How will it end? Boundedness, the satisfaction of completion, and never finishing the internet

After a short hiatus (I won't bore you with why*) I've had a chance to catch up with Michael Kowalski and review progress on the HayleyWorld zoeography app.

He's (hopefully) about to finish both implementing the algorithm and optimising the way the app works. And I'm going to continue writing commentaries, adding other content and thinking through the big question he asked me: How does it end?
 

When is a book a book?

Back in 2011 I interviewed Theodore Gray, author and co-founder of Touchpress, Wolfram Research and Wolfram Alpha for a feature in the Independent on Sunday about digital literature. Theo listed three characteristics that mark a book out as a book. If

"it’s bounded and user-paced and it’s narratively directed, then you can call it a book. Otherwise, it might be an encyclopaedia or it might be a website."

Theo Gray talking about books and apps back in 2011

By user-paced, he meant that it's not like a linear video,"that you are forced to watch at a certain rate. It’s a piece of text that you choose to read at whatever speed you want to read it at." He also states that the choice of navigation through the material should be entirely at the reader's discretion, while an author "takes you by the hand and shows you the things that [s/he thinks] you should read in a reasonable length of time, to get a good introduction, or a good overview, or a good in-depth analysis or whatever of this topic."

The boundedness of books is key to what I'm pondering in this post – and to how this digital biography of William Hayley will finish. Books, says Gray, "have a beginning and an ending and a discoverable way of knowing that you’ve read the whole thing. By which I mean that you can start, you can consume and finish it and say I’ve read this book.

This is typically not the case with websites. It’s an important and valuable and good thing about websites that they’re open-ended and they keep going. You don’t finish a website. You don’t finish the internet. That’s a wonderful thing. But it’s not a good thing in the case of a book. Because the valuable sense of accomplishment that you can have that I’ve read this book. And you can tell your friends. Part of it is the sense of satisfaction of completion."

Reading vs not reading endings

Tim Parks wrote a fab essay in The New York Review of Books on whether it's important for readers to read to the end of (good) books. One conclusion he reaches is

"even in these novels where plot is the central pleasure on offer, the end rarely gratifies, and if we like the book and recommend it to others, it is rarely for the end."

 And,

"it’s worth noting that stories were not always obliged to have an end, or to keep the same ending … It was only when myth became history, as it were, that we began to feel there should be just one “proper” version, and set about forgetting the alternatives."

A paradox?

Perhaps offering readers the opportunity to feel that "sense of satisfaction of completion" involves communicating the range of possible endings which would

a) explain my invarible dissatisfaction with forking path narrative
and
b) much more significantly, signal a paradox: to experience that a feeling of completeness, the work needs to we need a sense of incompleteness. Of potentials untapped, perspectives beyond the protagonists' storyworld…

 Tim Parks again:

"With novels, the endings I’m least disappointed with are those that encourage the reader to believe that the story might very easily have taken a completely different turn."

The conclusions Tim Parks draws concerning the relationships between reader, writer and text link neatly with a realisation Michael Kowalski's question provoked. The way we bound and/or end HayleyWorld needs to take into account not only how biographies finish, but also how, in general, relationships finish and, in particular, how William Hayley's key relationships finished.

How relationships end

While both his marriages ended badly, and his first love dumped him, most of Hayley's friendships either ended with the death of one party (his university friends), or with an illness that disabled communication – George Romney and William Cowper. A few others petered out over time. Only one or two – that with George Steevens, for example – terminated in high dudgeon. His professional relationships tended to follow similar patterns. Even though William Blake's three-year stay in Felpham ended in a colossal row, later communciations between the two men, if not overly intimate are courteous and amicable.

This also raises the question of how I want HayleyWorld's audience to feel when they finish – or finish with – the app. Overall, I'm aiming for engaged, amused and informed. But do I want them to feel about William Hayley and other key players in his story as I feel about them? Or do I want them to make up their own minds? What do I feel about William Hayley and co?

