Brazil's Museum of the Person - oral histories of ordinary people

"I believe that new technologies should not be used merely because they are `new technologies,' that is, merely as a way of trying to follow the pace of social evolution. But, when they offer a whole range of new possibilities, opening up a new world for the development and publishing of knowledge, then they become fascinating and unpredictable adventures. They become paths of which we are unable to know the end, but which we certainly cannot neglect to walk on."

-- Karen Worcman, Museu da Pessoa

Last March I offered a workshop called "Immersive Histories" at the Museums and the Web Conference in New Orleans. Ninety minutes into the workshop we took a short break, at which time three new folks appeared at the door. They introduced themselves as Karen Worcman, Jose Santos Matos, and Rosali Nunes Henriques from the Museum of the Person in Brazil. Over lunch, they explained the Museum of the Person. It was immediately obvious to me that they are combining art, community, education, and technology in interesting ways.

A VIRTUAL MUSEUM

The Museum of the Person, Museu da Pessoa in Portuguese, has been a company since 1992 whose aim is to collect, organize, preserve, and publish the life stories of ordinary people.

Ms. Worcman explains it: "Philosophically, the purpose we had in mind was to create the possibility of preserving, and turning it into an information source, the life history of each and every person. Our concepts of work and method were inspired by the oral history movement led by Paul Thompson (1978), which considers oral history an instrument allowing anonymous people to become part of history."

Originally, the Museum worked in text, video, and CD-ROM. In 1997, the Museum created a Web site to allow anyone to add his or her biography together with associated multimedia, to have their life stories preserved on the Web.

"The idea of establishing a `museum' that preserves `people's life stories' forced us to reconsider our standard idea of `place,'" Worcman says. "There are many people, and their voices are non-material. Therefore, the `place' to gather their stories had to be a `virtual' place."

The Museum has received more than 150 histories with images, and it is receiving 15 new histories a week containing testimonies from the elderly, young adults, and children. The only control the Museum exercises is an email confirmation and a copyright signature, and they do filter submissions for advertising and offensive materials having nothing to do with personal histories. Nearly 500 people visit daily.

I conducted an email interview with the folks at the Museum last spring and obtained a little more information about their project (see "The Interview," page 35). We discussed the origins and development of the Museum, its funding, and the subjects featured in it. For instance, I found out that the Museum of the Person was founded by five talented people: Jose Santos Matos, a journalist, poet, and videographer; Karen Worcman, a historian with a master's degree in linguistics; Mauro Malin, a historian and journalist; Marcia Ruiz, also a historian but with a marketing background; Claudia Leonor Guedes de Oliveira, a student of history; and Mauro Rech, a multimedia programmer who developed the first museum prototype. And that the first actual histories of people were collected in 1991 at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo.

The Museum did not have initial funding; each of the founders put in some money to get started. Their first project was a multimedia museum for the Sao Paulo football (soccer) club, which developed from the concept of a room with trophies in it to a multimedia kiosk, to a complete museum. They continued selling projects, and with the money from those, they were able to start doing interviews, buy equipment, and so on.

They discover people with stories to tell by first determining the theme they want to feature and then going to the associations, to the streets, and phoning people. "We never select a story because everybody has a story," Worcman points out. "It depends more on who wants to tell a story. This is how it happens on the Net, for example."

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW

The educational potential for real stories on the Net actually precedes the Net by many years in the work of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Paulo Freire, and Eliot Wigginton. Ashton-Warner, author of Teacher (1963), and Paulo Freire, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed (first published in English in 1970), both used real stories to teach literacy. Ashton-Warner used the real stories of the Maori people to create meaningful readers for Maori children, who were definitely not turned on by Dick & Jane readers. Freire's critical literacy theories rested upon impoverished adult learners reading and writing real stories about their real lives. This had a twofold effect. First, the stories were interesting because these were stories they could identify with, so they paid more attention. Second, reading and writing these real stories were ways for the learners to understand the circumstances of their own lives and make meaningful change.

In 1966, Eliot Wigginton came to Appalachian Georgia to teach high school English. Supposedly his first students were so unimpressed with his teaching that they actually set fire to his podium. He realized he needed to do something different, so he suggested that the students create a literary magazine. There was some negotiating between Eliot and the students, and it was agreed that they would create a magazine telling the stories of the lives and skills of the community elders. This small collection of real stories for a small literary magazine eventually reached book form and sold over 8 million copies. The Foxfire Magazine is still produced twice annually by the high school students of Rabun County, Georgia.

The Museu da Pessoa is collecting and publishing the real lives of real people in Brazil. Their intention is for every country to have its own Museum of the Person, collecting their own special stories of ordinary people in Poland, Indonesia, Serbia, and the rest of the world. The Museu da Pessoa is a museum of stories. Like museums and libraries everywhere, it is just a resource upon which talented teachers will build all sorts of educational experiences. These will be powerful experiences because these are powerful and real stories, stories just like they were told thousands of years ago in caves. The technology is new but the stories are old and the same regardless of language.

technos

Q: Where did the idea for the Museum come from?

A: The basic idea came from my research experiences working on an oral history project from 1988 to 1991 about Jewish immigrants to Brazil. A basic question I was dealing with was how historical concepts changed in didactic books and how this change changes how societies build their histories. The project was divided into two parts: one group collected and studied the objects the immigrants had brought, and the other group worked with oral history life stories. I coordinated this group. I collected 90 interviews and 200 hours of tape recording. The project results were an exhibition, a book, and organized material for an archive.

