The Whole Story Project

by Startacus Admin

Name any city in the world and there’s a good chance that there will be a statue of someone famous there (okay, maybe not any city). The chances that said famous person will be a woman (and not royalty or Generic semi clad lady), however, are slim.

Where there are statues of women, they are grossly outnumbered by those of men, and are often hidden in secret corners of the city. For example, in London there are so many statues it would take longer to count them than to write this article. Of these, about 12 are of women.

How about a statue of Margaret Heafield Hamilton: the working mother who headed up the team who put men on the moon and hatched a $400 billion software industry?

The Whole Story Project is an initiative that sees the need to celebrate and spread knowledge of women in history through statues of their own. It uses a crowdsourcing app to allow users to create statues of such women and place them inside augmented reality. Anyone can then view them through AR on their phone and read all about the woman they are looking at.

Why not a statue of Cecilia Payne: the first female department head at Harvard, who determined that stars are actually made of helium and hydrogen, not the same stuff as the Earth?

The app itself does not have any means of creating a statue, and these have to be made by the creator’s own software, meaning there is less likelihood of misuse of the app. Once created, the statue is simply uploaded through Facebook, and then the creator can go out into the real world to use the app to anchor it wherever they feel it should be.

Edmonia Lewis:  the part African-American, part Native American woman who overcame great obstacles to be the first woman of colour to become a professional artist, with her The Death of Cleopatra sculpture a highlight of the first World’s Fair.

So while politicians, town councils, and who knows who and what else, sit around endlessly discussing who should be given a statue, when, and where, anyone with some sense and historical knowledge can go out and put up statues to deserving women of history.

Good work The Whole Story Project - we are liking your style.

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Published on: 3rd June 2017