Since no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account, and since the process of producing meaning is necessarily collective, everyone's account within a specified community needs to be encouraged. -Linda Alcoff, 1995 [1] ABSTRACT We present an approach and a tool for helping individuals express small story-like expressions of personal perspectives in the context of larger, collage-like incubators of public opinions. Our goal is to work with people to create technologically supported public discourse spheres in which they can both represent personal views and practise new ways of forming collective opinions. We present the design and use of one public sphere system, TexTales, a large-scale photographic installation to which people can send SMS text message captions. We review one community's experiences with TexTales, and discuss the insights we gained about how residents scale and ground their civic discourse and move between expressions of individual perspectives and public opinions.Keywords: public opinion, civic discourse, multimodal interfaces, intermodal literacies, SMS text, interactive community projection, citizen journalism.
IntroductionCivic discourse is, in a sense, like storytelling. Public spheres -from kitchens to Internet chat rooms -are filled with people experimenting with ideas, practising arguments and learning from each other by trading perspectives through narrative. As these stories are constructed in -and, in turn help to construct -public spheres, they become both expressions of individual perspectives and the building blocks of public opinions. It is in these spaces that distinctions between good citizens, good storytellers and good learners blur as participants practise a kind of communicative dexterity, moving among a variety of views, roles and scales. Our principal contribution is a way for individuals and communities to form both new opinions and new ways of forming opinions. Our aim is to develop public spheres that explicitly support the development of multiple perspectives through a plurality of voices and expressive modalities.
This paper uses a taxation assessment to analyze the relations between taxable peasant wealth and regional marketing geography. The results show cashcropping patterns for different grains and livestock. The selectivity of market involvement poses broader questions concerning economic vulnerability at the household and community levels among the English peasantry, and strategies used to contain vulnerability.
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