Stories as Ancient Maps: A Tale Told for Ten Thousand Five Hundred Years | Jason Winn

Long Now Member Jason Winn tells a story of humanity's oldest technology: storytelling.
With thousands of members from all around the world, the Long Now community has a wide range of perspectives, stories, and experiences to offer. We're excited to showcase our annual curated set of short Ignite Talks created and given by the Long Now Members themselves. Presenting on the subjects of their choice, speakers have precisely 5 minutes to amuse, educate, enlighten, or inspire the audience.
Our speakers and their talks:
Natasha Blum: Famous Last Words: Self-Discovery for Life, Death, and Rebirth
Dave Elfving: My AI Co-Teacher
Altay Guvench: Ultraviolet Exploration: Fluorescence in Nature
Trevor Haldenby: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Fossil?
Andra Keay: Robotopia
Alyssa Ravasio: Recreation for Restoration
Jason Roberts: To State The Obvious: Addressing History's Blind Spot
Ya'el Shatz: From Dirt to Treasure
Sarah Cameron Sunde: Tides As Metaphor: Proposals Toward Living on Tidal Time
Diane Tate: Oral History and Human Connection
Natalia Vasquez: Visualizing Climate Futures
Jason Winn: Stories as Ancient Maps: A Tale Told for Ten Thousand Five Hundred Years
Connie Yang: Nonagenarians Doing Shit
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[@mobieus7]

Allegory for the progress of the dissemination of knowledge through methods of communication: speech (song), writing(maps and books), visual(photography and video) and now Internet access (all previous iterations).
The point of the lesson is communication being the key to progressing understanding. Just like his meeting with the monk.
But was it the speakers question or the monks question in response that lead (disseminated) to the knowledge? Proof that the knowledge is always there, if you have the mind to see it.

[@ashfsdfhsdfh]

@mobieus7 Storytelling (in various mediums) is the underlying mechanism, and it is ancient (maybe even the oldest tool). My research approaches the question from a long-term efficacy approach. How can we enrich a "sense of place" if we've not placed our memories there? So... Let's map our memories--find their place. Then we can do meta-things, like mix the stories that overlap to create new ones that borrow from the old. This stretches a line of continuity between new changes to our cities back into our memories.

[@mobieus7]

@@ashfsdfhsdfh Every generation's "sense of place" is different. With that adaptive method you describe, at what point do the older stories get traded off to the newer stories? if a new story needs to be made, then how can information be important if the details can be so easily changed?
You can talk to someone until you are blue in the face and still have no clue about the listener comprehending. A process that inspires the listener to ask questions is the key to ensuring the story is understood.

[@loonadeux]

This is super interesting, but I’m
wondering why your narrative layer stories necessarily have to map to geography. Songlines do this, but other great civilizational stories are symbolic. They reference the land but that is just one dimension of interpretation.

[@narrativeinfrastructure4308]

@loonadeux I didn't get to go into depth using the Ignite format. Five minutes, 20 slides, I had to be pithy.
There are a variety of benefits to using the land as an index of people's stories. At the most basic level, just the distribution of narratives gives us insight to community patterns, people's "sense of place". Our memories are cued by sensing things that reminds us of them (photos, scents, flavors, sounds, or the actual physical setting). Using geography we establish the setting that is a trigger for that memory in the mind of the storyteller.
Stories indexed by keywords presume you know what words to search. Narrative infrastructure stories are indexed by location, not keyword, so even if you don't know the language, you can still look at locally relevant stories and employ translation websites to understand those local stories (an index accurate to 220 meters).
Crime data can be overlaid with this information and we can tease out places where we can change narratives for a neighborhood using publicly funded intervention that uses the preexisting narratives as the impetus and initial theme for the intervention. This principle of continuity can equally be applied to development, policy, activism: use the existing stories to frame the new ones. Make people's own memories foundational to how we intend to change their community. Their physical community then evokes their own sense of place (as represented by the memories in their head).
The next layer of engagement is to start using ethnographic coding methods. We want to build the interface for Narrative Infrastructure so users can use their own keywords to "code" narratives, and then sort the map by their codes. Our pilot project used codes derived from Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition" (labor, work, action; and secondary codes for identity, meaning, and domain). As an example, it was very successful and we demonstrated in the pilot neighborhood a distinct dearth of stories about subjective well being, or "happiness" (labor). In review with the community stakeholders, they were very excited to see this result in the data, and agreed they had been telling a lot of meaningful stories, stories of political action and things they built, stories about distinguishing themselves from ethnic neighbors, and their sense of home, but only a handful about the labors and pleasures of life. This led to discussions about revitalizing a neighborhood garden that has laid fallow for a generation.
By giving researchers or community activists the ability to develop their own codes, they can look for patterns relevant to their specific questions, find the physical locations of commonality or dissonance, and make an informed case for changes to the urban landscape couched in the community's own stories.
You can see more at www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/ and the pilot map is under "projects"