An interactive participatory archive and map
People’s River Stories is a new media storytelling platform that invites people from across the world to share place-based narratives about rivers that matter to them. The project functions as both an interactive map and a digital archive of oral history, grounded in community voices and bottom-up storytelling.
Technically, the platform is a custom JavaScript and MySQL application that allows visitors to explore existing stories geolocated on an interactive map, or add their own story, image, or memory tied to a river place. It was designed with a strong emphasis on accessibility and simplicity of contribution, drawing from years of experience, inviting participation in the field.
The project is a conceptual and technical spinoff of A Secret History of American River People, a decade-long participatory art and oral history project focused on shantyboat communities and river margins. People’s River Stories builds on that work, extending the invitation to those far from our physical route and expanding the archive with contributions from a wider public.
The inspiration for the platform came from the influential Queering the Map (QTM), a brilliant, community-driven archive of queer experience mapped across the globe. I’ve long admired QTM and regularly teach it in my new media and creative coding courses at UC Santa Cruz. It is an exemplar of both technical elegance and radical openness. QTM’s ability to queer cartography and center personal, embodied experience in digital space is precisely what I sought to echo and adapt for a project grounded in the river as a site of cultural memory and ecological vulnerability.
People’s River Stories continues my commitment to participatory practices, oral history, and radical media. It contributes to conversations around digital memory, archiving, and geolocated storytelling while offering an open invitation to those whose river stories might otherwise go unheard.
The project is currently live and growing, with dozens of contributions to date and many more expected during the upcoming field season. It is integrated into the Secret History full exhibition as an interactive touchscreen and as a standalone digital artifact accessible globally.
