StoryCubes

playful cubes for storytelling, brainstorming ideas or playing games in three dimensions

Community & Events

Diffusion engaging with the community, online and out in the world.

Residencies

an ongoing programme enabling residents at Proboscis studio to create eBooks and StoryCubes for their own projects.

Learning, Schools & Education

eBooks & StoryCubes created for learning and educational purposes

Library

Browse the collection of Diffusion Shareables: eBooks & StoryCubes

Articles tagged with: local history

Home » eBooks, Featured, One-Off Shareables
As It Comes by Alice Angus
Submitted by on December 4, 2010 – 8:00 am3 Comments
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Small A4 | US Letter PDF 12Mb
Full Size A3 | Ledger PDF 12Mb

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About : a final eBook about Alice Angus’ new project, As It Comes commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts and Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce for  their Talking Shop series. An exploration of the independent shops and market stall traders of Lancaster, Alice has created a series of drawings that are printed on 2 metre long cotton banners with hand-embroidered details, which are hung in the windows of a shop at 18 New Street on from the 10th November to 16th December 2010.
Also available as a PPOD printed book.

Published December 2010

Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.

Made with *** bookleteer.com ***

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Home » Community Projects, eBooks, One-Off Shareables
A Sketchbook of Lancaster by Caroline Maclennan
Submitted by on December 1, 2010 – 7:12 pm4 Comments

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Small A4 | US Letter PDF 4.6Mb
Full Size A3 | Ledger PDF 20Mb

About : This book documents some of the research and traders involved in Alice Angus’ As It Comes project exploring independent shops and traders in Lancaster, England. It was made by Caroline Maclennan, a local student at Lancaster University who worked with Alice and also includes work with local historian Michael Winstanley who collaborated with Alice. As It Comes was commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts for their Talking Shop regeneration programme, and was supported by the Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce.

Published December 2010

Caroline Maclennan is a History of Art and Fine Art student at the University of Lancaster specialising in installation and digital art. Caroline undertook a creative placement on Alice Angus’ As It Comes project in Summer / Autumn 2010.

Made with *** bookleteer.com ***

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Home » Community Projects, eBooks, One-Off Shareables, StoryCubes
As It Comes eBook & StoryCubes by Alice Angus
Submitted by on November 11, 2010 – 12:09 am2 Comments

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eBook A4 | US Letter PDF 3.8Mb Read Online
StoryCube 1 A4 only 2.4Mb
StoryCube 2 A4 only 2.4Mb
StoryCube 3 A4 only 2.4Mb
StoryCube 4 A4 only 2.4Mb

About : an eBook and a set of StoryCubes about Alice Angus’ new project, As It Comes commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts and Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce for  their Talking Shop series. An exploration of the independent shops and market stall traders of Lancaster, Alice has created a series of drawings that are printed on 2 metre long cotton banners with hand-embroidered details, which are hung in the windows of a shop at 18 New Street on from the 10th November to 16th December 2010.

Published November 2010

Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the first Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.

Made with *** bookleteer.com ***

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Home » Community & Events, Community Projects, eBooks, One-Off Shareables
Greenhill eBooks by Gillian Cowell
Submitted by on July 14, 2010 – 8:00 am4 Comments

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Greenhill Digital Storytelling Guide A4 | US Letter PDF 300Kb
Summary of Activities 2009 and plans for 2010 A4 | US Letter PDF 530Kb
A March Back in Time with the Pipers of Allandale A4 | US Letter PDF 96oKb

AboutGreenhill Digital Storytelling Guide: This is a short guide to community research and how the digital story is formed. It details some handy hints about how you identify interviewees, writing your interview questions and how you actually build a historical digital “story”. These stories can be really engaging because they mix images with a real experience of life in a particular community. They can also be shared really easily and are very cheap to produce if you don’t have much of a budget. You can record interviews and combine the voice with digital images from archives or images of objects that have meaning, to create something really visual and emotional.

Summary of Activities 2009 and plans for 2010: This booklet details the Greenhill Historical Society’s wandering and exploring. A “village” situated in Bonnybridge, Greenhill has experienced a significant amount of upheaval and change over the last century. Most recently, hundreds of new and expensive houses have been built on vast tracts of greenbelt; mineral industry, predominantly mining, is all but gone. We’re interested in what this means for the area now. If Greenhill will never be as great as it once was, what does that mean for us? We hope that by exploring the derelict, the hidden, the new, the old, the stories of new and old residents we can come up with a new definition for this place.
A March Back in Time with the Pipers of Allandale: This project retraces the story of one remarkable family’s wartime sacrifice and the heroic journey taken by four brothers during the Second World War. Greenhill Historical Society created a weekend programme of events so that others could share their discoveries – a talk, a play, a walk, an exhibition, and a daffodil tea – as well as a chance to engage in debate about the issues it generated. This booklet contains a summary of the project as well as smaller versions of the exhibition and printed materials for you to view.

Published July 2010

Gillian Cowell is a community worker and researcher based in Bonnybridge, Stirlingshire, and a doctoral student at the University of Stirling exploring civic learning and the construction of public space. Her research interests include public sphere and public space theory towards a better understanding of community education as public education. She is involved in exploring derelict and historical spaces of post-industrial communities with residents, and how these spaces transform into public and political sites, revealing and reigniting debate about contemporary challenges.

