The reader journey - keeping things moving

I've been a bit quiet for the past couple of months (on here, at least), mostly because there's been quite a lot of life and other work happening (including a weekly blog for Westminster Business School).

But it's now January, and I'm back, with a new take on the HayleyWorld reader journey. In case you want to follow my progress, previous posts on this subject are 1. here, 2. here and 3. here

A productive meeting with development partner Michael Kowalski of Contentment, interviewing text mining expert Dr Stephan Ludwig  and reading James Pennebaker's The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us inspired me to

• redraw the journey algorithm
• change a couple of the forms I/William Hayley ask readers to complete

and

• thinking more deeply about how I frame the content from Hayley's Memoirs and other ego-documents.

Michael flagged two issues.

1. We were asking readers to choose their second batch of three subject areas (the first form currently gives them a choice of 11, the next one offers a choice of 8), before they'd exhausted the material from their first batch. This felt unintuitive and slightly confusing
2. There's nothing - aside from a changed chapter heading (they look like this in the current draft)  to indicate when a topic has been exhausted. 

As a result, the reader journey now has…

1. A contextual essay at the end of each topic. These will be in my voice rather than Hayley's, as they'll need to provide context. Their tone and content will need to complement, rather than repeat, the short marginalia commentaries. Thinking as I type, I'm wondering whether they might work even better as short video presentations. Will need to discuss that idea with Michael and my PhD supervisors (Profs Ian Gadd & Kate Pullinger), and, if it's a possible way ahead, create at least one
written and one filmed example over the next month or two, so that we can user-test both formats

This has also made me think about the number of subjects/chapters in the app. As you can see from the form below I've rounded the previous 11 up to 12 by adding sensibility. However, given the volume of work involved in creating essays/videos, I'm leaning towards rounding down to nineThis will involve merging 3 x 2 pairs of subjects, with love and marriage along with children and education being obvious start-points.

The latest iteration. There will be more…

2. A form with several free text fields. Aside from a couple of simple requests for basic info – for a reader's name, for instance – my plan was to avoid this, simply because developing a way of responding effectively to this mode of user input would be too big and complex a job.

Reading The Secret Life of Pronouns provoked a change of mind: we still won't be using readers' free text input to trigger a response from the HayleyWorld app. But we're aiming to use it to measure readers'engagement/involvement in two ways. Firstly, by the extent of their input – more words are likely to suggest higher level of engagement/involvement with the app, fewer, a lower level.

And, secondly, by using a tool – hopefully the one on The Secret Life of Pronouns website – to measure how far (if at all) a reader's use of function words (including pronouns, articles, prepositions, auxiliary words… there's a list on p22 of the book, and a brief explanation on the website homepage) mirrors Hayley's (or mine, when I'm writing as him).

Here's my first draft of this form (nb: in the app itself, there will be either nine or six options for the reader to choose from, as they will already have chosen their first three subjects)…

Um… I think that's more than enough for now. Thanks for reading. Next week I'm planning to review On Life-Writing edited by Zachary Leader.

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.

Next steps on the reader journey

When I last blogged about working out how readers will journey through my HayleyWorld zoeography, I was pondering how to:

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

A few months on, I'm still thinking about those issues – and suspect I'll continue to do so until the work's complete, I've post-mortemed myself almost to death over it*, and am on to the next big project†.

I'm also thinking about my methodology of designing the reader journey in a step-by-step linear way.
Given that I'm trying to make the reading experience feel less linear, is designing it in a linear manner, well, wrong? One aspect that concerns me is that it increases the likelihood that  I'll end up losing something – a key aspect of William Hayley's story – en route. Or that I'll miss a vital left turn, one that would allow me and the reader to explore aspects of the tale that my let's-start-at-the-very-beginning approach obscures.

This is where I'm at:

Will need to do page set up: A3 if I want to travel any further…

As for content - I'm halfway through editing/writing the personalised letters Hayley will send to his readers, and am thinking through what and how he'll "ask" readers to provide the information required for Form 2: as I write I'm wondering if this might also be a good point to ask readers for their email address…

My suspicion is that, for now, step-by-step is the most practical way to proceed. It won't be for much longer, though. My guess is that when I'm one or two stages further into the journey, and these stages have been successfully (I hope) implanted into the next iteration of the HayleyWorld app, I'll need to sit down with several huge pieces of paper and map out the various relationships between the people, places, themes and chronologies of the story, and interrelate these to each other. Which will probably make my head pop open like this, but will also make me feel considerably less smiley…

And which is where everything I'm learning by blogging my way through Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist is likely to come in handy…


Very interested to hear others' thoughts on reader journey design…



* Yeah, I know. Am invoking the paradox defence.
† on the backburner are

• an anarchist musical
• a radio drama 
• a crowd-sourced online project exploring the limits of kindness.

