generations of my family might benefit from a bird’s eye view of all this published material. Unfortunately, all this data is pretty much under lockdown. With little agreement about how to preserve and archive digital assets, I wanted to create a very simple system for telling and preserving stories from one generation to the next.

Background
My interest in what happens to all of the ephemera we create online during our lifetime has led me down similar paths at ITP. In the Spring of my first year I created a project called Gotham Guide.

Visitors to Gotham Guide are greeted with a map of Manhattan. Together with the tour guides from Real New York Tours, I created a series of videos at some of the most interesting locations around the city and then posted quick-response (QR) codes in the vicinity of where the recordings were made. Anyone with a QR scanning application on his or her mobile phone could scan the QR code and watch the video explaining the historical significance of the space in which he or she stood. I later turned this in to an Augmented Reality app.

During the fall of my second year, I became frustrated with the difficulty in retrieving and capturing all the data from the various social media communities in which I participate. The project I built in response, titled “All My Life” repurposed lifestreaming software to create an archive of all my online activity going back several years. Instead of visualizing the data in linear time, I extracted a random sample of updates in Processing and placed each one in a bubble that would only reveal the contents when touched on the screen. In this way, I wanted to explore a new way for interacting with all of the content we create independent of time, and in some way try and simulate the feeling of nostalgia one gets from looking through an old high school yearbook.

Audience
Telestory will probably appeal most to people with children. My testing revealed that users with kids felt more of a need to tell stories when they knew there were offspring to pass them to. However, I believe Telestory is for anyone that wants to document their lives for future generations.

User Scenario

• A user signs up for an account by creating a user name and password as well as submitting her name, birthday and phone number.
• The user then selects which categories of questions she would like to answer from the following: Romance, Technology, Money, Family History, Education, Childhood, Food, Decisions
• The user provides a phone number and indicates how often she wants to be called. This frequency could be as often as once per month or as infrequent as twice per year.
• During each automatically generated call, the user will be asked one question from a list of over 100 and prompted to share a story. The story will be recorded and added to the database for that user.
• The system then calculates the user’s birthday and sets all stories private until the user is 85 years old.
• On the backend, users can log in and curate their content, change their call times and the time at which the stories will become public.
• Users also have the option of sending an email to their friends and family inviting them to call in and submit questions that will help prompt the user to tell a story that is meaningful for the family.

Implementation
Telestory is built using a combination of PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and Asterisk.

Acknowledgments

There are so many people without whom this project would not have been brought to fruition:

Design: Noah Bell

Project Scope & Direction: Jordana Kritzer, Clay Shirky, Nancy Hechinger, Marianne Petit, Dan O’Sullivan, Alison Cornyn and Thesis Class, Nick Yulman, John Dimatos & Alex Kaufman

Beta Testers: Megan Hill, Emily Madison, Aaron Kleiner, Hayley Duitch, Jeremy Paige, Ashley Alderfer, Cheryl Uhrmacher, Jan Kritzer, Jake Bridge, Mark Maimon, Lyn Kritzer, Rebecca Masback & Jiwon Lee

Voiceover: Nathan Kaufman

Technical: Chris Kairalla, Amit Snyderman, Steve Aquillano, Dan Monzy Aminzade

View my presentations on Telestory:

Telestory Thesis Presentation from Aaron on Vimeo.