2010 has seen the World Cup in South Africa and FESMAN happening in Senegal. On December 10, the UN proclaimed the year beginning on 1 January 2011 the International Year for People of African Descent.
The Year aims at strengthening national actions and regional and international cooperation for the benefit of people of African descent in relation to their full enjoyment of economic, cultural, social, civil and political rights, their participation and integration in all political, economic, social and cultural aspects of society, and the promotion of a greater knowledge of and respect for their diverse heritage and culture.
The General Assembly encourages Member States, the specialized agencies of the United Nations system, within their respective mandates and existing resources, and civil society to make preparations for and identify possible initiatives that can contribute to the success of the Year.
As our offline discussions around technology and digital media continue, Beta Bahil and co-sponsors of Sankofa 2.5, the Atlanta BDPA and Noire Digerati, will be presenting the panel discussion “Color Me Black: Exploring the Presence of the Africana Culture in Comic Books, Graphic Novel and Animation.” The panel will take place on Saturday, September 4, 2010, as part of the Auburn Avenue Research Library’s Alien Encounters program.
Currently, confirmed panelists include Dawud Anyabwile of Big City Entertainment and Creator of Brotherman Comics:
Also, we will be joined by Joseph R. Wheeler III, artist and founder of ONYXCON, Atlanta’s annual Conference/Convention which celebrates the very best of the impact, contributions, and presence of the African Diaspora in popular arts and culture. Below is a brief interview with Joseph at 2010’s ECBACC conference.
The event is targeted at youths and the community who are interested in the persons, technology, and process used by leading thinkers/creators in Animation and Comic Books.
This is a great online video produced by The Story of Stuff Project. In addition to the content, schooling the audience on sustainability, the coolness of the clip is her use of simple animation to cover such a huge and complicated topic.
(The following is a thought piece of a potential product or service idea. If something similar exists already prior to the posting date on this blog, woops, please send me your link and I’ll post it online. If not, then Beta Bahil, LLC accepts all the ‘wow, great idea’ glory and is open to working to implement this offline. The Kindle product is discussed as they have the waterproof case. We are not getting paid by Jeff Bezos to write this. Further posts on other e-Reader/Tablets to come.)
Tuesday afternoon in Addis Ababa or Abidjan and a university student is heading home from class. On the way, they pop into a local café or kiosk to grab a quick snack, coffee and pastry. Sitting there, they pull out the course syllabus for their Sustainable Development class and skim down to a reference for a book entitled “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.”
Usually, the student would have to first find out if the book is available at the University or local library. If not, the search begins amongst friends and family, local and abroad. Once the book is found, the student would have to go to the local photocopy facility to copy the sections of interest($$), as they would have done for other handouts received in class.
It is well known that the availability of textbooks and other reference materials are a problem in countries such as Ethiopia. Marie Paiva wrote in “A Quick Glimpse at Public and Academic Libraries in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia”, about her observations after visiting the Addis Ababa Public Library in the Sidist Kilo area of the city. Some key points of interest in the article, published in February 2008, included:
“ -current budget for acquisitions is about USD $4,500 per year; and they do occasionally receive donations from private organizations and NGOs.
-users are mostly from nearby high schools and colleges, and the library contains 220 seats.
-collection consists of 20,000 volumes which do not circulate.
-most of the titles I picked up appeared older and well used.”
To solve this, there have been successful efforts to collect new and used books and ship them to under-resourced communities. Ethiopia Reads, founded by Mr. Yohannes Gebregeorgis, is one that has focused on both the supply and delivery of books for children in Ethiopia. These projects involve soliciting people, communities, and publishers to obtain their books, store and then find a way to ship them to the end destination(i.e. partner institution or school). Mr. Gebregeorgis and the Ethiopia Reads team are heroes for overcoming and managing the acquisition and logistical issues that made the program what it is today.
But what about the college student who needed that book on sustainability?
We wave our collective hands in the air and in comes the HaLaHaMaSa(only name I could think of on the spot)iCafé. Presumably located near the Uni, the café allows the student to sit, grab a drink and browse through a waterproof and sealed Kindle that is attached to each of ten tables.
The waterproof feature is not for the unlikely case of flooding in the city, but more to the durability of an e-reader that can withstand any potential spillage/wear and tear that exists in that environment. Kindle is the e-reader developed by Amazon. Watch the video below that describes the Kindle DX.