We interrupt this blog…

… because I've been distracted from reading about the semantic web by playing with something made with its tools, that does something similar to what I'm aiming to do with Hayleyworld.

The BBC's Home Front Story Explorer is designed for both current and new Home Front listeners wanting to catch up on stories they've missed, recap, or focus on specific characters/storylines. Based on this model (See the News Storyline Ontology developed with The Guardian, the Press Association and digital media consultancy Ontoba)…

Screen-grabbed from http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies/storyline.

 …the Explorer is clear, clean and attractively-designed, with elegant and evocative illustrations.

The Beeb's approach is ideally suited to long-running radio dramas, where the broadcast programmes cut between characters and plot lines, are built from distinct scenes or "moments" (not necessarily the same thing) and stories ebb and flow over months, years or even, in the case of The Archers, decades. One advantage is that – as here – the length of the re-ordered material can be determined either by content – ie the extent of an individual storyline – or by listener choice, instead of the time constraints of a broadcast slot.

Also, listeners can explore as and where they listen: although the two-screen (or one screen + radio) approach trumps this particular experimental iteration, as exploring too deeply takes you to a different webpage, and the clip stops playing…

What's exciting about this is both the control it gives the listener and the fact that using semantic web technologies to build it means that, over time, its extent and depth can be increased by federating more data. At the moment, for instance, it includes limited "on this day" snippets of historical information, which could be extended into details, images and other AV content, and a description of the geographical (real and imagined) location of the clip, but no map.

At present, there are no cast or creative details or images. I'd have liked to be able to explore these too, but wonder if they should be kept separate to enable us to immerse ourselves more fully in Home Front's time and place? Perhaps the ideal would be to be able to toggle in and out of the story world: to be able to choose either to immerse yourself in its reality, or to zoom out for all the who, what and how behind-the-scenes information… I'd love that…

Visit the BBC's Home Front Story Explorer
Lead producer Tristan Fearne explains the background to the Explorer

Getting my head round the semantic web

A big part of what will determine whether HayleyWorld will work for readers will be how effectively I use keywords to sort and order the edited quotations from William Hayley's Memoirs that I've entered into my research database, and which I'm using as the core narrative(s).

At the moment, along with details of the volume and page numbers in the Memoirs from which each extract is taken, and, where appropriate the date(s) on which they happened, I have three sets/fields of keywords, which I've labelled –

• "cast" ~  the people who are mentioned or referred to in the extract, or who are present at a specific event
• "place" ~ places mentioned or referred to in the extract

and

• "keyword" ~ which should, really, be called "subject", but keyword is what I called it when I originally created the database in the late 1990s as a research repository rather than a writing tool. This last field contains word lists describing what the extract is about. So, for example, an extract about mental health issues – one of Hayley's main interests – generally include the descriptors "mental illness", "depression", "melancholy" and "madness", but may also be found alongside "sensibility", "spirits" and other words that Hayley and his circle often used/which contemporary commentators use in writing on the subject.

But – how does this all relate to the semantic web? And why am I trying to get my head around it?

Because my database is (well, sort of) a primitive take on the tools and methods developed to create the semantic web. And understanding how "ontologies" (essentially sets and hierarchies of keywords) are constructed and connected should enable me to make HayleyWorld a better, more effective thing.

So, I have bought a book – Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist by Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler – recommended by Andrew Hugill, Director of the Centre for Creative Computing at Bath Spa University.

But here's the rub. Despite my lifelong love of books, I have never managed to finish reading a technical one. At each atttempt, I've run out of brain long before I've run out of pages.

So, this time, I've decided to blog about each chapter as I read it. I'm hoping this will carry me through/enable me properly understand/internalise the concepts and information I encounter. I'm aiming to do one chapter a week, but make no promises. Other priorities may intervene. And I may run out of brain as fast as usual. But I'm gonna try.

