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Using social networks, which helped organize the revolution in the Arab world, in order to create an interactive documentary, is really an excellent example of what can be a participatory journalism!
This is exactly what 3 professionals of documentary have decided to do: Jigar Mehta, documentary filmmaker and journalist currently on researcher participatory journalism at Stanford University; ALAA DAJANI, documentary filmmaker born in Egypt, also at Stanford and who works today in research on documentary film and finally YASMIN ELAYAT, webdesigner developer.
February 11, Hosni Mubarak left the Egyptian government. Jigar Mehta reporter on the scene, saw a multitude of people who were using their mobile phones or smartphones to film or photograph the event.
So why not tie all this content through social networks?
#18DaysInEgypt is a collaborative project. All the cyber-actors who are tagging their videos on Youtube, and their images on Flickr, can create an interactive timeline. As the team explains on their site, they invite people to just tag media with the date of the event (#jan25, #jan26, #jan27….#feb11), location (#tahrir, #heliopolis, #alexandria, #suez, #ndpbuilding) and other keywords that can specify the content of information.
This project deserves to be followed, and why not repeat it for other events.
Indeed, the mass of information that these “citizen journalists” publishing is a boon for those who can analyze and organize in a journalistic point of view. That is what promotes a project like #18DaysInEgypt referencing and combining these sparse data, they are then shared and redistributed more relevant.
This “Crude Informational User-Generated-Content”, which is sometimes referred to as “crowd-sourcing” has contributed significantly to the echo in the world of revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya now.
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University of Stanford, Palo Alto, California
