Transliteracy Research Group

'A Million Penguins' Five Years On

2012-01-25T13:38:40+00:00

Well, without dipping into too many cliches about the passage of time, it is nearly five years since the DMU/Penguin wiki-novel experiment, 'A Million Penguins', took place. The project ran from 1 Feb 2007 for five weeks, and all of us who were involved with it remember it as a time of chaos and great entertainment. Yesterday I was down at Goldsmith's College, in London, where I was the external examiner for a PhD candidate, Amy Spencer; her PhD was on the Networked Book. She built her thesis around three case studies of networked books that are also works of fiction, 'Paddlesworth Press' , 'The Golden Notebook Project', and 'A Million Penguins'. It's a solid and interesting piece of research.

Reading Amy's thesis promoted me to look at the current status of 'A Million Penguins' online. We heard early last year that Penguin was going to give up hosting the project, and we didn't have the time, or the resources, to figure out how to archive the massive wiki, with its many many pages, ourselves. I regret this, though it is hard to see how we could have saved it in time. So the original site no longer exists.

However, a good portion of 'A Million Penguins' was archived by the amazing people at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and you can find these pages by searching for it via the Wayback Machine.

During Amy's viva we talked a bit about the phenomenon of the networked book itself. Amy pointed out that during the noughties there were a significant number of projects that called themselves 'networked books', both fiction and non-fiction, my own on-going project, 'Flight Paths: a Networked Novel' among them of course. Amy wondered if the networked book concept has had its day. I think that we are now seeing trade publishing approaching publishing fiction in a manner that owes much to the networked book concept, although of course, all in the service of marketing. Social media marketing campaigns are now being built around books; these campaigns include bespoke web content, games, extra content, author interviews, etc. These campaigns aim to foster reader engagement around a newly published book, whereas the networked books of the noughties all sought to foster creative engagement with text and other forms of media. The networked book emphasis was on collaboration and contributing, whereas, of necessity, a trade publishing networked social media campaign is about sales.

Can you do Twitter by post?

2012-01-23T16:12:19+00:00

For one month, journalist Giles Turnbull explored this question in his Twitter By Post experiment, which replaced digital tweets with physical post cards.

"Twitter is the contemporary postcard - social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination"

Turnbull used the conventions of Twitter to share updates with fifteen friends via a stack of postcards and stamps. He shared comments, links, videos and pictures, exchanged @replies, re-tweeted some updates and favourited others. The Fail Whale even made an appearance!

When reflecting on the project, he noted: "We write long letters now because we hardly write letters at all, so we feel obliged to make them something special…This makes them long and tedious to write, which means we're disinclined to write letters; so we don't write any at all, and post on Facebook instead."

He compared this to letters from the early 20th century, which were "often kept short and to the point... a bit like social media updates." This was also true of the earlier correspondence of the 18th century. We often have romanticised, Austen-esque vision of letter writing during this period, but again, letters of the time were often very short. The materials of writing and the postage costs involved in sending more than a single sheet of paper made it prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the very wealthy to send a long letter. Again, there was effectively a limit on the length of a written communication imposed by the technology of the day.

As well as highlighting the historical prescendent for short social messages, Turnbull also reflected on the physicality of the project:

"Now I have a pile of conversations on my desk. I can touch them, or shuffle them."

Not only is it a tangible conversation, but it comes complete with glue and staples attaching other physical objects to those conversations. This experiment effectively makes concrete what we are doing in a more abstracted way on Twitter. As a method of examining our internet interactions this certainly has appeal and highlights the imagination required to "attach" something and send it across the globe in a digital form.

As Giles reflects in his conclusion to the experiment: "Tweeting by post made me appreciate the online and the offline."

Photo credit: @gilest

Scooping Transliteracy from around the world

2012-01-05T18:14:53+00:00

Sue Thomas

Reading it later #transliteracy

2011-12-14T22:57:04+00:00

David Carr's piece What Writers Are Worth Saving? Web Service Runs the Numbers (New York Times, 8.12.11) sheds interesting light on the relatively new phenomenon of marking articles to read at another time. Nat Weiner, founder of Read it Later, an app which allows you to save articles with one click and return to them at your leisure, regularly analyses the data his app collects. A year ago he noted that new technology, notably the iPad, is changing not just where we read, but also when.

When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs. They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer. Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption. Initially, it appears that the devices users prefer for reading are mobile devices, most notably the iPad. It’s the iPad leading the jailbreak from consuming content in our desk chairs. As better mobile experiences become more accessible to more readers, this movement will continue to grow. Readers want to consume content in a comfortable place, on their own time and mobile devices are making it possible for readers to take control once more. [1]

Now Weiner has reported on the most-read writers, those most commonly saved in the Read it Later app. Unsurprisingly, since this is an early-adopter activity, Lifehacker comes out top. Carr reports

Nine out of 10 of the most saved worked there — Kevin Purdy, Adam Pash and Adam Dachis came in first, second and third — which indicates a strong Silicon Valley/West Coast bias and a very narrow one at that. That makes sense, given that clicking-to-save is a techie sort of thing to do. The other writers who round out the top 20 bear that out. They include MG Siegler of TechCrunch, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo.

But it's early days, and I'm sure the habit will soon spread beyond the early adopters. It's yet another way in which the web facilitates an increase, not a reduction, in what and how we read.

Calling Transliterate Readers! Two new #elit works by @crissxross

2011-11-08T14:35:36+00:00

Rememori

Rememori is a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters.

Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

Out of Touch

In our world of perpetual connectivity, touching interfaces that keep us out of reach, we form attachments whilst remaining detached, by turns kindling and dampening emotions. Out of Touch is a short multimedia e-poem created in Flash, with sound.

Conceived as the first in a series of musings on the paradoxical and often poignant nature of human relationships amid networked life, this episode was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the Third Hand Plays series curated by Brian Stefans, published at SFMOMA's Open Space in August 2011.

Transliterate Effects

In their very different ways, both works encourage the reader to consider transliterate effects and reflect upon how they cope with such effects as individuals and in their relationships with others. Read more about the background to these works in these crissxross blog posts: Rememori – a new work and Third Hand Plays: Out Of Touch.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

'Why don't people write on toilet walls anymore?' 'Because they are too busy Facebooking or texting.' #transliteracy

2011-10-04T09:22:38+01:00

Couldn't resist taking a photo of this interesting example of transliterate change in our lavatories. Sorry it's a bit indistinct - you may need to click to enlarge.

The writer on the left asks 'Why don't people write on toilet walls any more?'

And the commenter on the right replies: 'Because they are too busy Facebooking or texting instead'.

I think this is probably true. Any thoughts? Is the same change happening in mens' loos?