Interviewer: Talk about that.

Abbe Don: These are really stimulating interview questions! [Laughter]

Interviewer: We'll get there.

Abbe Don: I'm teasing.

Interviewer:Yeah, I know.

Abbe Don: "Bubbe's Back Porch” combines a lot of different things I've done. One idea about " Bubbe's Back Porch " is that there is a character, named Bubbe. She has her own email address. She's Bubbe at Bubbe.com. She's very much based on the character of my great-grandmother. She acts as the host and the leader to the site. She also has her stories available. She acts as the catalyst for people think about the stories about people they have seen. A lot of people share stories about their grandmothers.

Most of my visitors are Jewish, in the title, because Bubbe meets grandmother in Yiddish tends to appeal to a Jewish audience, but it's not exclusively Jewish. It also tends to appeal to a female audience, but it's not exclusively for women. There's a lot of sub-scenes that emerge. There's a lot of journey stories about how they or their family got to the United States. A lot of romance stories, either first love or unrequited love or stories of ancestors who were together for 50/60 years, which I think for a lot of people in our contemporary culture, that’s pretty hard to imagine.

And so, over time, I've done multiple redesigns of "Bubbe's Back Porch". Originally, I tried to be a very comprehensive site about genealogy and media theories, representing families, ethnographies, pointers to lots of others sites and tried to support feature stories.

I took that book that I told you about earlier, "No Soup, just Motsa Balls" and translated it to the Web. It was very interesting that something that was kind of created in a static book form in 1983 had a whole new life in 1996.

I had this idea to do those kinds of features stories, working with writers and artists. I've done a handful of those. Those have proven to be really labor intensive. What's been more fruitful, I think, is to really enable people to tell, kind of short, what I think of as like nugget stories – just the sort of little core of a story, which if you string several together, you can get a longer kind of piece or portrait. The Web, I think, lends itself – I think interactive media, in general, in the Web in particular, lends itself to what I call "short and chunky", all kinds of pieces of information. You could string several of those short and chunky ones together to get something longer.

Interviewer: And that led you to thinking about doing these things both in your museum environments and then, more recently, in special event environments with the digital story bee.

Abbe Don: Right. So the next thing that happened is that people began to ask me to do family histories for them or would I put their story up on the Web? Bubbe’s Back Porch had a facility where you could add your own story, but there were a lot of technical glitches and not being a back-end programmer type, I didn't have the skills to maintain it. It was driving everyone crazy – including me. So I ripped that functionality out and resorted to saying, " just email me your story," which for a lot of people worked. For other people, they wanted to do something more complex, something that involved pictures – also just get a better understanding of how Web publishing actually worked.

I also still think there's a really important component and synergy to telling your story to a live audience. I started these workshops where people come together with between two and five family photographs. The story bees have a theme – so far. They've been stories primarily about grandmothers or women who have had influence on your life. People come together. They tell their story to each other. There's an opportunity to scan your picture, and then there's a couple of very simple templates that I've created to make design easier, and then there is a tutorial that takes people step-by-step through a construction process, using one of the graphical page editing softwares – like Visual Page or Claris Home Page.

So the participants don’t completely start from scratch, but it's a little bit more of a look under the hood then just filling on a form on a Web site.

Interviewer:That's great. I kind of want to go backwards and kind of, you know, ask the meta question of why you think your sense of story and the importance of story in the social context relates to a larger interest. Again, you started with a discussion about post-modernism, and that's a relatively elevated conversation, but do you have a sense that you're also part of a dialog that's a more populor dialog about the need for telling stories and exchanging stories?

Abbe Don: Yeah. I think that you put it very eloquently about the politics of identity in your introduction to the cook book? There’s a politics of identity– certainly in a Jewish community – after the 50s. The early part of the 20th century was – at least the Jewish community – very much about assimilation, and being as American as possible.

And then there was a sort of break in the '60s, in the post World War II, post-suburban cultures. People began to ask "Who am I?" "Who am I in this big modern world?" I think a lot of people began to look to their ethnic and cultural roots. I think that 30 years later we are still a process in which people are only now becoming comfortable and familiar.

There’s an awareness in our culture about the homogenization of mainstream media. Our heroes are all manufactured and have nothing to do with our daily life? There's kind of a way in which personal stories extend the significance of our lives– it's almost like part of what I do is make personal stories mythic.

I started this project working with stories from the Old Testament, called "Digital Joshua", without realizing it, I think what I was doing there was making mythic stories personal. So I'm very much interested in that space between our personal stories and our personal mythologies and our kind of collective stories and our collective mythology and understanding that continuum. I don't know that I understand it, but I am fascinated by it.

So I think that's something very much going on in the kind of culture and arts, right now, then you put the technology spin on it.

Interviewer: Right. Given your relationship to the oral storytelling tradition that started with your grandmother and when you worked on performing yourself – how much do you think it's a particular relationship between that history of orality and the potential of some of this new digital technology in terms of interactivity?

Abbe Don: I think it's crucial. You can footnote my narrative in an interface essay. But, you know, at that point, when I wrote that essay, I was really...

Interviewer: And this is the one that appears in the Human interface book that Brenda edited..?

Abbe Don: Yeah, the Art of Computer Interface Design.

At that point, I was very strongly influenced by Walter Ong's book, "Orality and Literacy, Technologizing of the Word". It was trying to understand the ideas. I didn't know what the hell orality was, I just knew that I sat at my great-grandmother's living room and she told these amazing stories and that those amazing stories weren't like the stories that I read in school. They were different. You know? I didn’t have language to say well, one was oral and was written – you know what I mean?

Interviewer: Um-hmm.

Abbe Don: At that point I didn't know much about a Hasidic storytelling tradition. I didn't have those references. I just had this very core, kind of visceral experience.

So, I don't think right now, frankly, very much about written narrative hardly at all because almost everything I've done has been first person oral history.

Interviewer: So you're bypassing text?

Abbe Don: I'm bypassing a third person narrative text, that's for sure. Well, at least in the personal storytelling stuff that I'm doing. Now, in the Digital Joshua project, I'm taking these classic fable stories, right? Which are all third person but, interestingly enough, they started out being passed down orally.

Interviewer:Sure.

Abbe Don: So I guess there's two parts of an oral tradition. There's stories that get passed down orally from before there was writing, right? And there's a certain kind of mythology and those have a certain kinds of structure. They tend to be episodic, because you had sort of certain narrative sign posts that you needed to hit, and then how the oral storyteller actually got from sign post to sign post was likely to change. I mean, that's a really interesting model. I don't think that's what interactive media necessarily does, but I was fascinated by that as a model.

But then there's this other kind of oral storytelling, which is the part that I'm more interested in, which is the first person oral storytelling. So when a lot of people talk about oral storytelling, they're talking about the passing on of those fables.

I'm all over the place here, Joe. [Laughter]

Interviewer:You are experimenting with how stories lead to other people telling stories.

Abbe Don: Right.

Interviewer: And that suggests you're learning something about the reasons that people give stories to each other, either in a conversational or a semiformal – like a group therapy session or a group artistic process or something – or in a public environment, which is either publishing something or getting on a stage in a venue performance.

It seems to me that part of what we're trying to understand is who is the audience that wants to do this? Is it everybody? Or is it a kind of person that, you know, is sensitized to storytelling in a certain way?

Obviously we've learned a lot about the gender politics of digital storytelling, and in a number of the discussions I've had with women working in this field, we talk about the fact that this is of great importance to a number of women. What are your assessments? What are some examples of the way people have responded to your work that has either surprised you or pleased you or both?