Timbuktu Storykeeper

The Problem: Historical Erasure and Loss of Oral Histories

Throughout human history, everything from natural disasters to colonization, wars and selective or biased accounts of history have silenced an uncountable number of stories of cultures who have traditionally relied on oral history to keep their memories and cultural identities alive.

In the USA, two communities with whom we are piloting our solution are among those currently facing the impending loss of narratives that are essential to the world’s understanding of their place in the history of the human family.

Native American Nations:

For many Native American nations, the ravages of time and systemic genocide have already erased much of their history and culture from the collective memory of the human race, and current societal shifts threaten to disconnect their past and future in ways that are existential threats to their cultural identities.

Our Native cultures are among the oldest continuous cultures in humanity, who have used oral traditions to preserve ancestral knowledge and perspectives for periods barely imaginable for most in our modern times, and if we do not act quickly to capture and preserve this knowledge of the ages entrusted to an aging and dwindling population of elders, many of the oldest stories of the human race will be lost to us all forever.

This problem is not limited to indigenous communities in the United States, but similar losses are happening across the globe as industrialization and societal attitudes that only value the present threaten to cause us to ignore many of our pasts until some future time when it will be too late to ever know what we could learn today.

The Black American Community:

The past century has been a period of unparalleled change in the lives of Black Americans, and there are still living witnesses who can provide firsthand accounts of events like the Tulsa Race Massacre and life in the Jim Crow South.

While historians and documentarians tend to focus on the stories of movement leaders and other well-known major players in historical events, there are scores of thousands of elderly African Americans whose personal histories from significant periods remain largely untold, and due to the inability of traditional documentary methods to scale, will not be told using conventional historical approaches.

“In the Future, Stories that were never Digitized will be indistinguishable from Stories that never Happened.”

- Ken Granderson

Our Solution: Timbuktu StoryKeeper

StoryKeeper is a new Speech Recognition module that is being added to the Timbuktu Content Engine that powers the BlackFacts.com website and BlackFacts’ Diversity Schoolhouse ed-tech platform.

Launched in 1997 as the Internet’s First Black History Search Engine, BlackFacts.com has been sharing Black History to a global online audience longer than most people have been using the Internet, and today, with over one million articles in our databases, is the world's largest single online source of Black History and Global News.

The Timbuktu™ content engine has been powering the BlackFacts.com website since 2017.

Timbuktu is a three-phase content Aggregation, Classification and Syndication engine comprised of three modules that comprise the content management pipeline:

The Rosetta module (named after the Rosetta Stone) collects content from various sources and converts it to a common structure internal to the Timbuktu platform called a Manuscript. The Rosetta module currently generates Manuscripts from online historical and news articles through both automated and curated processes. 

StoryKeeper (a term used by many Native cultures) will capture cultural stories using Speech Recognition technologies already present in most recent smartphones and other computing devices, as a monologue, as a dialogue with an AI agent or as a recording with a human interviewer.

Once Manuscripts have been created, they are passed through the Djuhti module (named after an ancient Egyptian wisdom deity, also known as Thoth), where multiple AI engines find common people, places, events and concepts to use to link the stories when displayed on web pages or other devices.

This contextual linkage is a core feature of the BlackFacts website that leads many visitors to spend significant amounts of time on the site compared to most other sites.

The contextually linked Manuscripts are finally shared with the public (based on the author’s privacy choices) via Timbuktu’s Griot module (named after West African storytellers) on any website or system that Timbuktu can publish to, including the BlackFacts.com site, BlackFacts’ content affiliates and messaging services.

The anecdotal nature of stories captured by StoryKeeper will necessitate categorization separate from content from more trusted historical or journalistic sources, so the ultimate public display of StoryKeeper content is likely to happen on websites and in collaboration with organizations yet to be determined.

The initial scope of this project focuses on the implementation of the technical solution to capture these firsthand stories by leveraging the widespread penetration of mobile devices (over 80% in more than 100 countries, and greater than the population in many), recent advances in Artificial Intelligence, and the arrival of Just-In-Time Speech Recognition which does not require prior training to recognize a wide variety of voices and languages.

