Abstract
"The Media portrait of the Liberties" cpnsists of a collection of multiple short historically informed narratives about the Liberties community. These media segments reveal "a sense of place" and were designed with the intention that they be delivered to the audience as the audience wanders through the neighborhood. The conceptual development of the project began with getting to know the neighborhood and its people using observation and ethnographic interviews, which evolved as the director of the project entered into collaboration with Maireen Johnston, a writer whose book "Around the Banks of Pimlico" serves as the basis for the scripted media segments. Drawn from Johnston's personal memories of growing up in the neighborhood, the book describes the life, lore and colour of the Liberties. The Liberties script made use of Johnston's anecdotal accounts of the lives of real individuals and the way in which she interweaves these with historical descriptions of the social condition of the people living in the area in past times.

The Liberties portrait uses a range of audio-visual styles to bring these accounts to life. The content segments are distributed to the interested audience via an ad hoc wireless infrastructure. In this paper a description of the technical infrastructure is followed by a description of the research process, the scripting and the production of the visual stories for the narrative application.

Proceedings of the Spark! Design and Locality Conference (Oslo, Norway, May 2004). pp. 84-91.
http://mf.media.mit.edu/pubs/conference/MediatedLib.pdf