PixStori™ helps people and groups tell and share their stories. It makes it easy to collect and manage short form stories with more depth and insight than other social media tools. PixStori lets people slow down and reflect on their pictures and then record their thoughts and feelings in short focused segments that are easy to classify and retrieve. The basic PixStori web app provides a free and familiar social media experience. Partners can use enhanced tools to create story collections on specific themes and then analyze the results without laborious long form editing.
PixStori is being used in diverse settings. In the “Newest Americans” project, hundreds of Newark HS students photographed their blocks and told their stories. Residents at senior facilities shared stories about personal photographs with family, friends and staff. Reflecting on self-chosen photos, adolescent cancer patients responded to thematic prompts in a structured 10-week program. A Public Library’s Stonewall 50 exhibit featured a Kiosk with LGBTQ community PixStori portraits. PixStories were collected at the “Finding Refuge in Buffalo” exhibit hosted by public television/radio WNED/WBFO. PixStori was a centerpiece in workshops on public history in China, India, Brazil, Italy, and Australia.
PixStori is a collaboration of two founding partners who have been working together to improve digital history media for over two decades. Professor of American Studies and History at the University at Buffalo/ SUNY, emeritus, Michael Frisch is an American social and urban historian long involved in oral and public history projects in collaboration with community history organizations, museums, and documentary filmmakers.
Frisch has been a leader in oral history since his landmark book, A Shared Authority (1990). This has combined with more recent digital innovations to generate enormous international interest in his work, including, in the last five years, Keynotes and/or Master Classes in Australia, Italy, France, Brazil, India, and China.
As a social historian with a rich interest in public engagement, he has served as a lead NEH consultant on six PBS American Masters documentaries, and on a similar number of nationally-screened PBS documentaries, from the multi-part Broadway Musical and Make ‘Em Laugh series to last season’s award-winning Lake of Betrayal, the story of the Seneca Nation and Kinzua Dam.
Mike Haller is a filmmaker and entrepreneur with a life-long interest in making personal media useful for individuals and community groups. His film, Bruce and His Things, selected for showing at the NY Film Festival, used personal photos and home movies to make a powerful social commentary on American material culture. He did community TV and documentary filmmaking before working at AT&T in new product development and marketing during the early stages of connected computing. He founded InterClipper® which introduced real-time video bookmarking to the commercial qualitative research market. He leads the technical development team of PixStori.