One of our pilot audiences are Native American Elders, many of whom are their culture’s last chances of preserving stories that have been passed down orally for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

It can be argued that no other cultures have been ignored, mistreated and devalued by mainstream history more than the First Nations of the Americas, and while we cannot turn the clock back and capture stories that have been forever lost, we can take advantage of today’s widespread availability and convergence of the key technologies that make StoryKeeper possible and do our best to capture and preserve endless stories of tragedy, triumph and everyday life from some of the oldest cultures in the human family.

For example, the Cheroenhaka tribe, a tribe for which Kevin Denny II is an active member, is still fighting for its right to be federally recognized working with the government of Virginia, the state we originate from.  One of the requirements for being federally recognized is to demonstrate a certain portion of its members have basic knowledge of the language of the tribe.  Technology, such as this, would tremendously benefit us in our fight for federal recognition, allowing us access the the very resources taken and owed to us and other indigenous communities.

Timbuktu StoryKeeper has the potential to similarly remove almost every barrier that has ever existed preventing the average person’s story from being able to occupy the same space as the stories heard around the world, and not only to exist on just another of millions of web pages that no one but the author and their family will ever know exists, but on a culturally-oriented online content platform that has been viewed by hundreds of millions of visitors over almost three decades of online presence.

From a practical and actionable perspective, this opportunity has never before been as possible as it is today, and as these oral histories are often only known by a dwindling population of elders, we have no time to lose if we intend to ensure that their firsthand stories and wisdom lives on for future generations.

Chief Walt "Red Hawk" Brown of the Cheroenhaka, is the only tribal member who truly knows the entire history of the tribe in and out and can tell the entire story of the tribe without hesitation.  He is also one of the tribe's eldest members.  With plenty of members on the roll call that are of younger generations that live across the nation, it is vital that the knowledge be passed down.  Chief "Red Hawk" carries many burdens of tribal history and duties but one of the most important is obtaining federal recognition for Cheroenhaka.  StoryKeeper would be a technology solution that could help ease the burden of passing down (and preserving) essential knowledge to tribal members that would contribute to furthering the case for Cheroenhaka to obtain federal recognition.  There are many other indigenous communities also fighting this same fight that could benefit as well.

The BlackFacts Team has over a half century of combined experience delivering advanced technology solutions to positively impact communities of color.

Team Lead, Kevin Denny II, is a member of both the Black and indigenous community.  He is a volunteer with the BlackFacts Team and has over two decades of software & web development experience along with a multitude of soft skills.  He is also an active member of the Cheroenhaka Native American tribe located in Southampton County, Virginia, where also, most of his family, on his mother's side, reside and originate from.

Kevin also volunteers as a contributor to Native Land Digital, a non-profit, allowing indigenous communities to represent themselves and their own histories as well as be challenged to learn more about other indigenous communities.

You can learn more about his background at thatdeveloper.dev

Ken Granderson, co-founder of Blackfacts.com, is a Black MIT Alumnus born, raised and outside of college has almost always lived in predominately Black, low-to-moderate income communities, and since discovering in 1993 that he could chart his own career path with technology, has been a 'technology evangelist' for Black communities, and has been responsible for pioneering multiple culturally-oriented offline and online projects since 1995, including:

• Creating a multimedia CD-ROM version of a book on Boston's Black History in 1995 • Putting Boston's communities of color online in 1996 • Launching the Internet's first Black History Search Engine, BlackFacts.com, in 1997 • Putting Boston's Black Newspaper (the Bay State Banner) online in 2001 • Demonstrating self-service online event and business directory listings before EventBrite and Yelp by 2-4 years on Roxbury.com in 2002 • Architecting, building and maintaining the Official Website of the Government of Saint Lucia from 2013 to the present • Architecting and building Timbuktu, the AI-powered Content Aggregation, Classification and Syndication system that powers BlackFacts to the present day in 2017.

All of these innovations, along with many others are fully documented by newspaper and magazine articles, television interview, contemporaneously created presentations and more at https://kengranderson.com.

Chief Walt "Red Hawk" Brown of the Cheroenhaka, is the only tribal member who truly knows the entire history of the tribe in and out and can tell the entire story of the tribe without hesitation.  He is also one of the tribe's eldest members.  With plenty of members on the roll call that are of younger generations that live across the nation, it is vital that the knowledge be passed down.  Chief "Red Hawk" carries many burdens of tribal history and duties but one of the most important is obtaining federal recognition for Cheroenhaka.  StoryKeeper would be a technology solution that could help ease the burden of passing down (and preserving) essential knowledge to tribal members that would contribute to furthering the case for Cheroenhaka to obtain federal recognition.  There are many other indigenous communities also fighting this same fight that could benefit as well.

The Timbuktu StoryKeeper module is currently in the Prototype state of development.

From a technological perspective, we have the Speech Recognition, conversion to Timbuktu Manuscript and Syndication via Timbuktu Griot operating in our test environments.

We are also currently engaged in usability testing with high-fidelity PowerPoint mockups with a half dozen African American elders we have connected with through family and friends.

For the Black American demographic, we have been building connections with organizations in the areas of Community Development, Politics and Clergy in New York City, and for the Native American demographic, we are reaching out to organizations in the Wampanoag Nation through one of our associates who is Wampanoag as well as the Cheroenhaka tribe in Southampton, Virginia.

We are also currently planning social media messaging to coincide with the upcoming Juneteenth holiday for Black elders and will have messaging tailored for Native communities in November when Native American History Month is celebrated.

We have not yet done much brainstorming in regard to the ultimate end user-facing systems that will feature content captured and organized by StoryKeeper.

In lieu of relying on standalone websites that may require significant amounts of planning, collaboration and resources to be viable, a longtime fallback plan has always been to simply include a new page in the BlackFacts website, titled “Firsthand Accounts” or “Personal Stories” to distinguish them from content sourced from academic or journalistic online sources.

My entire technical career of 30 years has been committed to conceiving, coding, deploying and supporting technology solutions intended to positively impact underserved communities, especially communities of color. 

While I have done this in ways that have directly impacted hundreds of thousands and have been viewed by scores of millions over the years, it has been done from a self-funded basis and in relative isolation due to the timing and geographic location of all of my early work. 

I believe that we have finally reached enough widespread familiarity with advanced technologies, as well as enough people who have seen that we have NOT leveraged the Internet to live up to its early expectations of delivering widespread democratization and supporting fair access to opportunities, that today there is a more fertile landscape for innovative ideas that leverage online technologies to positively impact historically disadvantaged communities.

In almost all cases where I see technology initiatives focusing on communities of color, they are operating only at the most basic levels and generally from a 'deficit narrative' of trying to get a foot in the door, while my 'normal' for my entire career has been using the most current technologies and delivering advanced applications on par with or ahead of mainstream names and companies known throughout the industry and world today.

From collaborating with a handful of friends in 1996 to put Boston's Black communities online (https://www.blackhistory.mit.e...) or single-handedly architecting, coding and supporting the Official Website of the Government of Saint Lucia (https://govt.lc), I know that it only takes a handful of committed tech visionaries to set the stage for potentially massive improvements for many people, so I believe that getting greater visibility for both our current projects and those still on the drawing board will be the catalyst for more innovative, out of the box tech solutions to be conceived and deployed to help foster greater equity across a variety of communities.

Kevin Denny II is active member of the Cheroenhaka Native American tribe located in Southampton Country, Virginia head by Chief Walt "Red Hawk" Brown

21st Century Approach: StoryKeeper introduces a modern method for capturing and preserving historical narratives, from communities whose stories have been traditionally marginalized or overlooked.

Recording oral histories through mobile devices fundamentally transforms how these narratives are collected, preserved, and shared.

Key Innovations:

1.    Preservation of the Original Speaker’s Voice: Based on privacy choices, original audio can be saved and played back for future users, linking key topics, characters and events and the original audio references to them.  Both the words and actual voices of past times will be captured and preserved for all perpetuity.

2.    Integration with NLP and AI: Using NLP processing and AI, StoryKeeper simultaneously presents ‘both sides’ of historical events, issues and personalities, presenting history in a nuanced manner never before possible from traditional approaches.

