Stories about stories about stories

This is a renarration of a renarration.

Scattered over 2006, 2007, and 2008, I spent several months in India trying to learn about the opposition to genetically modified crops. I was first interested in this movement because I wanted to understand how local movements connected to the anti-globalisation/global justice movement. Did activists in Karnataka feel part of the international movement? Did they feel like the anti-WTO protests in Seattle were relevant to their work?

Along the way, my focus changed: I became far more interested in how local struggles to shape knowledge contributed to the global justice movement.

Because it matters whether we think the "experts" are local communities, activists, scientists working for corporations, or policymakers.
And it matters whether or not we can share information easily.
And it matters whether we control the technologies that are vital to our lives.

So many people talked to me. Farmers and environmental activists and journalists and academics and friends.

Some of them told me what I was expecting to hear, and some of them surprised me. Some of them talked about things I didn't think I cared about, until I realised that I did.

From that, I built a story. One part of it is here, and one part of it is here, and other parts of it are still tucked away in my thesis.

The material on this blog is an attempt to take some of these stories and retell them, not just alone but also with the help of other people. I can only ever retell stories in the languages that I have. Sometimes stories need a new language to have a new life.

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Image: a sequence of photos of a man telling a story with animated expressions, courtesy of Noel A. Tanner.

Renarrating the Web

Alipi is a Web accessibility project with a difference: it allows users to renarrate the Web, explaining Web content in ways that are more relevant and accessible for print-impaired communities. You can see a demonstration here.

Briefly, though, it might mean turning this:

(English narration of fire safety precautions.)

Into this:

(Hindi narration of fire safety precautions. As well as a section of text being changed from English to Hindi, the image of a fire truck has been changed.)

Or this:

(Kannada narration of fire safety precautions. As well as a section of the text being changed to Kannada, the picture of a fire truck has been changed.)

Why?

Most Web accessibility projects aim to change the form of websites, for example by making the text bigger, adding text-to-speech capabilities, or adding captions to images. These projects are valuable and important, and help to make the Web more diverse by allowing people with disabilities to participate and contribute. In India the challenge is slightly different.

The population here, as in the West, includes a significant proportion of people who are not able to use sites that have not been designed with accessibility in mind. However, a far greater proportion of those excluded cannot access the Web for other reasons: because they don't have the economic resources, or because they can't read, or can't read English, and there are few sites available in their first language.

Alipi addresses this latter part of problem. The project allows users to reinterpret content in ways that are relevant to their community, changing the content as well as the form. As well as providing translations in text or audio, users can add commentary and bring attention to parts of a site that are particularly important to their communities.