And how do I ensure that these questions – and all the others that pop up when I'm thinking about relationships between protagonists, narrative journeys and the user experience – inform both content and technical development rather than simply running along on a parallel track…


* oh, all right: work, ill teenager, divorce and building work demanding the Movement of Many Things. All on-going (although most of the Things have now been Appropriately Moved)…

Transitions, story, emotion

At my last PhD supervision, a question asked by my director of studies, Ian Gadd, set me thinking. How, he wanted to know, was I going to manage the tonal transitions in William Hayley's story?

The forms Hayley "asks" readers to complete are playful – or, to use Hayley's term, "sportive". They work well with lighter content, but what about when things turn dark? How will a playful mechanism work in the face of the long, agonising decline and death of Thomas Alphonso, Hayley's only son? Or the emotional torments suffered by Hayley's adored friend, William Cowper, whose final poem, "The Castaway", compares his lot to a shipwrecked sailor, and concludes

No voice divine the storm allay'd,

         No light propitious shone;

When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,

         We perish'd, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

One friend of Hayley's by another: William Cowper by George Romney (NPG 1423)

 Hayley wasn't especially adept at managing the emotional transitions in his Memoirs – edited extracts of which form the backbone of my zoeography – or in the Memoirs of Thomas Alphonso Hayley, published in tandem with his own. His failure to match tone to content led his biographer Morchard Bishop (a pseudonym for the critic and novelist Oliver Stonor, originally named Frederick Field Stoner) to contend that 

"Hayley was a man much too facile in expression to feel very deeply, but he was capable, if the phrase may be pardoned, of feeling extensively…"
Blake’s Hayley: the life, works & friendships of William Hayley, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1951, p250)

I'm  inclined to pardon neither the phrase, nor the judgement. It's nauseatingly condescending and, frankly, spurious. Taken to its logical conclusion, it suggests that only people with a command of particular modes and manners of expression are capable of profound emotion: a statement that's both utterly of Bishop/Stonor/Stoner's time and class – and also clearly untrue.

However, the lack of emotional dynamics in the Memoirs presents me with an extra challenge in my attempt to engage readers with, and involve them in Hayley's story. So, I'll try two things as I go through each extract (at the moment, there are 447 of them) editing metadata and text, adding images and commentary.

Firstly, I'll see if slight textual tweaks act to increase emotional impact.

And secondly, I'll explore the possibility of rating each extract on three emotional scales (this will mean new metadata fields). At the moment I'm considering

1. happy <––> sad
2. calm <––> agitated
3. a scale of intensity*. 

But, once the extracts are rated, then what? How could this information be used to improve the reader journey/experience? By varying the order in which story extracts are delivered? If so, how? And if not, what would be the point?

At present, we're working on the basis that the prototype will deliver extracts on the basis of

1. reader choice (pick three topics of conversation)
2. randomness (the software picks one of the three topics randomly)
3. order in which text appeared in Hayley's Memoirs (sorted by volume, then page number: this is essentially chronological)

with additional material inserted at predetermined points on the basis of other information Hayley "asks" the readers to provide.

But could it be more effective if stories with high emotional content were delivered via a different mechanism? Should, for instance, news of some of the many deaths – Hayley's Memoirs have a high body count – interrupt the flow of his story? If so, how could that be implemented without throwing everything else out of kilter?

In other words, it's not merely emotional transitions I need to work on here. It's how emotional transitions intersect with narrative transitions that's the real issue. Sometimes the change of emotion and narrative focus will need to be abrupt and shocking, the way it can be IRL. Other times will require transitions that are gentler, more subtle. 

Time, I think, for a conversation with the developers about the desirable and the possible…

For next week I'm going to explore and write about one of the 10 games Naomi Alderman picked as essential for any of us interested in "the future of literature" in her recent article on narrative innovation and gaming to explore and write about.


* which brings to mind Don Paterson's chilling poem The Scale of Intensity

HayleyWorld: brief musings on content and design

If you're new to this blog, and aren't familiar with my zoeography project, you may want to read one or more of my introductory posts for context before getting stuck in here.

