Work Description

Date: 31 December, 2023

Dataset Title: Detroit River Story Lab: Sailing the River, Writing Ourselves

Dataset Creators: David Porter

Dataset Contact: dporter@umich.edu

Funding: The Michigan–Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis

Research Overview:
Launched in response to the growing crisis of narrative infrastructure, the Detroit River Story Lab is a collaborative, public-facing initiative that leverages the sociocultural, economic, and ecological centrality of the Detroit River corridor to reimagine it as an urban case study in narrative placemaking and civic renewal. Beginning with the premise that place-based storymaking is vital to sustaining democratic values and community capacity for self-determination, the Lab partners on projects designed to support the narrative capacities of local urban communities through the story-telling channels of community journalism, place-based education, and public history.

The Story Lab co-designs scalable interventions to strengthen community-based forms of narrative infrastructure. Participants draw upon archives and oral histories to document previously marginalized narratives centering the river. Drawing on this research, we prototype new approaches to place-based learning, within the university and beyond, to expand the publics involved in the production and circulation of local narratives of identity and urban memory.

More information about the Detroit River Story Lab (DRSL) can be found at https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/detroit-river-story-lab/.

Methodology:
The data in this deposit are primarily photos (JPEG documenting the Skiff & Schooner Program which provides place-based, experiential learning opportunities to high school and college students in communities up and down the Detroit River. Participants had the opportunity to hoist the sails on a historical tall ship, row wooden skiffs they’d crafted with their own hands, and participate in hands-on learning labs, offered by community experts and U-M faculty, on topics ranging from principles of buoyancy and the resurgence of Great Lakes sturgeon to the many-layered histories of Belle Isle and the Midnight Station on the Underground Railroad. A representative set of items were posted to the Egalitarian Metropolis site (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/egalitarianmetropolis/).

Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA

Folders contained here:
-Detroit River Story Lab.zip
> DRSL Schooner Sails contains images of the Skiff & Schooner Program.
> LSA Learning Stations for DRSL Schooner Trips contains images of the Skiff & Schooner program.
> Materials on EM Web contains the images, videos, and text of the Aquatic Spaces project page on the Egalitarian Metropolis website.
-DetroitRiverStoryLab_EgalitarianMetropolis.html - HTML capture of project page from Egalitarian Metropolis site
-DetroitRiverStoryLab.html - HTML capture of linked project page on Detroit River Story Lab site (destination page of "Detroit River Story Lab" button on Egalitarian Metropolis project page)

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0).

To Cite Data:
Porter, D. (2024). Detroit River Story Lab: Sailing the River, Writing Ourselves [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/hgfp-f665