Abecedarium: word geeks in Alphabet City

Author: Michelle Riggen-Ransom
Posted: September 12th, 2008 @ 2:13am
Info: bio / all posts
Tags: art, communication, social media

abecedarium:NYC is an online project that combines movie clips, audio tracks, animation, maps and written words in order to give small glimpses of life in the Big Apple. With 24 English words and phrases as a starting point (entries include “elutriate”, “biliomancy” and “umbel”) the website places you on a map of a lesser-known New York neighborhood and then provides a multimedia mini-collage interpretation of the related word.

The project, originally created by a group of New York artists and media-makers, is also collaborative. Visitors are invited to respond by contributing their own photos, text, audioscapes and films on the site’s blog. As contributions are added, the project grows in scope and size:

The web 2.0 capabilities of Abecedarium:NYC allow for a new level of user sharing, interaction and tracking. Shoot a video and geotag it to the exact location it was shot, then track other users’ comments on your work via RSS feed. Add your favorite post to Digg and subscribe to the project feed through Google Reader or My Yahoo!

If you like thinking about words and how they’re woven into our daily lives, you might enjoy Oxford University Press lexicographer Erin McKean’s talk at last year’s Pop!Tech. Erin will be joining us again this fall to show off a new piece of software that will “make words more useful.”

As the technologies and language we use to capture our lives change, the impulse to document and communicate remains the same–to share our stories and to find commonalities between them.