EDITOR Gary Marsden [e-mail]

Audiophoto Narratives for
Semi-literate Communities
David Frohlich

University of Surrey.| [e-mail]

Matt Jones

Swansea University | [e-mail]

It is widely assumed that the Internet is a global information resource. This is not true. For many people in the poorest parts of the world, the Internet is both technically and psychologically inaccessible through lack of infrastructure, money, and the requisite forms of textual and computer literacy. The StoryBank project has been tackling some of these issues by using the fast-growing infrastructure of mobile telephony to support an alternative form of information sharing in pictures and sound.

Situated in the Indian village of Budikote and inspired by developments in audiophotography and mobile imaging [ 1, 2], we have been exploring the possibility of semiliterate communities using the camera phone as a new kind of pen and paper for creating and sharing audio-visual stories. The system design has been described in a recent conference paper [ 3], and we are currently preparing a full write-up of the trial results. Here we want to promote the simple story format arrived at in the research, and point to some of the interaction design challenges of supporting it in this context.

The mobile is undoubtedly a transformative technology for development work. Networking and power-management innovations and large-scale investment mean that even very remote rural locations are getting connected. But a word of caution: One cannot necessarily deploy in-built phone interfaces and applications for populations that do not have our exposure to computing or the levels of textual literacy we assume.

Hence, three non-textual applications were written for the Nokia N80 camera phone: StoryCreator, StoryPlayer, and StorySender. This was a considerable challenge, since all existing

mobiles employ a menu-based style of interaction with textual labels. In contrast, we used culturally sensitive icons developed with our village population to control simple multimedia and file-handling functions. StoryCreator was used to author short audio-photo narratives, comprising a storyboard of up to six still images synchronised to a voice-over of up to two minutes long (see Figure 3). Users are led through a story-creation process to fill media slots in a template, either image first or sound first. Once the media elements in each stream are recorded, users are prompted to synchronise the streams by replaying the sound clip and tabbing through the images at the time they want them to appear. The only editing supported is to review and delete media elements or their synchronisation.

Despite the creative limitations of this design and a very slow response time on some of the actions, rural Indian users were able to use it in a one-month trial to record a variety of story content with minimal training. One hundred and thirty-seven stories were recorded by 79 people, using 10 phones, on topics ranging from agriculture and health to education, self-help groups, and entertainment. The average number of images used was 4. 5, with a mean voice-over length of 66 seconds. A typical story is shown in Figure 1, with the local Kannada language voice-over translated and transcribed below the picture to which it relates. A young boy describes the challenges of rearing cows in a short agricultural story lasting 1 minute 50 seconds; this plays back full-screen like a PowerPoint slideshow with spoken narration. A range of creative effects were demonstrated across the corpus, including the use of song during activities, the unfold-

[ 1] Frohlich D.M. Audiophotography: Bringing photos to life with sounds. Springer Verlag, 2004.

[ 2] Sarvas R., M. Viikari M., J. Pesonen, and H. Nevanlinna “MobShare: Controlled and immediate sharing of mobile images.” Proceedings of Multimedia 2004, 724- 731. New York: ACM Press, 2004.

[ 3] Jones M, W. Harwood, D. Bainbridge, G. Buchanan, D. M. Frohlich, D. Rachovides, M. Frank, and M. Lalmas. “Narrowcast yourself: Designing for community storytelling in a rural Indian context.” Working Paper. DIS 2008, Capetown, South Africa, 2008.