Building Memories Podcast

kkim733 — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 19:50:23 +0000

In the spirit of Mayor Allen’s abiding love for Atlanta, we offer the podcast “Building Memories” as a venue for telling stories about iconic places of Atlanta and the people who have occupied them. With the ever-changing cityscape of Atlanta, our commitment is to document the people and places whose stories should not be lost from public memory amidst Atlanta’s continual drive for redevelopment. The mission of “Building Memories” is to preserve and share community stories from Atlanta’s past in order to remember a more diversely rendered citizenry, those – famous and not so famous – who, like Ivan Allen, Jr., helped lay the foundation for what Atlanta is today.

The podcast is organized around thematic threads and is prepared by teams of faculty, students, and community members.

Topics of current and future podcasts:

Herndon Home
Herren’s Restaurant and The Balzer Theater
Auburn Avenue Research Library
Atlanta Daily World
Friendship Baptist Church
Fountain Hall – Morris Brown College
Carrie Steele-Pitts Home
Phyllis Wheatley YWCA
Booker T Washington High
McClendon Hospital
Southview Cemetery
The Royal Peacock
Paschal’s Restaurant
Prince Hall

Initial work on Building Memories (through mid-Fall 2017) focused on developing the theme and processes for the podcast; this phase was primarily the work of faculty and other professionals.

In late Fall 2017, the team identified three student interns who will learn the art of podcasting: writing, interviewing, and producing the content. The goal for Spring 2017 is for our student crew to gain sufficient skill in these techniques to produce the final episode of the semester on their own. Tentatively, the subject of this episode will be Friendship Baptist Church, Atlanta's first autonomous black Baptist congregation; founded in 1862, the church has played a significant role in the founding of institutions of higher education and has been at the center of African American political power in Atlanta for many decades.

kkim733 Mon, 01/22/2018 - 14:50

Project Year

2016-17

2017-18

2019-20

Project Leads

Faculty: Peter Brecke (PI), Jacqueline Royster (Executive Producer), Steve Hodges (Advisor)

Community Partners: Gene Kansas (Creative Partner and Host) and Stephen Key (Technical Producer)

Students

Charles Cardot

Maura Currie

Prachi Mehta

Genre Tags

Podcast

Digital Storytelling

Digital Archive

Project Site

Building Memories Project Site

Contact Email

building-memories@iac.gatech.edu

Polivision: Covering Latin(o) American Popular Culture for a U.S. audience

morangi3 — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 03:14:00 +0000

Polivision: Covering Latin(o) American Popular Culture for a U.S. audience

Goal

Polivision is a bilingual and multimedia outlet that covers Latin(o) American and Global Cultures. We create new content (video, podcast, and interactive media) and curate international stories about arts, film, music, satire, and other creative expressions of the Latinx transnational community.

Description

How are Latin American identities manifested in popular culture and entertainment? How do these cultural identities dialogue with the United States and other cultural realities in today’s globalized world? This is a bilingual and multimedia-producing project that combines humanistic research and digital journalism. “Covering Latin(o) American Popular Culture for a U.S. audience” engages undergraduate and graduate students in the production of bilingual multimedia pieces (videos, podcasts, stories in Spanish and English, and interactive maps) about transnational Latin American popular cultures, their socio-political implications beyond national borders, and their unexpected connections and disconnections with LatinX identities in the United States. At the core of the digital humanities’ interests, this project seeks to become a bridge between academic research and digital media/journalism, between traditional humanities’ pedagogical tools and the development of multimedia narrative skills using digital technologies, between English and Spanish-speaking audiences and contents, and between Latin American cultural idiosyncrasies and Latino identities in the United States.

In times when international and cultural reporting have considerably decreased in the U.S. media and the Latino population in the U.S. has become the largest minority in the country, stories and alternative narratives about Latin American cultures are not only scarce, but also tend to be superficial portraits and simplistic generalizations of complex societies heavily filtered through the Mexican experience. Latin American multilayered, hybrid cultures are rarely explored in relation to the local and transnational tensions that shape their struggle for identity, their connections and contradictions in relation to the United States, and their negotiations within today’s global media culture. In times of xenophobia and extreme political discourses based on ethnocentric assumptions (or plain ignorance), this project aims at offering students critical thinking tools in order to approach other cultural realities that resist regional stereotyping, while at the same time actively participating in the investigation, production, and post-production phases of the development of creative media content accessible to diverse audiences.

So Far

After developing the foundations of the project between Spring 2017/Fall 2018—obtaining the adequate equipment, developing a website, logos, an interactive map, video pilots, and social media accounts and guidelines—we launched the content publicly in August 2018 at: https://poli.vision/ We update original content weekly in the website and daily in social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram).

During the initial stage, a network of students, faculty, and professionals of the Georgia Tech community was identified to assist with the diverse technological aspects of the project. During fall 2017, the instructor worked with a group of undergraduate students (registered as an independent study), and since Spring 2018 “Covering LatinX Popular Culture” is an approved and regularly offered class at the School of Modern Languages and a graduate version has been approved for our new MS in Global Media and Cultures, offered with Literature, Media and Communications (LMC).

Polivision produces “Hybrid Atlanta,” an original video series of interviews with local artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs whose work establishes a dialogue with global cultures. In these interviews, we give voice to a variety of personalities who have creatively engaged with the cultural global flows that are taking place in Atlanta, such as a Puerto Rican celebrity chef, a Colombian Transgender Rights activist, a Dominican fashion designer or a Venezuelan punk rocker. We do not only interview international people living in Atlanta, but also locals whose work has been influenced by the waves of cultural globalization, such as a local performer of Brazilian Tropicalia or an experimental musician whose creative life changed after living in Buenos Aires. We are creating an accessible and sharable digital archive that reveals Atlanta’s multicultural and hybrid reality, as a way to counter ethnocentrism and make visible a changing creative landscape.

We also produce a series of bilingual videos and podcasts about Latin(o) American popular culture. In these productions, we showcase a diverse and under-the-radar international artistic manifestations that challenge the stereotypes associated with Latin American cultures in the United States. Our first season was about the state of satire in the Americas.

Our contents are published and disseminated through our growing virtual communities on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As part of our curation of cultural coverage, we monitor stories in English and Spanish published in the international media and create an inter-cultural and bilingual bridge.

Future Plans

Our current goal is to establish Polivision as a sustainable operation and a recognizable glocal media brand by increasing our multi-platform audiences, establishing a permanent team of part-time editors, creating partnerships with other media outlets and cultural promoters, and secure funding through sponsorships and major grants.

morangi3 Sun, 09/10/2017 - 23:14

Project Year

2017-18

2019-20

Project Leads

Paul Alonso

John Thornton

Students

Maria Daniela Rodriguez

Samantha Bay

Sierra Villarreal

Neta Kanny

Isabel Miller

Genre Tags

Podcast

Project Site

Polivision Project Site

Contact Email

paul.alonso@modlangs.gatech.edu