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Home » eBooks, eNotebooks, Residencies
Dominion Dundas by Seth
Submitted by on February 3, 2009 – 12:10 amOne Comment

dominion_dundas_cover  

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 1.9Mb

About : The Dominion Dundas eBook has been produced to accompany the exhibition of Canadian cartoonist Seth’s model city at the Dundas Museum & Archives (Dundas, Ontario, Canada). Organized by RENDER (University of Waterloo), Dominion takes Seth’s distinct vision of urban space off the printed page and into the format of an installation infused with the cartoonist’s characteristic air of melancholy and ambiguous nostalgia. This eBook features images of 10 of Seth’s buildings and has been developed as a story collecting tool to accompany the exhibition, encouraging museum visitors to reflect on their own town’s history and to share stories of buildings, people and sites of the area.

Published February 2009

Seth is the cartoonist behind the painfully infrequent comic book series Palookville. Currently he is serializing the story Clyde Fans between its covers. This is a task that has gone on for a decade now and will likely continue for several more years. His books include It’s A Good Life I You Don’t Weaken, Wimbledon Green, Bannock, Beans and Black Tea, and the above mentioned Clyde Fans Book One. One volume of his sketchbooks has appeared under the title Vernacular Drawings and another will likely appear within the following few seasons. His books have been translated into 5 languages.

As a book designer he has worked on a variety of projects including the recent Penguin reprinting of The Portable Dorothy Parker. He is the designer of the 25 volume series The Complete Peanuts and the upcoming two volume series on Canadian master cartoonist Doug Wright. As an illustrator/hack he has produced commercial works for almost all of the major Canadian and American magazines. His work has appeared inside and on the cover of the New Yorker. Last year he serialized the story George Sprott (1894-1975) in the New York Times for 25 weeks and will appear in an expanded form as a book in the spring of 2009.

Seth lives in Guelph, Ontario with his wife and three cats and appears to rarely leave the basement.

For more information about RENDER and the Dundas Museum visit:
www.render.uwaterloo.ca
www.dundasmuseum.ca

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Home » Learning, Schools & Education, Residencies
Lisa Hunter – Diffusion Residency, July 2008
Submitted by on September 14, 2008 – 2:16 amNo Comment

Diffusion Residency with Proboscis, July 2008
Lisa Hunter
Collections Manager, Dundas Museum and Archives
Dundas, Ontario, Canada.

In my curatorial work with the Dundas Museum and Archives, I work with a local history collection, within the environment of a supportive local community, to produce exhibitions and related programming.  At the heart of my curatorial approach is the concept of storytelling, and most of my projects have been based on some form of information exchange with members of the community.  The primary goal of my residency with Proboscis was to explore ways in which I could build on the most successful aspects of these projects, and to develop additional and alternative approaches to the exchange and presentation of historical material.  Specifically, I wanted to learn how I might incorporate eBooks and StoryCubes into the work that I do at the museum, and to see how these tools might lead to new programs or projects.

The best approach for me was to begin by “jumping right in” and producing an eBook.  The technical and intellectual process of making my first eBook became a way of thinking through how I might use the eBooks (and StoryCubes) at the Dundas Museum.  Additionally, having the opportunity to speak at length with Giles, and other members of Proboscis, about the many innovative and creative ways in which the Generator has been used by others, was a very significant aspect of this residency.  Being in the studio, and being able to share ideas and to have an open exchange, was invaluable.  Further, having the opportunity to put some distance between myself and the museum allowed me to see things a bit more objectively, which is often difficult to do when you are in the thick of the day to day work.

I think the greatest benefit of this residency was that it resulted in a definite shift in my thinking about how a museum can interact with, and respond to, the community it serves.  My approach has always been to encourage dialogue between the museum and the public, but the tools for doing so in an informal yet elegant way have been missing.  Consequently, those efforts to facilitate exchange have been sporadic.  Those of us who work in smaller museums can often feel very limited in our ability to disseminate ideas, partly because of a longstanding tradition of thematically narrow, expensive and poorly distributed publishing ventures.  The Generator, conversely, allows for spontaneous, experimental, low cost initiatives that can be distributed more widely than was ever possible.  I think that our future success as a museum will depend on our ability to continue and deepen an ongoing exchange with our local community, and that the eBooks and StoryCubes are excellent tools for us in this regard.

Although the actual residency was for a one week period, I feel that my work with it is just beginning.  Not only have I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how past projects might have been enhanced or done differently with the utilization of the Generator tools, but I have also been developing a number of future initiatives, in consultation with other members of the museum staff.  While it seems that the eBooks and StoryCubes will need some time to become an automatic part of our curatorial “toolbox,” (i.e. to become a part of our organizational culture), there is a lot of enthusiasm and interest within the organization at this time.  There are currently two eBooks under development, and a plan in place to create a StoryCube set for a senior citizens’ education program in the coming weeks. Other uses are also being considered for future projects.

The residency with Proboscis was an extremely useful, thought-provoking, energizing experience, and I feel very privileged to have been invited to take part.  The new insights I gained are being shared with my colleagues at the museum, and I am hopeful that it will be the basis for a new, creative approach that will permeate our organization.  Working with Proboscis has been very inspiring, and has given me a fresh enthusiasm for pursing my curatorial goals.

The eBooks

Button Doll
Despair
Forget Me Not

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