Selected participants at General Conference are recording their impressions for posterity, using a new app soon to be available to all United Methodists.
The United Methodist Stories app was developed by the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History and was announced April 29 at a General Conference press conference. It will be available only on mobile devices.
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“Preserving testimonies and reactions from a variety of voices to major events within The United Methodist Church will serve as a vital learning tool for our denomination’s future, as well as interrupt the dominant, often colonial, understanding that history is preserved only through written form,” said Ashley Boggan D., top executive of Archives and History.
The app has been tested at a few events already, including the 40th anniversary convocation of Reconciling Ministries Network in October.
Using the free app, users was able to record, review and submit their impressions of General Conference. The recordings will be added to the repository of the app, which will eventually be available to all.
The United Methodist Stories app was developed by Kevin Dusenberry, the digital archivist for Archives and History.
“(Dusenberry) is a great innovator and thinker,” Boggan said. “I asked him if it was possible to create some sort of easier way for persons to record their stories, their testimonies, their calls to ministry, their witnessing of mission, that was relatively accessible.
“And he said, ‘Of course,’ and then he proceeded to write all of the code for this app.”
The priorities were “usability and accessibility,” said Dusenberry, who is based in New Jersey, in an interview.
It’s anticipated that various United Methodist groups including conferences, congregations, agencies and ethnic caucuses, may eventually come to Archives and History for customized platforms.
“So at your annual conference, if you want to ask your laypersons, your clergy, your seminarians, anyone in attendance, a certain question to reflect on that week, we could design the app to have that question,” Boggan said.
She added the app will be used to help collect and preserve the stories of persons in their native tongues and persons whose cultural context isn’t prone to predominantly a written narrative.
“So this will be open to doing and capturing oral histories so that we aren’t just relying so heavily upon a written narrative, which tends to be a Western white narrative,” Boggan said.
The immediate focus will be on collecting stories, rather than dispensing them. There will be a 25-year wait before most data will be publicly available — in hopes of encouraging frankness. However, users will have the option to make their contributions available immediately.
“It’s a pretty standard archival policy,” Dusenberry said. “We want to encourage people to confront tough topics, and how they dealt with it, or how their church community dealt with it. And this gives them a little bit more freedom to speak.”
The database will be browsable, he said.
Dusenberry said a lot of this technology is coming through Amazon Web Services.
“We’re going to be working to integrate automatic transcription and translation on the back end, so we can make these stories available to even more people,” he said.
The transcription process would identify personal identification information for possible deletion so users can feel safe. There will be a countdown clock to help contributors keep their reflections to the point, but no one will be cut off if they keep talking past 30, or even 60 minutes.
excerpt from a story by Jim Patterson, UM News reporter, Nashville, Tennessee
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