The optimal scenario is that each student has their own device, like the plan by WorldReader.org, but there also exists an opportunity for a different service model that is a hybrid with the existing internet café model. The difference from a traditional internet café is that instead of just allowing people to browse the web and web content, they are provided an alternate reading experience and material. Roll-out of such as service is also fast, as one would be partnering with existing cafés and kiosks who could handle the upfront costs of the Kindle units.
Now there are still a lot of pricing related issues:
1. How much should the books cost in a developing market?
2. Access to scientific journals and publications?
3. Consistent access to electricity(though the readers are optimized for long battery life, it may not be longer than some electricity shortages)?
Check out the spillproof tablet, Qooq, that provides interactive recipes, instructional videos. Targeted at kitchen oriented individuals with a passion for cooking, the form is perfect for a e-reader cafe.
Though I haven’t covered the financial considerations in detail, you can’t miss the obvious savings in collections and transport of such a scheme. Instead of book collections, people would possibly collect Amazon voucher cards or send e-book credit to students, or any individuals needing the books, via sms. When the student arrives at a Kindle station, they would log into their account and access the necessary books. If they have bought the book, it would remain active on their account for future use or can be made available for others who use that particular Kindle device.
Problems Solved Are:
Lack of Material
Theft of Material
Dated Material
Built in Dictionary
Ability to Read PDFs
The Sankofa 2.5 Community Forum and Workshop took place at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on April 10, 2010. Panelists Camaal Moten, James Harris, Amani Channel and Chidi Afulezi covered topics ranging from mobile learning, digital literacy, augmented reality, to video blogging and the importance of leaving a digital footprint for future generations to access our stories.
Thanks to the Program Division of the Auburn Avenue Research Library for their support and assistance, the panelists and community members in attendance. We will be organizing more workshops in the coming months. Until then, you can view photos from last Saturday at our Facebook Fan Page.
If you are interested in the intersection between heritage, culture and technology or if you generally want to know what new gadgets and technology are out, you won’t want to miss our upcoming and FREE Sankofa 2.5 workshop. As stated above,
In an effort to close the digital divide in our community, the Auburn Avenue Research Library, in collaboration with Beta Bahil, LLC., will host the Sankofa 2.5 community forum and workshop. The event will bring together leading experts, in the areas of mobile technology, mobile learning, social and new media. Panelists will present their work and the technologies that are redefining the way we consume, create and distribute content and interact with one another.
The workshop will be taking place on Saturday, April 10, 2010. You may view the Facebook event page at http://tinyurl.com/ycsk7fk. Subjects to be covered include Social Media, Digital Storytelling, Mobile Learning, Appropriate Technology, Video Blogging, iPhones and other new media technologies.
After launching our iHeritage Guide iPhone app, we received a great amount of inquiries about the use of the platform and ability to have one’s brand present on the iPhone. So, we went back to the lab and decided to create the GeoDirectory App Platform so that anyone can access the power of being on the iPhone/iTouch. Organizations that benefit from this technology are those involved in:
Tourism Promotion
Business Listings
Cultural Specific Directories
City and County Guides
Conference Marketing
School or Campus Guides
Sankofa 2.5, Learnings and Thoughts from the iHeritage Guide Development
Since the beginning of this blog, we have mostly embeded or reposted the insight, media and products that reflect the very wide world of global African culture. For the last 7 months and counting though, Beta Bahil has also run parallel an in-house development of our new iPhone application called the iHeritage Guide(www.iheritageguide.com). Where our other in-house project, Grio.tv, is a HUGE endeavor likely to need a great amount of resources, iHeritage Guide was the perfect size to design, develop, and launch for this boot-strapping firm. Ok, it did take some arm-twisting and pleading for seed funds but, none-the-less, all involved have agreed on the usefulness and potential of the product which in essence, brings physical history into the palm of your hands. With our geotagged engine and app, one can locate the nearest African-American historic or culture site.
Why is this important? The short answer is Sankofa. Sankofa(with a nod to both the movie and cafe) meaning that we move forward taking the lessons from the past. The longer answer is that the app aids in the answer of where, or where is our past?
