Draft:Story Sharing Cubes

The Story Sharing Cube (SSC) initiative aims to refine qualitative, in-situ data collection methodologies in high-uncertainty and complex environments. It also seeks to deepen scientific understanding of the impact of transformative festival cultures while simultaneously supporting community development efforts by sharing of anonymized data back to the communities.

The testing and development settings for the devices since 2019 have resembled week-long transformative festivals. , such as Burning Man, where participants often undergo life-altering experiences. This was evidenced by a study published in Nature Communications in 2022.

Methodology
SSC is philosophically grounded to an assumption that people often attribute meaning to their experiences through stories .Methodologically, in situ narratives refer to stories collected directly in the environment where they naturally occur. The main difference between in situ methodology and thematic interview methodology lies in their data collection methods and context. In in situ methodology, information is collected passively in its natural environment, capturing spontaneous expressions and interactions, whereas interview data is actively collected through direct questions and interaction between the interviewer and interviewee. In situ narratives provide a less filtered and more contextualized perspective because they are recorded in real-time in a natural environment, while interview data may be influenced by external factors due to the structure of interview questions.

Outputs on the method (2019-)

 * Field research report on the 2019 Burning Man and Borderland events in article Transformation Through Connection? Insights From a Pilot Study of Story Sharing Cubes.


 * Conference publication on preliminary data analysis in conference paper Exploring psychedelic experiences: Insights from narrative collections in transformational festivals.


 * Master's thesis on the usability of Story Sharing Cubes Co-designing the Story Sharing Cube: a novel experience-driven data collection method for exploring transformative experiences in participatory culture communities.


 * The methodology and its potential applications in artificial intelligence have been discussed in article From Myth to Cyberrealism? An Overview of the Joint Future of Artificial Intelligence and Art.
 * The data has been so far used outside publications in sound art, in community journal posting and discussed for possible application in war zones.