Participatory Media

Participatory Media interactively engages with and presents participatory community media from the 1960s and 1970s. Through the discovery phase, the project will explore how to provide access to community-made, rare, and often publicly-funded moving images and their related archives; provide a model for community involvement in digital public humanities work, specifically participatory archival, curatorial, and exhibition work; and employ innovative technologies to enable digital participation on multiple levels. The final product of this discovery grant will be design documents that include user interface specifications, technology requirements, and wireframes. The project is a partnership with the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and Scholars' Lab as well as Yale's Digital Humanities Lab.

We received a round of funding through the NEH's Digital Projects for the Public Discovery Grant. Design documents will be available Spring 2018.

Involved with particpatory media making in the 1960s and 1970s? We'd love to talk with you! Please contact us at: ltilton@richmond.edu.

Core Team

Grace Hale, Co-Director. Hale is the Commonwealth Professor in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and a scholar of US cultural history, the history of the US South, sound studies, and documentary studies. She is the author of A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle-Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998) (New York: Vintage, 1999), and forthcoming Cool Town: Athens, Georgia and the Promise of Alternative Culture in the Reagan Era . Her current research focuses on participatory documentary making in the US South during the 1960s and 1970s.

Lauren Tilton, Co-Director. She is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Yale University specializing in 20th century cultural history as well as digital and public humanities. Her current project focuses on the rise of participatory media in the 1960s and 1970s. She has experience in the digital and public humanities serving as Co-Director of Photogrammar.

Taylor Arnold, is currently Lecturer in Statistics and DH Lab Research Affiliate at Yale University, as well as senior scientist at AT&T Labs Research. He contributes his expertise to the technical aspects of the project. He will be directly working on developing a mock-up of the site during the development phase. Arnold also serves as the technical director for the Photogrammar project.

Jeremy Boggs, is the Design Architect for Digital Research and Scholarship in the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab. He is an expert on user design and experience and will develop the project design documents.

Community Liaisons

Elizabeth Barrett, Director of the Appalshop Archive and documentary media producer/director. One of the founding generation of Appalshop and a native of the region, Barret brings her expertise on community filmmaking in Appalachia and knowledge of Appalshop’s archival holdings. She’s been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, and Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship in Media Arts.

Leonard Kamerling, Curator of Film, Museum of the North, Associate Professor of English, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and documentary filmmaker. Kamerling brings his extensive background in documentary filmmaking, curating and archiving. His work focuses on Alaska Native cultures and Northern issues and has been nominated for prestigious awards such as the American film Institute's Pere Lorentz Award. He also brings with experience in preservation and digitization as the curator of the Alaska Center for Documentary Film at UAF where he is also a professor of English.

Rodger Larson, Founder, Young Filmakers Foundation, New York City. Larson is an expert on community filmmaking. His extensive work in building 16mm film workshops and organizations began in the early 1960s. Published in 1969, his book Young Filmmakers became the guide for those interested in engaging youth with filmmaking. He became an international expert on community filmmaking consulting for groups in the states and abroad including the National Film Board of Canada.

Digital Team

Peter Leonard, Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University Library. He will contribute his experiences working on over a dozen digital projects at Yale, coordinating the partnership and resource sharing with the DH Lab, and assisting with the technical specifications in the design document. As a researcher with both a doctorate in the humanities and very strong technical skills, Leonard will be of particular helping to cleaning integrate the technical and humanistic aspects of the project.

Wayne Graham, Technical Director at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). He will provide expertise on new and innovative technologies the Participatory Media project is considering incorporating.

Worthy Martin, Co-Director of IATH and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of digital and public humanities research projects. He will assist in the design of the technical standards for the projects.

Jeri Wieringa, Digital Publishing Production Lead at George Mason University Libraries. Wieringa is a web developer specializing in the digital humanities. She specializes in the front-end development and user experience of digital publishing platforms. She will focus on how the Participatory Media project will present scholarly content related to featured archives.

Humanities advisory board

Institutional Partners

UVa Scholar's Lab

Iath logo

Yale DH Lab Yale

May 9 Meeting

© 2016 Participatory Media Project.