Know your Bus
Playing with digital maps isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – not everyone has a computer at home, a good internet connection or feels confident with new technologies. Even attending a workshop to play, practice and learn at a community venue can be difficult – travel to such events is easier for some than others and each venue tends to privilege the participation of those who understand such venue as ‘their space’. As a result, previous work through the Know Your Bristol project tended privileging particular kinds of participants. While this is inevitable to some degree, Know Your Bus sets out to challenge it as far as possible.
Know Your Bus is a lorry fully equipped with the latest audio-visual archiving technologies. The bus can travel around the Bristol offering a mobile space for people to come together to share and digitise artefacts, recount and record stories and access and update the Know Your Place and Map Your Bristol digital maps with the support of others who’ve used them before.
The ‘bus’ builds on a history of innovative mobile platforms from the ‘perambulating libraries’ of the 19th-century to modern ‘bookmobiles’ that open new spaces for collective research and learning. The bus will bring the project to wherever our communities are, enabling us to display existing resources, and explore new and existing methods of creating knowledge.