Wish me luck…

Blogging hiatus

I haven't blogged about making HayleyWorld for months. This isn't because I haven't been doing anything to make HayleyWorld (although life has intervened and I am now a part-time, not full-time PhD student. Rather, the work I've been focusing on left me with little to add to the blog. Eliza remains fascinating, as does the relationship between her, William Hayley, and Thomas Alphonso Hayley's mother Mary Cockerell. I will also have more to add on the subject of first/third person, as I'm in the midst of a bunch of reading around it.

Mostly, I've been working with my development partners at Contentment towards producing a first prototype. And that's taking time, as – of necessity – it's a side project for them, and one that, inevitably, throws up a bunch of unexpected and unpredictable development issues that need tackling…

But, if I'm completely honest, those are excuses.

My brain simply doesn't come up with ideas for blog posts all the time (to be fair, it has one or two other things to focus on, so I shouldn't be too cross with it). However, yesterday morning it did, and a these will follow over the next few weeks, with the first coming soon after this one. Soon, in this instance, = an hour or so after this one. Unless I don't finish it before I have to go out and eat fish & chips with friends, in which case it'll = tomorrow. But you didn't want or need to know that, did you?

The "Intellectual Machine" cranks into action

After a lot of nagging by Hayley and the judicious application of Lady Hesketh's schmoozing skills, William Cowper started receiving letters of the type promised in "the Vision".

The first, written 9 August 1797, came from William Wilberforce.

When he caught sight of the letter, Cowper said "The outside tells me, I shall be taken away by Force, & the inside will tell me the Time when”. He did, however, read the letter with what the Reverend Johnny Johnson - Cowper's cousin and carer – described as "unusual Attention".

The second - hustled by Lady Hesketh - came from the Bishop of London late in September. It was an enthusiastic fan letter, detailing the religious enjoyment with which the Bishop read and re-read Cowper's poems.

Cowper's response?

“Never was such a Letter written, never was such a Letter read to a Man so overwhelmed with Despair, as I am — It was written in Derision – I know, & I am sure of it.”

Johnson challenged this: Cowper shouldn't say such a thing of a man as good as the Bishop of London!

“I should say so", Cowper replied, "of an archangel, were it possible for an archangel to send me such a Letter, in such Circumstances.”

Imagine receiving this from your best friend…

“It was on Tuesday, the 20th of June 1797,” wrote William Hayley in the second of his unpublished Two Memorials of Hayley’s Endeavours to serve His Friend Cowper, “that after long lamenting the calamitous suspension of our Correspondence, I received in Sussex a Letter with the Post Mark of Dereham, containing the following Words, in the Hand-writing of Cowper, but with no signature.”

To
William Hayley Esqr
Eartham
near Chichester

Ignorant of every thing but my own instant & impending Misery, I know neither what I do, when I write, nor can do otherwise than write, because I am bidden to do so. Perfect Despair, the most perfect, that ever possessed any Mind, has had Possession of mine, you know how long, and knowing that, will not need to be Told, who writes.

Hayley adored Cowper: his love for the older poet was "as strong as manly friendship can be" and so he was, unsurprisingly, deeply affected by this letter. “I believe," he wrote "it is hardly possible for Language to describe all the various Emotions, that this dark billet of my desponding Friend produced in my Heart.”

But he was also ever-hopeful and his “fervent affection for the dear Sufferer”, combined with “a Fancy naturally inclined to cherish the most sanguine Hopes of what it ardently wishes”, to inspire him to try something quite extraordinary to improve Cowper’s state of mind. It was, in his words, "a large & Complicated Intellectual Machine", and I’ll tell you all about it in my next post…

Third person, first person?

The New York Times asked Salman Rushdie why he wrote Joseph Anton, his account of life under the fatwa, in the third person. He responded that he felt using the first person hampered his progress.

Each time I tried [to write the book], it didn’t work and so I put it aside. And then I realized that one of the things I was really disliking was the first person, this endless “I,” things happening to “me,” and “I felt” and “I did” and “people said about me” and “I worried.” It was just absurdly narcissistic. So at a certain point I thought, “Let me just see what happens if I write it novelistically, in the third person.” And the moment I started doing it was like the kind of “open sesame” that gave me the book.

Meanwhile James Camp wrote, in The New York Observer, that the third person voice would be the first thing readers would notice. He remarked, pointedly, that it “is not a perspective often associated with self-awareness.”

While the author of Joseph Anton – a book that’s fascinating, thought-provoking and irritating in about equal measure – doesn’t always show himself to be the most dispassionate of self-observers, I don’t think this is either down to, or responsible for, his choice of the third person. 

