if IU Memories had no limits...

I would love to see some serious efforts to legitimize people's stories. An email discussion about the difference between history and stories has left me even more convinced that there is little to no actual difference between the two.

The first step I thought of was to make physical markers for people's stories and put them in their appropriate locations on campus/in town. Plaques that look really official would do the trick. I'm thinking that right next to "Such-and-such building built in 19-whatever in memory of people-with-money," we could see "On this site in 1975, Mr. Somebody, by the drop of a pen, met the man who would change his life." On the plaques, we could have something about reading more and contributing at a given website. I haven't yet thought of a way to do this without being really tacky, though.

(This website would probably use Google Maps or some such thing, as has already been suggested several times, as a means of organizing the information in a visual space. Of course it would need to accommodate the addition of information by website visitors. That's not so much my concern at the moment, though. I'm interested in what we could do in the physical world.)

Also, the trick would be to change the plaques as often as possible as a means of accommodating a high volume of stories as well as keeping interest. More than anything, though, changing the things would evoke the important notion that stories are fluid-- they come in and out of existence and fade in and out of memory.

I like the idea of having sites where people can walk by and tell their stories, like little tents or kiosks. Maybe we could have one in a high-traffic area, like the Gates, but not require people to talk about their immediate surroundings. Maybe on the way there, they saw a plaque with someone's story in the arboretum and it made them think of one. Just let them go with that. They don't have to have a story about what's around the tent --just a story about IU (or Bloomington in general, depending on the goal here).

A very intended consequence of making these random stories look so official is the potential "demeaning" of existing commemorative plaques. If you give a story about a long-forgotten student being mugged as much of a shiny dedication as "Beck Chapel was built in 19whatever," you risk making it seem like the "real" history of IU is just a bunch of bedtime stories, too. It's a risk that I like.

©The ideas and objects presented in this blog are copyright Marcela Poffald 2008.