“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.

NLab Social Networks Conference – The Opening

 

 

 

X-posted from custardether.co.uk

Well, it has taken a little longer than I anticipated to formulate my account of the recent NLab Social Networks conference, held at DMU on 19th June, following the IOCT Salon.  However, I have finally made sense of all of my notes!  So, without further ado, as they say….

The Opening Address

 

Professor David Asch opened the conference by briefly putting Leicester in the context of the day’s theme of social networking – a diverse community working to connect and network to build cohesion.  He noted that there is a need to academically examine how social networking is affecting us – whether it is making life better or more complex.  He highlighted the role of DMU in this process and the academic work going on here.

 

Professor Asch’s own research covered business competitiveness at the turn of the millennium – looking in particular at the impact of the Internet on the way companies compete in terms of economic theory. He noted the difference between searchable and unsearchable items in relation to internet sales: searchable items have defined and can therefore be purchased online or offline.  However, if you are purchasing an unsearchable item (usually a service) – how do you know what you are buying or whether what you have bought was the best that you could?  Asch’s interest was therefore in the way in which the internet and social networks have developed to address this problem since he was researching the issue from an economics stance in the late 90s.

 

What became apparent throughout the day was that the development of social communities on the internet does not just benefit those purchasing “unsearchable” items.  Social networks allow internet users to get advice and recommendations about all types of retailers, and to make better informed decisions about which retailers to trust, regardless of the type of product they are buying.  The key to the day was developing an understanding of how to harness this proactively both for marketing purposes and for the management of company image….

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.

Moving On From Manvers Street

I have recently launched my digital documentary Moving On From Manvers Street as part of my ongoing studies in New Media writing at DMU.  The trailer is very tongue in cheek, but that is characteristic of the tone of the whole piece.  

The documentary focuses on using Web 2.0 principles to present the story of the first bus station at Bath, which was located in Manvers Street until its demolition in July 2007.  As someone who both worked there and has an interest in the way buildings fit into our culture, I wanted to examine how this functional building would be remembered and how people would engage with those memories in a digital format.

Defining and designing a digital or Web 2.0 documentary was a challenging process.  How and where does one present a Web 2.0 documentary?  What should it look like?  How will people interact with it and contribute to it in the spirit of Web 2.0?  What features of a traditional documentary should be retained? What elements of Web 2.0 philosophy should be included to make it a web-native design, rather than an online version of a traditional documentary?

 

I had two options: producing my own website enabled for user interaction, or making use of existing Web 2.0 tools such as aggregators, which would involve sacrificing an element of control over the content and design, but provide pre-existing mechanisms for collating and disseminating information – common purposes of documentaries.

 

I experimented with two similar aggregating tools – PageFlakes and Netvibes.  Both involved layouts that comprised of boxed widgets for live feeds, which would mean that I and others could add content about the Manvers Street Bus Station at various locations (such as YouTube or blogs) and it would automatically be collected and presented by the aggregator.

 

There were several issues:

 

-       Although feeds were easy to set up, both platforms had limited customisation facilities and it was difficult to add static elements other than text or still images.  The latter was particularly problematic when considering how to add the commentary element of the documentary, which would provide the context for all the content sources.

-       The commercial nature of the sites meant that templates and features could change, so the way the project would appear over time could change without prior notice to me as the creator.

-       There are also issues of ownership of content involved not just in the aggregator interface, but in every individual widget – I needed to manage accounts with several content hosts (such as YouTube, Flickr etc) and to have investigated the degree to which they individually claim ownership of content stored there.

 

I therefore opted to design my own site and instead consider how to integrate Web 2.0 principles and facilities into its design.  I really focused on interactivity and user-generated content as the two main features that I needed to work into my design. 

 

The first consideration was integrating the piece with existing Web 2.0 facilities.  I developed a trailer for the project, which I uploaded to Daily Motion (a video hosting site) and disseminated via Facebook.  I also uploaded interview clips to this service so that the participants involved can embed and forward the clips of themselves to their contacts – all with a link to the URL for the project.  This was partly a promotion strategy, but also established a connection between the project and an audience who are already familiar with interactive sites.

