Organizing and reflecting on StoryEngine

Today I exported all of the public stories from StoryEngine.io into an Airtable database. I also gathered all of the public audio files from Humans of the Internet (Mozilla, 2017) and Humans of the Commons (Creative Commons, 2018) and added those to the database.

Things I already knew I was right about that I’ll be more obnoxious about going forward, and a few learnings:

File nomenclature (when files are properly named, it makes it way easier three or four years later)
Follow the damn script… you really gotta get people to say their name at the beginning of the interview
It would be helpful for interviewers to say their name as well
Verbally ask for confirmation of consent on the audio file, as well as who owns the copyright and what the distribution license will be — this is important metadata that gets separated from the digital/physical consent forms
There’s a lot of metadata to add: who sponsored, image owner and distribution, sponsor, implementing org, etc.
Adding consent forms to each record, although this would need to be hidden because PII

We’ve collected 229 public interviews! View the Airtable database — this is not yet public. Oh, and I also made a Gallery view.

And probably 100 more private ones. Just wow. I’ve learned so much from this practice.

Oh and there are also ones that others have made that I can capture, even if the content is not shareable. Because copyright. For example, the James B. McClatchy Foundation used StoryEngine in its LIFTing Local Leaders program:

”LIFTing Local Leaders is a storytelling program launched by the James B. McClatchy Foundation. “LIFT” references the inaugural pilot grantmaking program. These stories are guided by the StoryEngine methodology, an open-source, narrative-based, data collection tool developed by Loup Design.”