Idea Lab

How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast. I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR. At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia...

• May 8, 2012
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Zeega: Algorithm Isn't Just Another Word for Automation

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a crazy couple of years thinking about the changing nature of documentary in the context of networked culture. In the background of developing Mapping Main Street and then Zeega -- an open-source platform for creating interactive documentaries -- I've also been doing research into what I call the urban database documentary. I define this genre as a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems as generative processes and organizational frameworks to explore the lived experience of place. And I believe that the invention of the computer did not give rise to the urban database documentary --...

• March 16, 2012
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Zeega Imagines New Forms of Digital Libraries and Archives

by Jesse Shapins
2011 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since the founding of Zeega, one of the primary areas in which we've been working is the radically changing domain of libraries and archives. In the digital age, we believe libraries and archives pose one of the most exciting opportunities for re-imagining the ecosystem of public knowledge production and sharing. We see the questions posed by the future of libraries and archives to be intimately intertwined with the questions of who will own our digital future. In particular, it's our concern that what we see emerging is a model of the web dominated by private companies that provide an all-encompassing...

• October 12, 2011
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