 

Within the site itself, I added several opportunities for contribution.  I invite people to contribute to the Wikipedia article I started, detailing the history of the bus station, and provided a blog with short posts posing questions, which invite comments.  This use of a blog was inspired by Sue Thomas’ use of her blog The Wild Surmise as a research tool.  In both instances I used the <iframe> tag in html to allow the external site to appear within a page of my own – thus helping to retain the audience, rather than allowing them to wander off into other sites.

 

The remainder of the design featured video clips of me presenting the content of each page, thus providing a narrative to the site and a cohesive gel to the content without masses of text.  Within the piece I cast myself as the presenter, but my overall role varied from page to page – sometimes I was a writer (Wikipedia, The WTF File), sometimes a archivist (Interviews), sometimes an editor (The Last Day), sometimes a facilitator for audience participation (Memories), sometimes a composer…

 

 As a documentary inviting audience contributions, I felt it was difficult to be overly analytical or probing in my narrative.  Instead, I opted to raise issues in the introduction, then simply present the different view points and contributions so that the audience can mull over whether I had a valid point that functional buildings, like the Manvers Street Bus Station, should be remembered and what we miss by dismissing them as ugly.  Several of the responses I received were quite insightful on this issue, but several interviewees did have difficulty separating the Bus Station from being “on the buses”.  This confirmed for me that culture – which has moved and lives on – was the integral feature of the building, not its fabric.

 

The documentary can be found at www.manvers-street.com.  Any contributions to the project, or thoughts about the issues raised here concerning the design of a digital documentary, are very welcome!

 

The Wikipedia Worry

I was really encouraged to read this blog post some weeks ago, calling for students to be permitted to use Wikipedia as a research source.

I am often faced with students, from GCSE to degree level, who come to me for support and sit aghast as I pull up a browser window and check Wikipedia for a good definition.  Their teachers and lecturers ban its use or mention and many of them are struggling to grasp concepts or find starting points for their research as a result.

I understand their argument:  Wikipedia IS an unreliable source, which is not policed by experts, with articles that can range from misleading to down right inaccurate.  It often features sections written in more colloquial English, rather than the hyper-formal language of published encyclopaedias, making it easier to copy and paste sections of text convincingly.  It is not trustworthy and promotes plagarism from students.

So why I do I support its use?

Well, I think the reason it can be misused and abused as a resource by students is because they are not taught proper research skills in the first place, and so cannot use sources responsibly and discerningly.  It is easy to ban Wikipedia and instruct students to search in books for their answers, but this is not the same as teaching them research skills.  If these tutors bothered to teach research skills properly, then there is no reason why students should be restricted by an approved list of sources – in fact, restricting them in such a way can prove completely counterproductive.

So, guidelines for teaching research skills:

1. Don’t ban any source
2. Don’t ban any source
3. Don’t ban any source

Instead, teach students to understand the limitations and biases of certain sources, and how to use them constructively within context.  Because Wikipedia is not written by an accepted team of experts (although many contributors ARE experts in their field) it is not necessarily a reliable source.  However, it does have benefits in that it draws a lot of information into one place and provides both internal and external links to relevant sources.  It is often, therefore, a good place to start to get a handle on a topic, and to find links to other online sources.  A student who understands the issue of reliability will approach Wikipedia, take information from it, then search for corroborating evidence before deciding whether to accept the information in the Wikipedia article.  In reality, this is what students should do with ALL sources – including traditional printed materials, such as their own textbooks.  Research is not simply collecting information, but analysing it to decide what is likely to be true and what is not.  Unfortunately, many students come away from the research process without grasping this simple concept, because the rhetoric of their tutors convinces them that certain sources are automatically trustworthy, when others should be avoided like the plague, despite any apparent usefulness.

I think responsible tutors and teachers will eventually come round to this, but many will remain closed-minded or bound by institutional misunderstandings about what Wikipedia is: simply a resource like any other – to be challenged and used responsibly in context.  My hope is that by teaching students how to use Wikipedia and other online resources responsibly, I can help them to develop a mature attitude towards research in general, with all the questioning and investigative joy that goes with it!

