Seth Keen

Not long after getting up the first prototype version of videodefunct published, the Palabras project appeared on the video vortex mailing list:

Palabras, which means “words” in Spanish, is a set of software tools and interfaces designed to facilitate collective self-representation, and promote social inclusion through participatory media production. Typically, in workshops at local cultural centers at each Palabras site, participants learn to use inexpensive digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application to edit, organize, and share their videos online.

There is a demo video of screenshots to show how it works. The emphasis on tags and participatory content creation is excellent.

The web application was devised to facilitate the discovery of connections between participants’ personal stories, at each site and across cultures, allowing participants to label or “tag” their own video content and create an emergent, social taxonomy – or “folksonomy” (folk+taxonomy).