Benefits

• • A personal stake: Interview near/dear ones
  • Empathy as method to civic engagement
  • Exploration of local history and community
  • Resumé building for university applications
  • Learning about immigrant experiences
  • Learning about long-term resident experiences

Key Activities

• • Interview techniques and ethical considerations
  • Digital device usage for recording and basic mapping
  • Making and interpreting maps
  • Combine qualitative and quantitative data
  • Combine stories to develop new stories, generating new urban policy
  • Civic engagement and policy recommendations

Enroll Your Class

Collaboration

Narrative İnfrastructure, the host of Chat Maps, focuses on existing neighborhoods and helps them recognize and reinforce their informal traditions.

Developers and politicians, entrepreneurs and community organizers can use neighborhood story maps to enhance continuity with projects, contextualizing new initiatives with the local sense of identity.

We do this by mapping the oral history stories of the neighborhood, and looking for patterns in the story themes that can be incorporated and expanded upon.

Chat Maps, our school out-reach program, is used to build local narrative infrastructure. The students collect the stories and we combine them into a composite map:

• 1. Students collect and do basic mapping using their own devices and off-the-shelf software.
  2. Narrative İnfrastructure compiles and creates the final, comprehensive neighborhood map (gratis for a limited number of classes per semester, apply early.)
  3. Narrative İnfrastructure helps teachers reach out to planners, NGOs, local leaders, and neighborhood associations to make the stories the students collect impactful now and into the future.

Benefits

• • Professional map creation and data visualization.
  • Access to a growing archive of local stories.
  • Student + Energy = Community Synergy.
  • Student + Deeds = Community Needs.

Flow of Story-Power

Support

• • Pre-workshop consultation with Narrative Infrastructure.
  • Ongoing email and phone support.
  • Potential virtual training sessions.
  • Customization to local education standards.
  • Outreach effort support (planning and marketing materials).

Case Study

Between 1984 and 1986, 13-year old aspiring Eagle Scout, Barry Matchett, collected nearly 50 oral histories. In 2023, Narrative İnfrastructure mapped those stories for a Denver community, and used them to research the process of community integration of newcomers (detailed in a forthcoming book: Turning Intangible Heritage Visible, published by Springer Nature)

Barry’s Story Map

Please fill out the Interest Form: