Communications organizes 'Murmur' network on campus

The Office of Communications is working to establish a “Murmur” network on campus. Murmur, which originated in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighborhood in 2003, is a network of short recordings that tell personal stories about the buildings and sites in an area — in this case, on a college campus.
Communications Design Director Pamela Fogg described it as “place-specific storytelling.” Fogg was first acquainted with the idea at last fall’s University and College Designers Association annual design conference, where a presenter briefly introduced Murmur during a session on digital storytelling.
“I immediately saw it as an opportunity for us,” Fogg wrote in an e-mail. “We feel this has incredible potential for prospective students wanting to understand the deeper character of Middlebury.”
A Middlebury Murmur network would allow visitors touring the campus to stop outside a building or other campus site, call a posted number from their cell phone and listen to an approximately minute-long story about that site. According to Senior Editor Blair Kloman, a site’s story “will be a personal reminiscence from an alum, professor, current student, staff member — a variety of Middlebury voices who can tell a great, quirky, short story about a campus site.”
Murmur will also have an online component, which is visual and map-based, with access to the same stories.
“[It] helps visitors appreciate the diversity of people — students, alums, faculty and staff — that are here, or have been here, by listening to their voices relaying their experience,” said Fogg.
Kloman elaborated on this idea. “Only Middlebury has Hugh Marlow talking about the time Robert Frost spoke in Mead Chapel,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Not only does that make Mead Chapel more alive and memorable to a visitor, but it also brings up a historical context.”
This week, Communications set up tables from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Proctor Dining Hall, McCardell Bicentennial Hall and Davis Library to record Middlebury community members’ stories.
According to Kloman, the reaction from alumni so far “has been incredibly positive — most people love the idea of sharing a short fun story about their days here.
“The problem with the conventional ‘campus tour’ is that they’ve almost become interchangeable in their predictability,” Kloman continued. “Here’s the quad, here’s a dorm, here’s the new science/art/music/library building. Murmur stories will be funny, quirky, personal, historical, casual and real.”