So, what's new about it? – what I'm trying to do
A "zoeography"? – why I've invented a new term for this form
Introducing William Hayley er, introduces my subject, William Hayley.

I've written three posts about thinking through the reader journey (one, two, three), and in this post I want to think through a couple of other elements of the project:

Firstly, content.

I've sorted and edited into the first person all the nuggets of text from Hayley's Memoirs that will form the backbone of the narrative. I've also keyworded and tagged them with their original Memoir volume and page numbers, dates, places and the people they refer to. Most of them will fit into the main HayleyWorld keyword topics, which, at the moment are scheduled to be (in alphabetical order)

• children
• death
• education
• friendship
• love
• madness
• marriage
• medicine
• poetry 
• politics
• theatre

These may change: it's possible that some subjects might have insufficient content, while others may need to be broken down into sub-topics. Some might overlap to such an extent that, having gone through one, a reader might be left with nothing substantial when they get to the other. This may turn out to be the case with, say love and marriage and/or children and education. There's also a possibility that madness may turn out to be a subset of medicine. This probably wouldn't be a problem for anyone reading madness before medicine, but would be if the order's reversed.

There will also be some extracts that fall outside the main topics. Given that the reader journey is partly driven by choices of these topics, how can I ensure these don't get lost? Do I need to ensure they don't get lost: if they don't fit in, are they superfluous? How will I know?

At the moment, I'm wondering about giving at least some of these another keyword – asides – and maybe treating them as comments and anecdotes for William Hayley to drop into the conversation, not quite randomly

I'm also thinking about the look of the app. Hayley's words, thoughts and feelings will take centre page: mine, and others' – with the exception of his first wife Eliza's – will, I hope, appear as marginalia. In addition, I'm planning pop-up content, which will include Hayley's poems, extracts of unpublished correspondence and the lik. Most, but not all, of this will be reader-controlled. 

A while back, one of Contentment's designers mocked up a few ideas. I particularly like this one, which allows for up to two voices (or subjects) in the margin.

 

It's challenging to adapt something like that for mobile, while keeping the 18th century feel. I'm wondering if exploring the art of the 18th century portrait miniature (or even the transient late eighteenth/early nineteenth century fashion for eye miniatures) might yield some ideas. But the main issue is how we can make the thing feel comfortable and enjoyable to read, whilst also keeping a sense of Hayley's time and place…

Will hopefully have more to report in a couple of weeks.

Next week: the final chapter of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist.

Move along now: the reader journey gains momentum

If you've stumbled onto this blog about my digital biography/"zoeography" of William Hayley for the first time, you may want to read my initial post about the project – as well as the two I've linked to above – before going any further with this one, so it makes sense.


A few weeks since my last post on the HayleyWorld reader journey, and some of the questions I posed have been quietly answering themselves while I've been getting on a) with writing and b) other stuff. Lots of other stuff.


So, here's the latest version…

1. Reader journey design: phase 3

As you can see from comparing phase 3 (above) to phase 2 (below)

Reader journey design: phase 2

… I've moved on both conceptually and creatively, and also started using Omnigraffle - which is much more suitable (and fun) than Word for this sort of thing.

What's also interesting is the way a slight delay in technical implementation (down to my brilliant development partner Contentment's commercial commitments) has facilitated this surge forwards. Had we been further forward with the technical and visual development of the HayleyWorld app, I would have written more commentary on the edited extracts from Hayley's Memoirs that sit at the centre of the zoeography. But my thinking about how it all fits together, and the different ways in which the app will be personalised and function create the illusion of a relationship between Hayley and his readers wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced.

Next week - Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: chapter 14 (you can read my take on chapter 13 here).

In the meantime, hurrah for obstacles.

Reader journeys

One of the most difficult aspects of making HayleyWorld to get my head round has been imagining and designing the possible reader journeys through the text. How can we (my development partner & I)

• personalise a reader's journey while still retaining an element of control?
• make sure that readers can take different paths through the narrative and still read/experience something that feels like a coherent narrative?
• make readers feel like they're getting to know William Hayley in a away that mimics encountering him in real life?