If you have an iPhone, definitely try it out. If you don’t, but are interested in the app, leave a comment and we’ll keep you posted. Museums and other cultural/heritage institutions who can actually build traffic using the iHeritage Guide, can also contact us at the following link.
Here are some brief observations from our current listing: -There are tons of African American cultural institutions through-out the United States. Every major city east of the Mississippi River has some museum and/or center. West of the Mississippi, there is also good representation of institutions in states like California, Washington, and Texas.
-National marked heritage sites are also plentiful and can be found in the smallest of towns.
Sankofa 2.5 = Sankofa * Technology
Interestingly, the journey of development has also illuminated tons of learning and questions around finding relevant content for the iHeritage Guide and the presence of African heritage data in the digital world. For the iHeritage Guide, the key was to combine all elements of data related to African American heritage onto one platform(i.e. physical interaction, general data, updated data, and other media such as video). Developing straight for the smartphone presented us that opportunity and allowed us to translate the world of heritage information onto a converged technological tool such as the iPhone.
But let’s back up a bit and go over what converged or convergence means. The video below gives you a general outlook on what convergence is and its implications to how one obtains and interacts with media and information. To summarize the clip, the day when you can obtain news and video “anyplace, anytime, anywhere” has arrived in the form of smartphones like the iPhone, Palm Pre, or Blackberry and their PC-like features and internet accessibility.
So, in this rapidly evolving technology ecosystem, a few questions came to mind related to heritage/cultural institutions:
1. Are heritage/cultural Institutions and their content leveraging new ways for people to obtain information? First generation websites were made primarily for marketing. Second generation or Web 2.0/Social Media platforms are used for conversations with an institution’s members or audience using a Facebook Fan Page or Twitter account. (Side note: This also brought to mind what input an institution has on Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” and the subject pertinent to the institution’s area of expertise or scholarship?)
2. How can convergence and a rich mobile presence facilitate the mission of a heritage institution and also, in broader terms, historical information? For example, for those that can’t visit The King Center in Atlanta, what ways can exhibitions, programs, and media be accessible by someone across the country or across the world digitally. The website was one manner, but now the arrival of web-enabled mobile devices has brought forward an opportunity to reach a broader audience in new ways.
Robin Caldwell of BlackWeb20.com, in a recent article on the Huffington Post, wrote about the lack of diversity in technology circles. At the end of article that provided a list of emerging tech thought leaders of color like BlackDigerati.org and Jon Gosier of Appfrica Labs, she states:
“Technology is viewed as an incubator for innovation, but if the same people are always included in that incubator then they are recreating more of the same and reproducing themselves.
Until there is diversity represented in technology, there will be no true innovation in a space that is colorblind to only one thing — money.”
I believe the same goes for museums and cultural/heritage institutions in relation to the world of new media and convergence based content. There currently exists a new and different set of tools to engage visitors(virtual or actual) and use this digital experience to educate, create awareness, and even gain new revenue sources in the way of admission and product sales. Until institutions of culture and heritage use these new tools, innovative opportunities will be missed to aid in our collective journey to learn from the past.
M-Net, the South Africa based media company that produces Big Brother Africa and runs satellite networks Channel O and Africa Magic will be launching an online service called the African Film Library.
The websites describes the service as follows:
The African Film Library is an M-Net initiative showcasing the best of the African film industry – making the movies easily accessible for movie aficionados around the world.
The African film industry is one of the oldest – with its roots in Ain el Ghezel (The Girl of Carthage), which was produced in Tunisia by Chemama Chikly in 1924. M-Net has spent the last three years negotiating the rights to almost 600 works in English, French, Arabic and Portuguese and digitally remastering them.
The library forms an important archive of the continent’s cultural cinematic heritage, and also, for the first time, makes the African artists’ works easily accessible by a wide viewership around the globe – creating a new audience for existing and emerging filmmakers.
If you have ever tried to find some of the films listed on the site, you can appreciate the innovation of the platform. The site is built similar to most video sharing portals, where one registers to gain access and digitally rent movies as well as rate and leave comments. It is parallel to Jaman in many ways, though Jaman’s African movie selection is limited and the African Film Library focuses strictly on African films. There was no indication on the cost of a movie rental, but that one will first buy credits that can then be used towards film rentals.
Beta Bahil is here to help you represent your mother's land. If you have a story to share, either in media or product form, we have the business and technical tools to help you share it.
