📖 What Is Collective Memory?

Collective Memory is a new form of immersive documentary that places community voices at the center. Instead of watching a linear story, you explore an interconnected web of perspectives, each one adding depth to your understanding of place, history, and lived experience.

In a world of fractured media and algorithmic feeds, we're building infrastructure for communities to gather, preserve, and share their own stories—on their own terms.

⭐ AI as Guide, Not Creator

Community Sovereignty: The stories belong to the storytellers. Metadata helps you find connections, but the narrative power stays with the people who lived it.

🔍 Why Collect Metadata?

Each story includes tags for emotions, themes, people, and places. This isn't surveillance—it's agency.

• Discovery: Find stories that resonate with what you're feeling or thinking about
• Patterns: See how themes weave through different voices
• Preservation: Ensure stories remain findable and meaningful over time
• Community Ownership: Communities control their own narratives and how they're connected

🌍 Vision Beyond PARRAMORE

This platform was built for PARRAMORE, but it's designed to be replicated anywhere:

• Clarkstown, Mississippi: Preserving blues heritage and community resilience
• MIT 77 Mass Ave: Documenting the Alchemy of ideas and the legacy of the Table of Free Voices
• Your Community: This infrastructure is open and replicable

Every community deserves to control its own memory.

🔒 Privacy & Ethics

• ✅ All storytellers give informed consent
• ✅ Communities control who sees what
• ✅ No AI training on community stories
• ✅ Right to be forgotten (stories can be removed)
• ✅ Data sovereignty (communities own their content)

🎓 MIT Open Documentary Lab Partnership

Developed in collaboration with MIT's Open Documentary Lab, this project explores:

• New forms of spatial and immersive storytelling
• Ethical frameworks for AI in community media
• Infrastructure for community-led documentary work

🙏 Thank You

For bearing witness. For listening. For being present with these stories.

You've just walked through a living archive of community memory. Every story you encountered represents someone's truth, someone's experience, someone's gift to the collective understanding of this place.

This is what it means to see, share, and act on our collective intelligence.