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Quipu is a Quechua word meaning knot. In the ancient Incan system of Quipu, brightly colored and knotted strings were used to keep official records and tell stories over the millenia, across the Andean mountains. In the 2015 web-based online documentary Quipu Project, audiences click on colored-dot icons, each representing testimonies of more than 100 women from remote mountainous locations across Peru. The women contribute their anonymous stories by leaving voice messages after dialing a free phone number. In recording after recording, they recount being among the nearly 300,000 women (and thousands of men) who were brutally subjected to sterilization under the government of the former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. The national program targeted poor, remote, and indigenous communities, who were forced into surgeries without their informed consent. In Quipu Project, the co-creators elegantly fused low-tech phone technology for recording with a high-tech digital interface for the user experience. They first gathered audio recordings of oral histories directly with local women, and then employed open-source VoIP technology to allow participants of the project to listen back to all the messages, and to be notified when a listener had responded. Local human rights activists found this process helped both to forge a broader mutual support network amongst the survivors, and also to build the larger national movement. For the survivors, sharing their stories functioned as a rehearsal for potential court testimony, another way in which co-creative media-making could serve as an artistic and meaningful tool in the fight for justice. For audiences and listeners, the Quipu Project digital interface presents an interactive, visually impactful and emotional engagement through the story, landing on a clear call to action to support the survivors.

For brilliantly weaving together low-, high-, ancient and new technologies in a powerful and poetic online collection of co-created, participatory oral histories which contribute to a movement for justice, Quipu Project wins a Peabody.

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Star Wars Uncut—a 2010 online film produced, edited and directed by Casey Pugh—is a crowdsourced shot-for shot recreation of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope consisting of 473 segments, 15 seconds each, created and submitted by fans from all over the globe.

In 2009, Pugh created a website where fans could sign up to recreate scenes from the original Star Wars film. Fans could recreate whatever scene they desired. When there were multiple contenders, there was a vote to determine whose work made it into the final film, which would then be altered in real time. It was left up to the imagination of the individual fans how, and in which style, they recreated the scenes. This approach produced a plethora of visual choices and tones, from stop-motion LEGO figurines and various animation styles to what can best be described as LARPing.

Star Wars Uncut is a great example of fanfiction involving a beloved IP. To their credit, Lucas Films recognized that Star Wars Uncut would be a work of art in its own right and enthusiastically supported it.

For showing how to engage a fanbase and use the internet to crowdsource content that not only entertains, but also makes you enjoy a familiar story in a new way, Star Wars Uncut wins a Peabody Award.

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