Blogging an Event

The experience of participating in an event, whilst drafting a blog post about it, was an interesting one.  In many ways, I wish I had done it at some of the various events I have attended over the last year of studying New Media as well, but in other ways I found it a difficult thing to do whilst being actively involved.  There is also something that feels very rude about typing whilst someone is talking – no matter how discretely one can do so.

 

The recent posts detailing the events of the CWNM Creative Retreat were written live, as it were, during proceedings.  I started out on the Friday making hand written notes throughout Professor Leahy’s lecture, but ran into difficulties when writing these notes up into cohesive prose.  My scribblings never quite make sense afterwards and my memory for the details of the convoluted arguments and discussions that evolve amongst this particular group of people is not great.  Therefore constructing a blog post as a running commentary as such discussions develop seemed like an obvious way of ensuring that I can capture more detail.  Throughout the remainder of the weekend I was therefore attached to my Mac, clicking away…

 

Summarising key points of discussion into sentences instead of note points whilst people were talking involved starting the sentences, then revising them as my understanding of the point clarified.  Using a computer to do this – with the flexibility to delete and re-jig – made this easier and less destructive in a way than using a note book – where crossings out (and the doodling temptations these inevitably lead to) can be quite an obstruction when reassembling notes in a logical format at a later stage. 

 

Generally I stuck to recording turns in the discussions and any key points/quotes made by specific participants – with very little reference to my personal views or interpretations.  The only account that differed from this method was my account of Christine’s talk, where she showed us a lot of her work.  This was a far more subjective talk to start with (being geared towards viewing art), so my own take on what was going on formed the bulk of this account, as I could hardly interpret it in any other way.  One method is obviously better than the other from an impartial, journalistic point of view, but that raises the question as to whether I was blogging about events at the retreat from a purely journalistic stance to provide information to those unable to participate, or whether I was blogging with more discursive intentions. 

 

As for feeling rude?  Well, I found myself consciously typing very lightly and looking up at the speaker far more than I would normally do whilst sitting with a paper notebook.  There was no doodling to be done.  There also appears to be a culture of multi-tasking with laptops during events surrounding New Media (as was apparent at the Women, Business & Blogging conference in the summer), which seems to be accepted by speakers and other participants without question.  Maybe we all just understand each other’s need to be plugged in?  Anyway, seeing others around who were far less visually engaged with the speaking event at the front (although obviously engaged in terms of content, as they were googling and following links through that were directly related) made me feel a little better about occasionally bashing out a quick sentence, then sitting back to listen again.

 

Maybe this means I am now firmly pacing the road towards becoming a conscious blogger?  Awareness of the process when writing any thing is usually the first step to acquiring the genre’s ice-skakes…

The Day After the Storm

Sunday has been a far more informal and relaxed, with only four of us plus Sue in physical attendance.  We started out testing the technology for our Skype call to Toni, which created some interesting feedback and sound effects as we all logged in to Skype and had a conference call whilst being in the same room.  Unfortunately, Toni did not arrive online, so we progressed by doing a skills exchange looking at both Audacity and Garage Band.

 

The practical use of these programmes to create audio for a range of New Media work seems to be of interest to a lot of people within the MA, although our resident guru Katherine was unable to be present to take us to the next level.  We did manage to establish the basics and some of the possibilities for both of these tools and the effects that can be created in each. 

 

Christine also gave me a personal demonstration of iShowU, a piece of software that can be used to create screencasts or demos from a Mac.  There are equivalent products for PC users – such as Camtasia – which allow you to achieve the same effect.  This tool is extremely useful for e-learning resources, and I think Christine’s use of it for her recent workshop shows how useful a tool it could be for us as collaborative writers.  It seems extremely easy to use, so we may have to play with this as a way of creating resources for each other in online skills exchanges.

 

We discovered that Toni had made it to Skype – an hour early, due to our wonderfully confusing daylight saving time system.  However, she had emailed us a short film that she has been making whilst in Australia.  It was really good to see some of Toni’s work – in her great personal style.  We projected this up onto the main screen for all to enjoy.

