1001 Electronic Story Nights

In post-modernist theories of literature, critics concern themselves with the way in which the audience constructs meaning. In reading a book or watching a movie, the audience first deconstructs or parses their experience into the smallest possible elements of meaning. Allowing for a certain latency, the audience then reconstructs these elements in higher-level groupings. This process of granular reconstruction mimics the activity of the original creator. One of our recent projects is designed around the idea of construction. Our subject is historical biography; the title is "Jerome B. Wiesner: a Random Walk through the 20th Century."

At one level, this research is about the nature and expression of history. Our lives are reflected in and through the fabric of multifaceted chronologies. Events which are common between cultures are also distinct to each culture. Increasingly, I feel that we, perhaps especially in America, are losing our history. As the turmoil of the 1960's fades, I watch students enter MIT who have no knowledge of the Second World War and its impact on America, let alone the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam. They are students of the Now, but it is hard for them to put their generation in context. Although this may not inhibit their ability to write computer programs in the years to come, it cannot help but leave their world less rich. In addition, it may limit their ability to realistically evaluate strategy, occurrence, and consequence. World War II left its heavy mark across a cultural framework for several generations. Remembering the circumstances of the war and the Cold War which followed can help us formulate a context for our current history. However, if we restrict ourselves to some thin causal chronology of the times, we cannot understand the global cultural trends that have emerged. A contextual approach to history allows us to examine the actions and interactions of individuals as more or less innocent agents of change. We followed this approach in our portrait.

Jerome Wiesner was born in 1915. He served as President John F. Kennedy's Science Advisor from 1961 until Kennedy's assassination in 1963; subsequently, Wiesner became President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Wiesner died in 1994, I became interested in making a biographical piece which would reflect some of the strengths which had allowed Wiesner to affect the community of MIT, as well as the course of American -- and hence, global -- history. Five circumstances influenced my commitment. I knew Jerry Wiesner fairly well from my time at MIT, and I had filmed and edited several short pieces about him while he was still alive. I was fascinated by the story and had already collected several key pieces of visual material which featured Jerome Wiesner. I had become friendly with Cheryl Morse, his assistant at the time of his death, and she was willing to participate in this project. Jerry Wiesner had written some compelling chapters for an incomplete autobiography; we had some access to these, but not publication rights. Finally, my own research in the development of digital story engines for documentary narratives almost certainly would benefit from the richness of this story.

The goal, then, was to develop a biographical piece around the theme of individual influence. What method of engagement, what style of thinking allowed Wiesner to become so influential? How did he formulate and negotiate his commitment to change within the society? What could his life lessons tell us about our own journey forward? In all of this, I was less interested in conveying a sense of historical causality than in probing individual consequence. The roots of this approach evolved out of my own growing-up. In my experience, conviction about the causality of events often shortchanges the type of dialog which is so necessary to learning. In moving away from a causal presentation, it was useful to present an individual portrait of action, reaction, and interaction as it occurred over time and within a distributed context of sociology and psychology of a time. I knew Jerome Wiesner well enough to understand that he respected and engaged human capability at home and abroad. What would we discover by listening to circumstances of his interactions as told by individuals who had been on the other side of the interaction?

This project was published as a WWW site with a companion CD-ROM as part of the tenth anniversary of the Media Lab, which Jerome Wiesner co-founded. The piece presents itself to the participant viewer via a conceptual map designed by Michael Murtaugh, a graduate student in my group. The concept map provides the participant viewer with an explicit and dynamically suggestive navigational scheme. The visual structure of the map is derived from the wall of the Media Lab's atrium, which was designed by the painter Kenneth Noland. The images and text contained in this map comprise the complete set of annotations which we used to describe and enhance the video sequences and text documents contained in the portrait. Any piece of media can have multiple annotations. The interface mediates the participant viewer's journey by providing a layered visualization. The viewer can select from a period of Wiesner's life (arranged as a downward diagonal on the grid), a decade, the cast of interviewees, and a set of 8 keywords. As the viewer selects from this palette of choices, the concept map indicates other annotations which will lead the viewer to relevant or related content of interest. The system jumps immediately to content when this is the only possibility for closure. This method of narrative guidance through annotations encourages meaningful choices and some amount of narrative continuity and coherence in the viewer's experience. The initial version of the project contained 53 first-person stories told by 28 of Wiesner's friends and colleagues, as well as a collection of letters and autobiographical writings.

In this experience, the viewer can begin exploring the content from any annotation, according to their knowledge and interest. Someone who has no idea who Jerome Wiesner was might begin with "Science" or with the period of his life connected to "Kennedy;" someone with a knowledge of MIT during the 1960's might begin with "November Actions," a period of tremendous upheaval on campus which included street rioting and the student's takeover of the President's office. If I select "Science," the system will highlight in red all periods of Wiesner's life, as well as many of the interviewees. As soon as I select the second period of his life, the "Research Lab for Electronics," the system discovers closure and streams a QuickTime story by Professor Jerome Lettvin. In the story, Lettvin describes an encounter he had with Jerome Wiesner at MIT's Research Lab for Electronics in the 1950's.

Red Howland and I developed an anti-wiretap device. Now they're trying to find the original documents because all of a sudden it's come back into fashion in a different way. So anyway, it worked, it was wonderful and we were so short of money at the time... it was really bad. So I got in touch with some bookies in NY and they said, "Yeah, we need this," because the nice thing about it was that you didn't have to have two... just one was enough. The speaker turned on the noise when he wasn't... speaking, and -- I really think it was interesting -- he could get the whole message coming in, but everybody including me heard only the noise. So we were delighted and the bookies said they'd give us 10,000 bucks so we said, "OK." Red and I were looking forward to it. And it was Saturday, we went Saturday to pick up the money and, ah... but I said, "Maybe you should probably tell Jerry what we're doing," so we did it. Jerry was very interested and said "That's a very intelligent way to do that, very good, very good" And then Friday afternoon, Jerry calls us in Brooklyn, there's a colonel, a major. And he said, "Would you explain this to us?" So we explained it. At the end of which time he said, "You have a document?" I said, "Oh yes." And he got out the stamp and "top secret, top secret, top secret," and he gave it to Jerry to put in the file. And Jerry said, you know, we sadly just... "I'm afraid you're gonna have to tell your clients it didn't work."[7]

We could have started anywhere. Each edited clip builds up the viewer's impression of the person and of the historical time. The viewer is able to consider the relationship between individual style and the progress of transforming societal opinion. We have incorporated a mechanism by which individual viewers can contribute to the discourse. Aimed at developing a society of audience, a firmer idea emerged as colleagues at the Media Laboratory viewed some of our early sequences. Many of our early viewers knew Dr. Wiesner and had lived through particular portions of the history. When they would watch a clip, particularly one about Vietnam, they would comment, "Oh I was there! Can I add my story?" Therefore, we incorporated a discussion component on the World Wide Web. Occasionally, we discover something about the language of interactivity from observing our mistakes. Initially, the discussion thread was open and unedited; however, this was not well-used, so we introduced an editorial function. This form still feels stiff and does not elicit the type of commentary which we had hoped for. We need to continue to explore the design of community-generated commentary.