Discovering Climate Resiliency through Storytelling, Art and Community Outreach
The ADK Climate Project connects climate change to personal narrative using a mobile recording studio that travels through the Adirondack Park. These captured climate narratives are subsequently provided to artists who create artworks in response. The aim is to promote climate action by highlighting our humanity, sharing and reflecting on the local consequences of climate change, as opposed to relying exclusively on scientific data.
Because half of the Adirondack Park belongs to all the people of New York State and is constitutionally protected to remain a “forever wild” forest preserve and the remaining half of the park is private land, The Adirondack Park is an ideal location to deconstruct environmental conflict and explore how park residents and visitors are encountering climate change.
The Role of Digital Scholarship
Professors Ashenfelder and Beauchamp had already begun collecting materials for the project when they approached Digital Scholarship for help creating a searchable online archive. The site needed to provide intuitive access to recorded stories, transcripts, and related subjects and tags, while also showcasing artwork created during the project’s associated artist retreats.
Digital Scholarship collaborated with the project team to:
- define the scope and goals of the website
- identify key audiences and their needs
- develop meaningful subjects, tags, and other descriptive metadata
- select appropriate technology platforms
- establish workflows for tagging, organizing, and importing content
The team selected Speak AI to assist with transcription and tagging of the recorded stories. For the website, we chose Omeka S because the collection would grow annually, required robust search and filtering, and included several different types of content. The site is hosted on our Digital Scholar platform and uses a custom domain.
Development of the Omeka S site took place in several phases and included extensive user-experience work, information architecture, custom theming, and graphic design.
What's Next?
The ADK Climate Project is ongoing and data collection continues as the booth makes appearances across the Adirondack Park. New artwork is being created at the artists retreat and shared via the site each summer.
