Wolfville Community Radio

Through my work in Nunavut, I was invited to take part in some Equity and Technology radio broadcasts here in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. The broadcasts are part of the dissemination phase of a Tech Equity research project that has been going on for several years that has been examining how people use technology, and how we can use technology to better serve those that have been marginalized (i.e. African Canadians, Aboriginals, Inuit, etc.).

My connection to this is that we have been working with Inuit in Nunavut to use new technologies (Virtual Learning Environments, a combination of VR photography and other interactive medias) to capture, preserve, and promote their culture.

Our project launched on March 29th and can be found at InuitQ.ca. Most of the site is online, and our full interactive movie (involving VR photography, interactive video, games, and decision-making scenarios) should be online by the end of April. All of the VR photographs in the Learning Resources section are ones that I created on our trip in September, which you can also find on my web site, as well as the one hundred Inuit carving object VRs in the Resources section which I photographed this past fall at the Houston North Gallery in Lunenburg, NS.

I was invited to speak about my work with VR Photography and Virtual Learning Environments as new tools for unique cultures. After I set that up, we decided to organize a panel discussion on the atmosphere of Intellectual Property, and the changing concepts of IP in this new digital and collective information age. We discussed new IP models like open-source and Creative Commons, as well as the ways in which people are creating, sharing, and distributing information. Then we had a short discussion on Web 2.0 and user-created content web sites.

I had originally planned to do my VR photo for this event right from the middle of our IP discussion, but the hour-long discussion went by so quickly, and then we had to move out of the way for the Easily Distracted jazz band to set up. So, I didn't get my atmosphere pano of us discussing IP, but I moved back in the room and captured one of the atmosphere of the overall event.

Over the week-long broadcasts, we kept calling what we were doing, "noisy radio," since it was truly noisy. People would walk in off the street and join the conversations, you could hear the phones ring and people in the background, and we just went wherever the topics and events took us. This really was a grassroots, community, radio event. An atmosphere of collaboration and sharing, placing priority on the issues of importance to the local community. It was very interesting to step back from all the technology, and work with a traditional media like radio. Meanwhile, we did keep up with the technology by keeping up blogs, photo-blogs, and webcasts. We even had a wireless digital camera that was sending pictures to a laptop, which was them posting them instantly on Flickr!

The atmosphere was an incredible one, combining the power of community media, the power of traditional media, and the power of new and emerging technology.

It has been a pleasure to work with everyone that was involved in the broadcasts, and I hope to be able to work with initiatives like this in the future!

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USA-Canada / Canada-Nova Scotia

Lat: 45° 5' 28.78" N
Long: 65° 22' 36.53" W

Elevation: 17

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Hardware:
- Canon 20D
- Peleng 8mm/3.5
- Panosaurus
- Tripod

Software:
- Capture One
- PTGui/PanoTools
- PhotoShop
- Pano2QTVR