I'm still near the start of the reader journey design process, but I have a start point that Contentment are in the process of implementing for our first prototype (which should be ready within the next couple of weeks).

At the moment, the idea looks like this:

As you can see, I still have questions about how much content to deliver before giving readers a chance to either choose more, or move on to another topic. But how will they get there in the first place?

It took me a while to work out how the app should start. But then I realised that it should begin in the way that William Hayley characteristically began his relationships with friends.

So, I embarked on my first element of semi-fictionalisation. I edited together – mostly from phrases/lines Hayley actually used, but with a few of my own (mostly obvious) tweaks  – a Hayleyan letter and sonnet, addressed to the reader…

"The past

Sussex

My dear Friend

Please allow me the liberty of addressing you thus as, I believe I have reason to hope, such you will soon become. Having some important Topics I wish to share with you, I have thrown them into here, and entreat your acceptance of the following history, that you may peruse at the greatest Ease to yourself.

Before you begin, I would beg you to look on my peculiarities with affectionate indulgence and I hope only that what follows may be thought worthy of you to whom I have taken the liberty of addressing it.

Ever your affectionate

WHayley

SONNET

Kind Friend! who reads in far off future years,

I pray thy generous heart will care to know,

A poet who lov’d to laugh yet oft shed tears

And wishes this – his story – to bestow.

Accept this volume:- through these pages flow

Sincere effusions of a long-passed mind!

Herein the untold truths my heart will shew,

Of artists, poets, friends and loves combin'd!

In this fair copy may thy eyes discern

The turns of mortal life herein outlin'd:

Whate'er the lessons from these words we learn

May all their blessings in you be entwin’d!

Thine be that joy which Friendship's bosom fills;

And thine eternal peace, devoid of ills!"

 That's the beginning that every reader will see. But then how to set each one off on their particular journey?

My initial plan was to give them a long form at the beginning. But my research into how people develop and sustain relationships led me to realise that this would be wrong. I need to create the illusion of conversation, which has two main implications.

• the reader needs to be asked for smaller tranches of information about themselves at various (but not too many) points in the app
• to have any chance of creating and sustaining the illusion that readers are getting to know William Hayley, they couldn't just be given a series of impersonal forms to complete. He would need to ask them questions. And would need to do so in an entirely Hayleyan manner…

So I wrote this. It is, I think, is more fun than an impersonal form, and has the advantage of allowing for "conversation" between Hayley and the reader without the reader being able to ask the sort of questions that an app will be unable to answer…

Also, given that the act of exploring HayleyWorld means readers are taking an interest in William Hayley, isn't it only right and proper that he should show an interest in them?

So, what's new about it?

Although reading a book about someone can be an excellent way of getting to know about them, it’s not like getting to know them. The ways we impart and receive information during interpersonal contact are radically different from the ways we absorb stories from books. The order of information sharing, what is given and withheld at any particular moment, how much the sharer reveals about any particular event, what happened, how they feel, their degree of honesty, and so on, vary, depending on all kinds of factors, including why and how people meet, how much time they spend together, how much they like each other – and in which kind of way. If people were books, they would be a different book for each individual they formed a relationship with.

And that's how I want to make HayleyWorld. As a different experience for every reader, based on their individual interests and interactions with the app. This means that I need to break down each story/event in William Hayley's life into a "nugget" of information, write each significant nugget in tow or three ways, with varying levels of detail and emotional content, so that Hayley "tells you" the story in a way that's appropriate to how well you've got to know each other.

So, yes, readers will be asked to enter some information about themselves. Their journey through William Hayley's life and storyworld will be determined partly by their choices and partly by other triggers including chronological date, the amount of time they've spent in his company and what William Hayley "wants" to tell them about…

Making that work isn't going to be easy. There are certain aspects of the process – particularly ensuring that the various nuggets link up every which way into different, but equally satisfying, narratives – that will be exceptionally challenging

HayleyWorld will be built as an app for tablets and smartphones, using Padify, and – thanks to Michael Kowalski – with help from Contentment's team of developers.