3.    Scalability and Accessibility: StoryKeeper will require just a mobile device and internet connection, so almost anyone can document stories from virtually any location at any time. This shift to the role of telling the stories of humanity has never before been possible and can help redefine ‘history’ as capturing a diverse array of narratives, rather than just the priorities, analyses and perspectives of traditional academic sources.

Catalyzing Broader Positive Impacts:

• Empowering Communities: StoryKeeper helps put communities in control of their narratives. This will lead to greater community pride, a stronger sense of identity and a greater sense of individual as well as collective agency by having greater control over the stories being told in and about communities who have been historically ignored or disrespected by mainstream history.
• Educational Resource: The stories captured by StoryKeeper will provide a valuable resource for educators, researchers, and the general public, offering fresh perspectives and a more comprehensive understanding of history.
• Encouraging Similar Initiatives: StoryKeeper could inspire other initiatives for preserving cultural and historical narratives, particularly among other groups that face similar risks of cultural erosion.  With a foundation of scalable tech, StoryKeeper can empower communities of any history and background, and can support additional cultural or other types of groups.

Market and Landscape Change:

• Shift in Historical Documentation: StoryKeeper challenges traditional methods of historical documentation that often rely on written records or focus on prominent figures. It democratizes history, so anyone can record and share their story.
• Inspiration for Policy and Cultural Preservation: StoryKeeper can influence cultural preservation policies and practices, emphasizing the importance of inclusivity and the preservation of oral traditions as critical elements of cultural heritage.
• Catalyzing Adoption of Advanced Technologies by Mainstream Academia: We see little evidence that even the most prestigious and well-known academics use technologies more sophisticated than the 1990s, and the potential to overshadow work that is essentially locked away in ivory towers by academics unaware or disinterested in leveraging today’s technologies may be a catalyst for them to catch up with the rest of us.

StoryKeeper not only solves the problem of Historical Erasure, but also can transform the landscape of historical documentation, making it more inclusive, accessible, and representative of our diverse global community.

Theory of Change for Timbuktu StoryKeeper

Logical Framework:

1.    Activities:

• Deploy the StoryKeeper module as part of the Timbuktu content engine.
• Utilize speech-to-text technology to capture oral histories directly from storytellers using mobile devices.
• Process and categorize these stories using natural language processing (NLP) and AI to identify and link thematic elements across the digital archive.

2.    Immediate Outputs:

• A growing digital archive of transcribed and categorized stories from historically marginalized communities.
• Increased accessibility of these stories to the public through the BlackFacts.com platform and other affiliate sites.
• Engagement from the target communities in sharing and documenting their personal and communal histories.

3.    Longer-term Outcomes:

• Preservation of cultural histories and personal narratives that might otherwise be lost, ensuring these stories remain a part of the global historical record.
• Enhanced understanding and appreciation of these communities’ histories among the broader public, leading to greater cultural awareness and sensitivity.
• Empowerment of individuals within these communities by giving them a platform to share their stories and contribute to the historical narrative.

Evidence to Support the Links:

• Technological Feasibility: Research on speech recognition technologies indicates a high potential for accurately capturing spoken language across various dialects and accents, which is critical for the diverse target audience of StoryKeeper.
• Cultural Impact Studies: Studies on cultural preservation demonstrate that having access to one's history significantly enhances community cohesion and individual identity, particularly in communities where oral traditions are dominant.
• Pilot Feedback: Initial conversations with elderly African American communities has shown positive engagement and an enthusiastic response to the opportunity to record their histories, providing preliminary evidence that the solution meets a felt need.

Supporting Research and Data:

• Third-party Research: Academic research into the impacts of digital storytelling on minority communities highlights its potential to foster greater understanding and empathy across cultural divides.
• Impact Evaluation: Ongoing evaluations of the StoryKeeper prototype will collect data on user engagement and satisfaction, which will help refine the approach and prove its effectiveness.
• Interviews with Target Population: Conversations with potential users have underscored the importance of preserving their stories and have informed the development of the StoryKeeper platform to ensure it is user-friendly and culturally respectful.

