“LiveGuide: An Online Guided Tour” Goes Live

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk

After many months of development, I am pleased to announce that my latest project – “LiveGuide” – is finally online.

 

LiveGuide is a new design of online tour, intended to more closely mimic the features of a real world guided tour of a location thank traditional virtual tours.  In particular, LiveGuide focusses on the narrative and interactive elements of a live tour to deliver a more complete experience for the online tourist.

 

In the course of researching this project, it became apparent that there is a tendency when communicating factual information online to using hypertext to provide a lot of the contextualization for the information.  However, in the real world, this contextualization is often supplied by narrative – as in a guided tour.  LiveGuide is an experiment in combining the functionality and flexibility of hypertext and the stricter structure of a narrative.  The tour has a defined tour route, around which the narrative is structured, but there are also opportunities to pause at particular locations and select from a range of options so one can explore the space on a thematic basis.  This balances the expectations of online users – who are used to the freedom of hypertext – with the need for narrative to make sense of the space in context.

The tour design also includes a live chatbot, named Tour Guide, who is programmed to answer any questions the tourist may have during the course of the tour.  The training for this is ongoing, so I am able to review its responses and improve the quality of its comments the more people interact with it.  The bot is also able to engage in conversation, as would a real tour guide, to enhance the user’s personal experience of the tour.

 

The tour design – featuring a 35 minute tour of the World Heritage City of Bath – is currently on show here.  You will require headphones or speakers to listen to the tour and the latest version of Flash Player.  This is a test version of the design, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA in Creative Writing & New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester.  I would be interested to hear about people’s experiences/reactions when taking the tour and invite comments either on this blog post or by email to: custard@custardether.co.uk.

IOCT Salon – 18th June 2008

 

 

 

The recent IOCT Salon was a great opportunity for students from the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media to show case their most recent work. It featured inspirational performances from Chris Meade and Christine Wilks, fascinating talks from Toni Le Busque, Claudia Cragg and Alison Norrington – and a bit of waffling from me!

The event was organised by Chris Joseph as his last salon at the IOCT, as his time as digital writer in residence nears its end. Both past and present students were invited to show their work to a public audience, showing the range of artistic endeavours covered by the course and where these can lead.

Chris Meade has recently published a report commissioned by Sue Thomas titledDigital Livings, examining how digital writers, like us, might be able to monetize our work. Together with launching the report, he gave a performance of his creative non-fiction piece “drumming – becoming – forgetting”. I had only previously seen this piece as a blog with YouTube clips of drumming which could be left playing whilst one scrolled down to read the text. In the live performance, Chris read the text whilst playing a small drum. This interlocked with the audio and visuals from the YouTube clips to create far more complex texture. I have to say that this was quite a surprise for me – not because I didn’t enjoy Chris’ writing on its own previously, but because I had not considered how much a live performance like this could enhance a piece of new media writing.

In a similar way, Christine’s performance of her piece “Fitting the Pattern” brought the text element to life. Again, I had seen this during the workshop stages and enjoyed the tactile nature of the user engagement with the piece, which is built in Flash and requires the user to mimic dressmaking processes such as cutting, pinning and unpicking to reveal sections of the story. I remember that I was totally absorbed by the themes of fabric and family, but in the live performance I got a much stronger sense of place. This was particularly apparent when dialect terms arose such as “let’s bray her”, which Christine put across with far more expression than my internal voice could have managed.

In contrast, Toni gave a talk about her work throughout the course and some of the factors she considered when developing her creative practices – specifically with regards to copyright and fighting the battle against the “you’re out to destroy the book” gang. She showed us her final dissertation piece “Drunkalogue” as well as some of her more recent work using the Sophie software developed by The Institute for the Future of the Book. She gave us a quick demo of the software, showing how easy it is to create multimedia projects and share them with others. She made the very valid point that there are lots of emerging platforms that enable writers to create media-rich work without learning Flash or other complex programming skills.

