Following up on my previous post, I decided to carry the RSS feed (see wikipedia) for the del.icio.us tag “pegtv” here on the right sidebar of this blog.

When I noticed that other people were beginning to tag their del.icio.us bookmarks with “pegtv”, I thought it would be much more interesting to share what other people were finding on the web, rather than sharing just the stuff I was finding. This way I can show my bookmarks tagged with “cmediachange” along with websites other people are tagging “pegtv.”

While you can see for yourself, I thought I’d share some the other bookmarks people are tagging with “pegtv”:

• billsimmon bookmarked LTC
• bensheldon bookmarked People First
• belanico bookmarked Take Public Access TV off the chopping block
• paulfalcone bookmarked Concord Community TV - Public Cable Television

As Felicia says,

“if we in the community media world could start using a mutually agreed upon tag for the work we do in the socially networked world. It would help to pull together the growing number of us using these tools.”

And hopefully lots of other people will then be able to find it, share it, and ultimately benefit.

So, here are some more of my contributions to the folksonomy of PEG acesss TV through some of the other popular social networking platforms:

• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• blip.tv
• technorati
• Internet Archive

As I was searching for examples of access centers using blogs, podcasts, and other participatory web tools, I stumbled upon a great conversation happening around issues of folksonomy and PEG access TV. I first found WCCA TV’s Tech Blog post titled “PEG, tags and RSS“. In it, Felicia Sullivan poses a question about how access centers should organize all the “stuff” they’re publishing on the web so other people can find it:

“I wonder if we in the community media world could start using a mutually agreed upon tag for the work we do in the socially networked world. It would help to pull together the growing number of us using these tools.”

In a reply in the comment section, Mauro writes:

“I have been involved with Pubic Access for twenty years. Here what I see it as:
Public Access TV, P.E.G , community access, community media center, free speech television, participatory media, democratic media, independent media, educational TV, information TV, community media clearinghouse”

Next, I found a post that Jason Crow wrote over on PEGSpace titled “Tagging Conventions“:

“Felicia started the conversation about tagging conventions on the ACM listserv. I am interested in if anyone wants come up with some general guidelines. Once we agreed upon them, I we could send it out as a flyer and start creating RSS feeds based on them.”

There are some great suggestions offered in the comment section about how access centers might begin thinking about how to tag their web content. Jacob Redding recommended that access centers focus on keeping their tags simple:

I think that locative information is going to be next inline on the web anyhow so people will not only be able to enter a tag but also click a point on a map to place where the video/photo/blog/whatever is from . . . My point is that the regional and State tags will then be obsolete.”

I left a comment wondering if the suggested “pegtv” had become an agreed upon tag? It seemed that it had, so I have decided to start using the “pegtv” tag here, as well.

I’ve also started a new page on the wiki titled “Taxonomy and Folksonomy” to explore this topic further.

Click To Play Video

Back in March, I spoke with Felicia M. Sullivan, Executive Director of Organizers’ Collaborative and former Director of Community Programming at Lowell Telecommunications Corporation about a number of issues related to PEG access TV and the Internet.

This short video features an excerpt from our conversation with Felicia’s response to the question, does “YouTube = Public Access TV?”.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by cmediachange with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

We’re still in the very early stages of this project, but here are some of the main themes that I see developing at this point (in no particular order and completely subject to change).

This list (in the picture above) is on the wiki titled “Proposal” where you can add your ideas to this collaborative graduate thesis project.

I’m curious to know if any PEG access centers have worked with their town’s historical centers (or other local organizations) to archive their cable access content? The conversation about digital libraries in the future and metadata (particularly with regards to local community media content) is fascinating and important.

The IS2K7 conference sponsored by the Berkman Center at Harvard (where I work) will be exploring a number of these issues as it relates to University. But, I wonder how this conversation might relate to local public libraries and archival efforts of local stories in community media?

The archiving page on the wiki might be a good place to explore this further.

I only know as much about public, educational, and goverment access TV as the experiences I’ve had spending time around PEG access TV centers and meeting people working in community media over the past three years.

This project is indebted to all those who have worked (both paid and unpaid) as advocates for and participants in an amazing platform called public access TV.