Conclusion: The theory of change for Timbuktu StoryKeeper is grounded in a clear understanding of how technology can serve as a bridge between traditional oral histories and modern digital archives. By enabling the direct capture and processing of these stories, StoryKeeper not only preserves important cultural narratives but also enhances the global understanding of diverse histories. This approach is supported by technological feasibility, cultural impact studies, and direct feedback from the communities involved, ensuring that the activities lead logically to the desired outputs and outcomes.

Impact Goals for Timbuktu StoryKeeper

Impact Goals:

1. Preserve and Digitize 10,000 Stories within Three Years: Aim to capture a wide array of narratives from elderly African Americans and Native American communities, ensuring these stories are preserved for future generations.
2. Enhance Cultural Understanding and Awareness: Increase public awareness and appreciation of the histories and cultures of the target communities by 50% among users of the BlackFacts.com platform and associated networks.
3. Empower Storytellers and Communities: Empower at least 90% of participants by giving them a platform to share their stories, contributing to a sense of pride and ownership over their cultural heritage.

Measuring Progress:

• Number of Stories Captured and Digitized: Track the total number of stories recorded, transcribed, and archived. This will be the primary indicator of success for the goal of story preservation.
• User Engagement Metrics: Measure the interaction with the archived stories on the BlackFacts.com platform, such as page views, shares, and mentions on social media. These metrics will help gauge increased public awareness and appreciation.
• Participant Feedback Surveys: Conduct regular surveys with the storytellers and community members to assess their sense of empowerment and satisfaction with the StoryKeeper initiative. This will help evaluate the impact on the storytellers themselves.

Alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

• SDG 4 (Quality Education): By providing accessible and inclusive educational content through the stories preserved, StoryKeeper contributes to the availability of quality education materials that reflect diverse cultural histories.
• SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities): StoryKeeper helps to strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage, especially concerning indigenous and minority communities.
• SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions): Promoting inclusive societies by ensuring public access to information and protecting fundamental freedoms aligns with StoryKeeper’s goals of inclusivity and representation in historical narratives.

Additional Indicators:

• Demographic and Geographic Reach: Track the diversity and spread of story contributors to ensure a broad representation of experiences and backgrounds.
• Content Utilization: Monitor how the digital content is being used by educators, researchers, and the general public, which will provide insights into the educational impact of the project.

By focusing on these specific, measurable goals and aligning them with broader global objectives, Timbuktu StoryKeeper aims to achieve a transformational impact on both the individual lives of its participants and the collective understanding of cultural and historical narratives. Progress toward these goals is monitored through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the initiative’s impact.

The Timbuktu Platform and StoryKeeper are built on top of the Microsoft stack, using:

• Dedicated Windows 2019 Hosted Servers
• SQL Server 2016 database
• Custom SQL Stored Procedures
• REST APIs written in C#
• HTML5 Web Applications using AngularJS
• Browser / Device-native Speech Recognition
• Custom Windows Service applications
• Third-Party APIs from:
  • OpenAI
  • IBM Watson
  • Ujeebu

The entire platform is architected, coded and maintained by Ken Granderson.

Boston MA

New York City NY

The BlackFacts Team is comprised of two members and volunteer:

• Ken Granderson, Full-Time Software Architect, Full Stack Developer, Database and DevOps Administrator.
• Dale Dowdie, Full-Time General, Business Development, Relationship and Project Manager.
• Kevin Denny II, Volunteer, Full Stack Developer

The StoryKeeper module has just started development in the past month, but it is being built as a new module on top of the foundation of the Timbuktu™ engine, which has been in 24x7x365 operation for seven years, since 2017.

The BlackFacts Team is currently comprised of two Black males, and past ventures and teams that we have respectively operated included employees and consultants from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, as well as female lead software developers and project managers as far back as the 1990s.

On occasion, we also have volunteers from all walks of life, including our current volunteer, Kevin Denny II, is a member of the Black and indigenous community, and also military brat. 