Claudia also picked up on this theme in several of her observations throughout her talk about her Laboratory project “Twitter Suu”. She noted that beautifully designed websites alone are not the key to getting real involvement in a project, and programming skills are not necessary when using new media. Claudia spoke of the resistance she experienced from journalists who did not understand the role social networking tools like Twitter can play in generating support for a cause, and of her findings when researching where to focus her efforts to attract people most likely to rally in support to a cause. Her insights were particularly relevant in context of theNLab Social Networking Conference the next day.

Alison also spoke about the use of social networks in relation to her work – particularly the lessons she learnt from her Staying Single project, where she attempted to use a very wide range of social media to generate interest in her blog-based fiction. Alison gave us a sneak preview of her latest project “I ♥ NY” and how the lessons of Staying Single have informed her plans for this story. She is very enthusiastic about the ways that new media can be used to bring people into a story from different places, but also realistic about the amount of time that this type of promotion and networking can involve. She aims to be more focussed in her future efforts, rather than spreading herself too thinly across lots of networks – again, relevant to many of the discussions which followed at the NLab conference.

My own talk was a slightly waffly account of my current dissertation project to create an online tour of Bath – informed by an analysis of live guiding techniques. I demonstrated a couple of examples of existing virtual tours and talked about the importance of narrative when guiding an audience around a physical space. The project is in the early stages of development, but I was able to show the draft design, which features a chatterbot programmed to answer simple questions (although a failed wifi connection made this impossible to show). I also showed a clip of the tour itself, complete with animation.

In addition to the range of presentations, Dr Jess Laccetti had produced a critical essay considering the work of all the MA students. You can read is essay here. Greetings also came from many of the students who were unable to be present, including Janine, who despite being on her honeymoon was with us in spirit in the form of copies of her fanzine, produced as part of her Laboratory project and available for sale throughout the salon.

Many thanks have to go to Chris Joseph for organising this great showcase, and to Sue Thomas, Kate Pullinger and Jess Laccetti for all their efforts. It was a fascinating evening!

translating reality into the virtual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is really quite odd to consider what elements of real life people choose to translate into their virtual existence on the Internet.

 

We have translated the “Christmas card” – a symbol of former friendship and regard – into the badge of appearing on someone’s “friends” list, receiving cursory updates and greetings from acquaintances/former friends who are no longer part of our current lives via tools like Facebook.

 

We have taken advertising with us into the virtual world, but done away with ad breaks, which force us away from the box to make a cup of tea.

 

We have translated our forums for chat – our coffee bars and our high school reunions – but we have not translated our quiet spaces to ponder.  The Internet is a doing place, afterall…

 

The reason I have come to consider this odd division of things we have translated and things we have not is because I am currently trying to improve on a standard online system by translating real world values into a virtual format.

 

I am trying to create an online tour.  If you look at most online tours, they can look pretty neat… you can usually swivel round a 360^o picture until you feel sick and click on a few hotspots to get some information in the form of text.  No problem there!  A virtual equivalent of a real world activity – taking a look around a place and getting some contextual information about it…

 

But is that what a real, live-guided tour does?

 

Very often, we get so wrapped up in the idea that our lives have a virtual parallel dimension that we forget to compare the virtual with the reality to see whether we are really achieving this dream.

 

In the case of virtual tours, they generally miss out so much of what a real tour guide is doing that aside from giving a visual experience of a place, they can hardly be said to be “guides” at all. 

 

I analysed the role of a tour guide and compared this with a survey of the variety of virtual tour variations available.  I was surprised by the number of recommendations I could make for improving existing standards and concepts of “virtual tours” based on this comparison.  It was almost as if the designers and standard setters, whoever they may be, had devised a way of doing a really cool thing, called it a tour, but never really thought about what a real tour does at all. 

This sounds like a harsh analysis, but when I started to look deeper, I found that this was often the case.  Virtual equivalents to reality are being developed all the time without much reference to the actual reality that they are trying to represent. 

 

Sometimes this is a good thing.  We can improve upon the reality we have in our virtual world in a kind of utopian fashion.