Two things struck me during the project: First, I was struck by how people we interviewed became so alive during the interviews. How good it was for them to be able to tell their stories, which were often very hard stories of concentration camps, exile, and so on. Sometimes this was the first time these folks had had the opportunity to tell their stories -- how they were born, how things were before, how they felt when they first arrived in Brazil ... It was also very important for them to know that this was going to become part of something lasting.

For example, there was an 86-year-old woman who told the story of having come directly to northern Brazil in 1937 from Austria. She told her tale in great detail of the physical and emotional sensations and cultural impacts she and her husband lived through after they had arrived. She spoke of the first night they arrived, when they awoke in the middle of the night, in a very simple house, with all kinds of spiders in their rooms, and how they tried to run away and take a boat to Rio de Janeiro, but it was during Carnival -- so it was hot and everybody was in the streets and they had never seen this before -- so they didn't get far. When the interview was finished, she asked me to come to her house to thank me. She said: "You know, I am a happy person, I have my daughters and I love them and also my granddaughters ... but now, after having participated in this project, now I know I can die, because who I am, the real me inside, my life story has been told. Now I know it is going to stay."

For me this story was very important. It confirmed my impressions that the stories of common folks were so very rich. I could hear so many different kinds of information, most of which could only be had through their tellers' experiences, not through books. History became much richer because each story provided a different historical perspective.

I thought how beautiful and how important all these stories are, how many prejudices could be eliminated by understanding the different points of view, as many points of view as there were people living in the world. The main thing to understand is how important it is for each person to have the opportunity to tell his or her life story, to organize their memories, and for their stories to survive their deaths.

History seems to be made of what the dominant culture elects to be important. But how about people, regular people? Regular people make history while they are here. Each person has a unique life story and a different experience that is valuable. To be able to understand life through a housewife's point of view or through a doorman's point of view or through the view of a child on the street -- this can be really important and revolutionary. There are museums for everything: art objects, civilizations, kings, queens, cities, etc. But, why not have a museum for regular people? A museum that could give everybody the possibility of having his or her life story preserved for eternity? Why not have a Museum of the Person? I think that was how the idea was born.

Q: How has the idea of the Museum changed over time?

A: The essence of the idea hasn't changed much. But the format has. Originally we applied our story-collecting ideas to all media: books, exhibitions, CD-ROMs, radio programs. We have now added the Internet. The Internet made it possible to let people write their stories without being interviewed by us. This was a big change. We began to think of other changes, such as ways to be more present in people's daily lives: Net diaries and calendars for scheduling special dates such as birthdays, anniversaries and Mother's Day; places for people to tell special stories on special days. We changed a lot with the Internet, and we expect to change even more.

Q: Where do you go next?

A: After seven years of work, our actual goal to create a network has been accomplished through the Internet. Presently, we think a lot about how to get funding to develop more institutional projects. We would like to work with the elderly in asylums and hospitals. We would like to have an educational program with schools, and also we would like to go around the city and the country with what we call the "memory truck," registering people's stories in the town squares. That would be a great way to enlarge the possibility for ordinary people to register their stories with the Museum of the Person.

THOM

My name is Thom Gillespie, and I am your Maitre d'Igital for the Cafe TECHNOS. When I'm not serving up food for thought, I direct the MIME program in digital entertainment technologies in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University (http://www.mime.indiana.edu).

For the past 20 years, my life has revolved around art, community, education, and technology, first slightly north of the Arctic Circle in the Inuit village of Kivalina in Alaska working for the University of Alaska's X-ceed program; then finishing a Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley in Information Studies; on to working as an information scientist for the United Nations slightly south of the Equator in Central Java; and now teaching newMedia design at IU in Bloomington, Indiana. Always there has been a constant weave of art, community, education, and technology in every thing I've done.

Twenty years ago, the weave was less technology and art and more community and education. Ten years ago, the weave became more technology and art. Today it seems to have all come together in this multimedia smorgasbord we call the Net. Computers have completely morphed from typewriter-like instruments for word processing and spreadsheeting to communication portals where we keep in touch and learn at a bewildering rate. Some of us may have G3s and P2s the same way past generations had V8s and Turbocams -- but it is the simple Web page that counts for who we are on the Net. The Web page is about looking good and attracting attention; the Web page is about art ... community, education, and technology.

In the mid-1960s, Marshall McLuhan said that the content of every new medium is an old medium, at least until the new medium figures out its uniqueness. So, the initial content of photography was painting; film was theater; and TV was film. Today we talk about bookmarks, Internet radio and WebTV. We are, as McLuhan also said, "driving through the rear-view mirror" -- which leads me to the purpose of Cafe TECHNOS.

It is not about forecasting or predicting the future -- I haven't a clue how to do that. Cafe TECHNOS is about nowcasting, knowing what is happening now by looking at interesting folks combining art, community, education, and technology in interesting ways. Cafe TECHNOS will be "in print" but more importantly, it will be online in an expanded version that will allow you to complete this fine dining experience by adding your point of view to the stew. One benefit of this new medium is that you will always have the last word, just as fast as you can boot up the email machine and send in a note. Please join us in the Cafe for this issue's special du jour at www.technos.net/cafe.

Visit the Museu da Pessoa at www.museudapessoa.com.br (Portuguese); or www.museumoftheperson.org (English)

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