The most powerful channel for sharing experience is people's words, is people's laghter, is people's silence, is people's hugs, is people's tears. The most powerful channel for sharing experience is the atmosphere created by a group of people.
I'm not sure whether this is the right way to put it (or whether you will agree with me), but I disagree with that the combination of text, video, audio, and maybe even physical objects is always good enough for conveying experiences that somebody once had. To me, however, the gathering of people, or in particular, the gathering of the characters in the story, is something I think to be a very powerful channel for conveying experience. For the case of re-experiencing the stories about myself and my friends, looking at a video we took years ago or listening to a song we recorded at home does not necessarily reminds me the experience better than gathering all my buddies and heading to the beach together. For the case of getting to understand others' shared experience, on the other hand, an efficient and effective way would be being shared by the whole group of characters as well. I was just thinking about Push's death, thinking about the scene in Bartos this afternoon. I guess almost all the people at the lab at that time were there. Everyone was stunned. Everyone was silent. Everyone was moving slowly, slightly having any expression on his/her face, and, the whole atmosphere was just a single word - grief. In my eyes, I saw everyone with their brains blanked out, but at the same time thinking about numerous things, thinking about numerous little stories they have with Push. Maybe because it's what I was doing: I first knew Push when I came for interview last winter. During those two weeks, he was the one I talked to the most, because he was so willing to help. I saw people hugging each other. I was people slowly walked into the elevators and went back to their own offieces. And, if I felt something strong, I believe it was because there were all these people. It doesn't matter whether they talked or talked not, or whether they use any other possible modalities they could use to share their experience. The gathering is powerful enough, I think.
So I'm thinking about making a website for the people in the lab to share stories they have about/with Push. The input can be text, video, audio, drawings, pictures, and maybe still other format. (I don't want people to be limited with their own ways of telling stories, so it's better if I can make it as flexible as possible.) The stories can become a collection of the Media Lab's "Push's Story" (Which is somewhat similar to the photo mosaic work I've been doing as a collection of people's memories: http://web.media.mit.edu/~jteng/project/cm.html) Since what I've been working on is commonsense computing, I think it's easier for me apply what I can do right now in this assignment: to relate people's stories. By analyzing the annotated files they use to tell the stories, the system will be able to show the user all the related stories after they provide their own ones. The difference between this idea and what I've done with Glorianna last semester is that, I think it is really gonna be a collaborative sharing activity joined by many many people, where I can get to see/hear many other people's stories with different styles and channels upon inputting my own one. So the interaction would not feel like an one-to-one interaction. The tools I'm gonna use are stuffs I've already been familiar with: ConceptNet?, WordNet?, Montylingua, etc. I think I will shoot some video as my own input too.
I don't know actually whether it is a good idea to do my assignments using this sad event. But it is something with impact to us, and therefore needs to be documented somehow. (Just like Katrina or the 921 earthquake we had in Taiwan) And, I consider maybe it is good too if we can really do something memorial.