 

But in other ways we risk missing out skills in our new world which would enable and facilitate users greatly.  The skill that the virtual tours miss out is narrative – none of them provide you with an overall narrative for the place they are exploring in the way a real tour guide would, and so we have a virtual world where spaces – physical or otherwise – are described with nuggets of information and connected by hyperlinks, rather than being connected by a narrative that could enhance understanding and contextualise the information.  It is almost as if the virtual world is a stripped down version of reality in this sense: dispensing with the subtleties of connections whilst claiming to make links and connections between things clearer. 

 

If this is the world we are supposed to be bringing storytelling into, we need to be thinking not just about places we can locate stories, but rather the whole attitude and design of this virtual reality and how it could be altered to enable storytelling in all its forms – just like the real world does.  Basically, we need to think more about how and what we are translating into our virtual realm from our real world, and how it all hangs together, rather than just trying to blindly create a utopian equivalent in flat pack form.

IF Book

Chris Meade gave us a talk about his move to the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF Book) and the different psychological reactions of different groups within the industry towards the whole idea of digital fiction – readers, publishers, writers, creators.  He introduced us to the type of background of Bob Stein has been involved in, his meeting with Stein which lead to his new job within IF Book, his move from the very traditional book world and the types of project the Institute is involved in – including Sophie and Comment Press. 

 

Chris gave us a brief background of the evolution of the technologies of publishing, including the introduction of paperbacks, which we heard about last year during campus week.  He also talked about the serendipity and physical space of a library – particularly how this can be retained as libraries can be increasingly stored digitally.  He was in New York last week to discuss these issues, so his description of this event and the ideas that were involved were very interesting.

 

Chris now has the challenge of working for IF Book in the UK, including considering how to monetize digital fiction and conducting experiments in publishing.  The background of the Institute seems to be more academic, so he is bringing a more fiction-orientated approach to this, based on his own work and experience on the MA.  Monetizing our work is a major issue to us as digital writers so ideas about how to achieve produced quite a lot of discussion.  The various commercial models for doing this – with reference to the music industry and Radiohead’s recent ploy, which Janine was able to give interesting insight from her experiences in that industry.  My own dissertation idea about linking a creative piece into a real world commercial project is one example of how this could be achieved – using the online writing as a loss leader in a project that makes its profit in other ways.

 

The issue that technological developments are viewed as “the death of the book” and that there is some how an either/or result to this process is one that we agreed was simply not the case – and that the development will not be just focused on the physical device people use (such as an e-reader).  Actually there are already examples of paperbacks and the internet being used in partnership – either on a marketing or creative level. 

 

Chris showed us a visual piece created by an artist – Orson Whales – who painted on the pages of Moby Dick to create like a flick-book animation with sound, which was another way of reusing the traditional technology of the book in digital way.  This reminded me a lot of Mark Leahy’s work that he discussed yesterday.  This is the type of work that Chris is exploring as part of his work for IF Book.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

Jo and Alison kicked off the student-led element of retreat with a talk about their work and experiences of the course.  Jo took us through her various projects and explained what she is doing beyond the course, whilst Alison talked about the iwritestoriesonline.com project and her experiences with the creative non-fiction module on the course.  The iwritestoriesonline.com website has been designed to give people a platform to write stories or short snippets of life in a blog, in an environment where the blogs are linked to form a community of writers.  Toni is really the driving force behind the tech side of this, but Jo and Alison showed us the page and discussed their ideas for this collaborative project.     

 

The discussion lead on to their experiences collaboration to fill in the gaps in their own skills and how, as writers, we need to think outside the box in terms of what we want to do (or expand the envelope as Michael put it) so that our writing and story ideas can push the technology – even if the technology does not currently allow for an idea to work with the existing tools.  We also talked about Machinima, Alison’s attempts at this in The Sims and the way that Machinima is developing outside of the gaming world to produce more meaningful stories for those outside this culture.