My Motivation

My first experience with PEG access TV involved shuttling (by foot) VHS tapes of Democracy Now! with Nicole Mandala (Emerson College) from CCTV in Cambridge to BNN in Boston. At this time, I was also a volunteer community radio producer for John Grebe’s “Sounds of Dissent” on WZBC at Boston College. These two experiences introduced me to the possibilities that community media offer to individuals in local communities in providing a communications platform within an increasingly commercial media landscape.

Later, I became a board member of CCTV in Cambridge and a member of the Alliance for Community Media. Living in the Boston area, I have been very fortunate to meet and learn from a number of folks who have been working in public access TV since the early days. Their hard work and dedication to the ideals of community media are much of the inspiration for this project.

My fear with the web (and more directly with Google and other online searches) is that it is still young, at least in its participatory nature. It’s easy to find stuff that people are writing about presently (like this blog), but not as easy to find the stuff that’s happened in PEG access TV and the experiences of service it’s provided to local communities over the past thirty years.

I don’t want this project to presume that I know more than other people who have spent much of their lives working in support of community media and its ideals during this time. This is why I am grateful for the interest and support of those how have contributed to this project through these participatory web-based platforms.

With this project, I look forward to learning more from others who know much more than I do about PEG access TV and the Internet. I think the web makes this possible. At least, for now.

With regards to archiving local community stories in PEG access TV, Jason’s comments made me think about the short video I shot on my digital camera of Jay Dedman’s presentation from the ACMBoston 2006 conference in Boston. Here’s the clip from blip.tv:

Click To Play Video

From the blip.tv description:

“A video excerpt of Jay Dedman, Node 101/FireAnt.tv, presenting at the Alliance for Community Media Conference in Boston, July 8, 2006.

To download and listen to the complete audio podcast from this session, visit the ACMEBoston Podcast.”

I’ve created a new page on the wiki, titled “Archiving” to explore this topic further.

This video was originally shared on blip.tv by acmeboston with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The following post (and blog title = email subject header) is from Jason Daniels who gave me permission to share an email correspondence here on this blog. I think it’s very relevant to the issue of archiving of Public Access TV content to preserve a part of the history of local communities and its potential made possible through web-based technologies:

Colin,
I just saw a festival called the Found Footage festival at the Coolidge a few weeks back and it really put the bug in my head about the value of archiving public access tapes.

http://www.cine-magic.com/foundfootagefest.html

They had a segment called ‘this week in public access’ and it was phenomenal. Weird, interesting.

I have always been interested in anthropology and visual anthropology in particular. When you passed along your research into Radical Software I noticed that there is a reference to the ‘public access experiment’. Experiment struck me because as it sounds scientific - and part of a scientific method is collecting the data in order to draw your conclusions. I see digital archiving, archiving to the web, etc - as a way of collecting the data. I saw the Found Footage Festival’s celebration of public access as a remarkable accomplishment in this light.

What does this have to do with your thesis project - I am not quite sure. But taking the FFF as the tip of the iceberg - the whole scope of public access as a cultural artifact is a collective ethnography of American life in the post 60’s era. Because so many idealists from the 60’s helped launch public access - access tapes can serve as some sort of record of American culture for the last quarter century. What is most impressive - when compared with the mass media from the same era is that it is PUBLIC ACCESS. There is no gatekeeper, no one grand narrator telling the story, it is people telling their own stories in whatever way they know how. It is the first collaborative documentary project. Maybe it provides some framework for evaluating the future of a web based community media experiment in which regulation helps to fund the next phase of public access.

Jason

It struck me as I was speaking with Mara Altman at the Village Voice last week how much image and production quality matter less in a participatory media culture. We talked about this a bit. It leads me to the question of whether or not PEG access productions on the Internet have the opportunity to become more relevant, as a result?

This is not to say that all access productions are of low quality, but it is certainly an issue for some people who have criticized PEG access TV on this point. My question is whether this becomes a more important issue now in attempting to locate and contextualize PEG access productions within a participatory culture?

I’ve started a new page on the wiki titled, “Production Value” to explore this topic further.