For-Profit Entity: BlackFacts.com LLC

• Core Activities:

• Development, maintenance, and sale of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications focused on educational technology, such as the Ed-Tech Platform Diversity Schoolhouse.
• Management of the technological infrastructure for the BlackFacts.com website, which provides free access to Black History, articles, videos, and current news.

• Revenue Streams:

• SaaS Sales: Selling subscriptions of the educational software SaaS applications to current B2B clients in the K-12 education sector, future B2B clients in community and faith-based organizations, and B2C clients in the Homeschooling community and on an individual basis.
• Custom Online Application Development: Architecture and development of complex online business applications generally in the space of content management and management of online training systems that require highly customized workflows.

• Market Strategy:

• Target educational institutions looking for comprehensive, culturally inclusive educational tools from both a bottom-up approach, reaching out to principals and superintendents, and a top-down approach, engaging school district leadership
• Leverage the content and traffic from the BlackFacts.com platform to showcase the capabilities of the software solutions, thereby driving SaaS sales.

Non-Profit Entity: BlackFacts Education Foundation

• Core Activities:

• Funding and managing the content development for the BlackFacts.com website, including the production of educational videos.
• Covering operational expenses related to content distribution on the BlackFacts.com website to ensure it remains free for users.
• Supporting Public Interest Online Applications developed by the BlackFacts Team like Say Their Names, Civic Chat, Voting While Black and My Communities.  StoryKeeper will be included in the Foundation portfolio of Public Interest Online Applications.

• Revenue Streams:

• Fundraising: Traditional fundraising activities, including grants from foundations, individual donations, and fundraising events targeted at supporters of educational and cultural preservation causes.
• Partnerships: Forming partnerships with other non-profits, educational bodies, and cultural institutions to fund and support shared objectives, particularly in cultural education and preservation.

• Impact Objectives:

• Provide high-quality, accessible educational content about Black History and current events to a global audience.
• Enhance public understanding and appreciation of Black History through free, widely accessible educational resources.

Synergy Between Entities:

• The for-profit and non-profit entities operate synergistically. While the for-profit develops and sells educational software, enhancing the technological delivery of content, the non-profit ensures the content itself is rich, engaging, and freely accessible, fulfilling an educational mission.
• The visibility and user engagement driven by the free content on BlackFacts.com can enhance the marketability and perceived value of the SaaS products, potentially increasing sales and user adoption rates.

This dual structure allows BlackFacts to maximize its impact by combining the strengths of both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, ensuring a robust approach to both educational content delivery and financial sustainability.

Financial Sustainability Plan for Timbuktu StoryKeeper

Revenue Streams:

1.    Grants and Donations: As a non-profit entity under the BlackFacts Education Foundation, StoryKeeper will focus on securing grants from organizations dedicated to cultural preservation, education, technology for social good, and minority empowerment. Efforts will also be made to attract individual donors through crowdfunding platforms and direct appeals, targeting those who are passionate about cultural heritage and history.

2.    Partnerships and Sponsorships: Forming partnerships with cultural, educational, and historical organizations that can sponsor a future standalone storytelling site or specific storytelling projects. This includes collaborations with tech companies interested in supporting innovative uses of technology in cultural preservation.

3.    Platform Licensing: Licensing the platform to organizations interested in having a StoryKeeper site that serves their cultural, ethnic, faith or lifestyle community with authentic, first-person narratives for their projects.

Long-term Financial Strategy:

• Diversifying Grant Sources: Continuously applying for a broader range of grants and funding opportunities, both domestically and internationally, to support expansion and continuous improvement of the platform.
• Expanding Partnership Opportunities: Actively seeking new partnerships and sponsorships, particularly with organizations and companies investing in social impact projects.
• Licensing Strategy: Developing a structured approach to content licensing, ensuring it supports the project's sustainability without compromising its non-profit ethos.
• BlackFacts.com LLC Growth: As BlackFacts.com LLC grows in revenue, it will be able to support the BlackFacts Education Foundation and its projects as part of its corporate operating budget, eventually removing the need for the Foundation to seek external funding.  As StoryKeeper is an additional module to an existing framework, its primary cost impact will come in the form of storage of recordings, which are not expected to grow at a rate that will create an unsustainable cost burden.