 

Alison discussed the success of Staying Single, how she promoted it and where she wants to take the story now – including a talk she has been asked to give at a conference in New York.  She had a lot to talk about following her research project into the attitude of publishers and the responses she got from publishers when she contacted them to discuss digital fiction.  Jo made a very valid point about the push for literary fiction in the digital realms rather than the more popular fiction and how that is affecting the type of work that is being produced.  Alison’s experience with Staying Single in terms of the cross over between escapism and participation – which is obviously not what those readers come to chick lit for – shows how this cross over is a blurry kind of area.   

 

We then got a bit deep talking about truth – or Truth – and how this relates to fiction – including Alison’s decision to admit that her blog was a fictional story, how she came to that decision and what effects this had on the readership for the project.  This is a pretty central issue for all of us writing all sorts of fiction – whether new media in format or more traditional.  Ultimately we are playing with people’s beliefs and trust when we are writing fiction… asking them to suspend belief either consciously or unconsciously.

 

Interesting stuff! 

One door closes, another opens…

So, the final lecture of Campus Week opens the Creative Retreat for 2007.  Suddenly two distinct groups meet in one place: one group tired from the rigours of a week’s thought and the other raring to go after a year of absence. 

 

This final and first lecture is given by Mark Leahy, the external examiner for the MA.  This hinging point within this live week within the course being especially appropriate, given his topic…

 

Professor Leahy titled his talk Figures and Grounds, introducing several of his ideas and some of his work to us – including many of the questions he still grapples with.  These included: how do we recognise what we read? and how do we know how to read what we see?

 

One of the ways he considers these issues is with comparative terms, such as form/content, creative/critical, things/stuff… but in reality, these terms are constantly shifting in their relationships towards each other.  In particular, the relationship between things and stuff is important.  He asks: what is the point at which something becomes a thing, instead of just stuff.  Leahy argues that this point is different for each member of the audience – what one person views as a completed “thing” may be just a collection of stuff, or parts, to another viewer.

 

One element that determines this point in our judgement is our culture.  We hear or see what we are trained to hear or see.  At this point in Leahy’s talk I was reminded of my music training, where it was explained that we are trained to hear music in a western way – meaning that eastern music (which uses different degrees of tones such as quarter tones) sounds odd to our western ears.  The relationship between things and stuff will be different for different audiences with different conventions of reading/understanding.

 

Leahy then moved on to talk about how is it possible to analyse a piece in two directions – both outwardly and inwardly.  Inward analysis involves turning the microscope onto a piece and examining at ever closer range until you are examining the very atoms or phonemes of the piece.  In the case of more digital works, this might involve looking at the individual frames or pixels of a piece.  Conversely, outward analysis involves looking at a piece in context from an ever greater distance to see its overall place in culture.  Examining a piece to excess in either direction leads the piece to become blurred or distorted in the mind, but illustrates how the different points of view when looking at an object can affect our viewing of it.  Even when one examines the idea of listing as a way of analysing data, we find that as a creative process it can be found in renaissance work and Shakespeare’s Sonnet Number 130 (amazingly remembered by Terry) involves the same process.

 

Leahy showed us several pieces of his own work, including examples in which he was presenting physical printed text as an artefact within a gallery space.  He talked about his curetting and installation work.  Mags got a mention for her piece, which was included in one of the exhibitions Leahy was involved in producing – Public Pages.  This exhibition focused on the difference between public and private reading and how this difference affects the readers’ relationship with a text.  He also talked about other events involving the use of shirts, which seem to a physically reoccurring theme within his work – with specific shirts or elements from them being carried from one piece of creative work to the next.  He was questioned towards the end of his talk about the significance of shirts in his work and cited several reasons for his interest in working with these in a creative sense.  He has experience of making shirts himself, and a family association with the production of shirts – with his mother and grandmother making clothes.  He also explained how a shirt is a physical representation of the body, without the body being present.  He uses the fabric from shirts like a page so words – or elements of words in the case of one piece – are linked with the fabric in a physical sense, rather than the metaphysical sense of their meanings.

 

In other questions, Sue challenged him to answer: “who are you and what do you think you are doing?” (Leahy considers himself a writer, artist and curator) and Jo lead him into a discussion about domesticating fractals.  A bizarre conclusion, but a very interesting talk…