What is elmwoodstrip..org and who created it?

Elmwoodstrip.org is a free community dataspace based in the elmwood strip community of Buffalo, NY. This digital public space brings local residents together by allowing them to share their local experiences. Users can easily embed text, sound, animation, and video without having any web programming experience and without using commercial software. The published content becomes immediately available to the public via the elmwoodstrip.org interface. By lowering the learning curve for publishing to the web, and combining publication with a dedicated local readership, we hope to open up this digital documentation process to a segment of the population that typically does not produce their own media or record their own historical experience.

As with swatches in a quilt, the embedded media files are "sewn" together using MySQL, an open source database software package, and delivered to the public with PHP, another open source scripting language, to form a digital quilt of the elmwood experience starting in fall of 2003.

Elmwoodstrip.org is being developed to counteract the negative effects on local community resulting from a move toward the globalization of communication via the internet. Time spent at the site focuses the user on other local residents and local information, as well as historical documentation of their own local experience. As the site grows, a people's history of this community begins to emerge and the interpretation of the local experience becomes more colorful and accurate.

Elmwoodstrip.org was created by Paul Visco, a graduate student in the UB MFA in Media Studies program in Buffalo, NY. You can find his journal here and his API mirror here



Elmwoodstrip.org was created using mysql, php, perl, javascript, xml, rss, soap, actionscript, maya, photoshop, cinema 4d, and flash.