 

One of our last exercises with in IOCT space itself was to record a response to Renee’s virtual postcard to us.  We achieved this using the inbuilt iSight on Christine’s laptop and iMovie.   I believe this has since been loaded into BB for Renee and others to see – but we will try to get this visible via the googlegroup so those poor souls like Alison, who have to stand outside the door of BB now, can view this.  We decided to leave in the outtakes, for humorous effect.  However, Chris did take the opportunity to ask Christine for a quick demonstration of basic editing in iMovie, just so we could see how we could have edited this clip to give a more professional impression of our good selves, had we chosen to do so.  This was certainly a useful skill-sharing day for us Mac users, whilst Mary worked to download a clip of a Blondie track on her PC (I am sure the purpose of this will become clear at some point…)

 

We pretty much concluded the day – and indeed the retreat – with a fab roast dinner at the pub across the road from the IOCT.  Sue joined us and gave us all some reassurance about our dissertations and chatted about some of the changes she has made to the course since last year.  She also challenged us to think about what we intend to do once we have completed the MA, and we either pleased her or scared her by our general enthusiasm for continuing study to PhD level. 

 

All that remained to be done was the washing up and the farewells upon return to the IOCT.

Skills Exchange

The main skill everyone really wanted to have a grounding in (however basic) was the use of Flash.  Christine really inspired this with her talk about her work and the demonstrations she gave.  The skills exchange really focused on this, with us all coming up close for a chat through what flash can do and ask questions of Christine.

 

The basic principles we covered were: the use of layers, file sizes (using vector images vs using jpegs), key frames, motion tweens, creating symbols (which can then be animated), buttons, previewing information about the flash project and how to publish them.  We debating pre-loaders and Christine magically obliged Chris in his request to make a green ball “bounce around”.

 

Christine explained how the programme is based on older animation techniques and demonstrated some of the simple (but effective) things one can do with flash.  This was inspiring for those who were really daunted by Flash and felt this was something they should be doing in their work.  However, the overall content of the day actually showed the new students that they do not have to do everything – Claudia in particular noted this whilst we were making cups of tea.  There is such a wide range of tools available, but as writers we need to choose the tools that will facilitate what we want to create.   There was also the general realisation that many of these programmes overlap, so whilst many people were panicking about learning new programmes, they could actually achieve things using programmes with which they were already familiar.

 

Christine’s main tip for those wanting to progress further beyond this session was to visit the W3Schools, as the tutorials offered on this site are free and quite user-friendly. 

Remix

Christine took us on a tour of the remix work in which she has been participating – lead by Randy Adams (runran).

 

The remix basically takes creative work produced by others within the group and remixes it in different ways.  This includes flash work, static pictures and sound.  The remix is based around a blog, which forms a creative conversation in both images and words, showcasing recent work.  Remixers have to reference the sources, so that the audience can trace the evolution of a piece through the history of the blog.

 

She showed us examples of her original work and her remix creations.  The source files are also posted on the blog so that other members of the group can download this material in order to create a remix.  The group ethic towards each others work seems really open and pieces get worked and reworked, producing pieces that include many layers of different people’s work.

 

One piece “Picasso’s Point” was constructed out of code, rather than existing as a picture file, so you can go behind and look at the source code to see how it works.  This harks back to one of the lectures last year in Lab, which lead to my post Code of Ideas.  Christine remixed this image by animating it, which was then in term remixed in several ways.  The whole project hinges on artistic responses to work, rather than critical responses – and this drives the work of the group forward and creates more.  This seems quite an organic process of creation – almost like minimalist music gradually changes with each repetition.  The piece “Machine_Language” actually works in this way as well, so this evolution is both internal to the pieces and external in terms of the structure in which they sit.

 

Chris did lead the discussion into whether this kind of idea might work using Comment Press to create a kind of Frankinstein story – remixing text work in the same way as remix works with artistic images.  Again, we ended up in the monetizing conversation, but that seems to be an important issue that we need to explore further, but that’s the same with artists of all shades… sigh!

 

There was (and is) an awful lot of awe for Christine in terms of her tremendous output and development of her technical skills over the last year – which has been phenomenon.  Her blog, including a showcase of her work, is well worth a look:  crissXcross