I suspect it’s more accurate – and consistent with Rushdie’s professed reasons for choosing the perspective – to say that the third person is not a perspective often associated with self-exposure. It’s helpful in evading the confessional, and useful to self-aware memoirists and autobiographers who wish to avoid revealing themselves in their work.

Almost two hundred years before Rushdie, William Hayley – having published biographies of Milton, his friends William Cowper and George Romney, and a memoir of his son, Thomas Alphonso Hayley – wrote his own life in the third person. Somewhat lazily edited by Cowper’s relative/carer Rev. John Johnson, it’s a long book, generally honest and egalitarian to the extent that its publisher complained that Hayley seemed to think that “unknown personages connected with him merely by family ties or juvenile affection” and “his literary career and his intercourse with persons of talent and celebrity” would be of “equal interest” to his readers.*

One of my first steps towards creating the zoeography app was to take around 440 shortish extracts from Hayley’s memoir, and ‘translate’ them into the first person. Finicky and – as I’m sure you can imagine – time-intensive, it still proved a fascinating exercise. There is, I suspect, no better way to explore what’s gained and lost by writing about oneself as ‘he’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘I’.

High on the list of benefits has to be status delineation. Hayley often dubs himself “the poet”, as in “The poet of Eartham having finished his life of Milton, in the autumn, took it with him, when he set forth on his second visit to Cowper.” And “The tender gloom which the sudden loss of this memorable man (so long endeared to the poet) had thrown over his mind, prepared him to sympathize in the recent domestic affliction of his noble friend, Lord Egremont”. Using the third person enables Hayley to position himself within his profession and within society much more easily than he could have done using the first person. It’s a significant advantage for someone as concerned with controlling his image, and with posterity, as Hayley was.

But the downside is the loss of intimacy. We may be better placed to perceive the writer’s position within his networks but, there’s a corresponding distancing and dilution of his/her emotions and experiences. Which makes it a slightly odd choice for one of Sensibility's leading votaries.

I’ll be thinking and writing about this more as my research and development progress, and would be interested to read any comments…

* quote from an unpublished letter from Henry Colburn to Rev Johnson.

Introducing William Hayley

Although now – unless you’re a Blake aficionado or an 18th century specialist – you’re unlikely to have heard of William Hayley (1745-1820), in his time he was highly influential.

Alongside reams of poetry, a dozen or so unsuccessful plays, a slew of verse and prose essays (he was the first person to publish any of Dante’s work in English), and one novel, Hayley wrote one of the late eighteenth century’s bestselling self-help books: The Triumphs of Temper, advising young women on how to attract and keep a husband. It was written in rhyming couplets and modelled on Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

Despite this success, his own marriages – he wed twice – were not happy. His first wife, who, in his memoirs he often describes as his “pitiable Eliza”, suffered from “marvellous mental infelicities”  which, in Hayley’s telling, led, ultimately, to their separation.

Little is known of his second marriage, except that it lasted under four years and ended with a case in the Doctors’ Commons. However, I’m in the process of trying to decipher a heavily redacted letter Hayley wrote to a friend in 1816 in which he describes himself as having been lured or tricked

into a calamitous marriage by a subtle plot between two beautiful sisters & a hypocritical Presbyterian all of whose artful machinations [illegible] I have lately discovered

More to follow when I’ve completed my detective work.

Hayley also functioned as an amateur doctor, treating the villagers around his home in Eartham, Sussex, where he was well loved, and was proud of never having killed anyone.

He also had a particular interest in the relationship between mental health issues and creativity, and took an active part in supporting, and attempting to cure, William Cowper, George Romney, Joseph Wright of Derby and Charlotte Smith amongst others (he also, on occasion, negotiated book deals for Smith).

Hayley coaxed William Blake to Sussex from London in 1800 and provided – as the antithetical element in Blake’s dialectical approach – inspiration for some of his prophetic poetry. It’s also likely that, in standing bail for Blake when he was tried for sedition in 1804, hiring a lawyer and speaking for him in court, he saved the visionary’s life. Sedition, after all, carried the death penalty.

For a combination of political and health reasons, in 1790 Hayley turned down Pitt’s offer of the poet laureateship. After his own, unpleasant experiences at school – he nearly died at Kingston Grammar and was bullied and beaten at Eton – he paid close personal attention to the education of his son Thomas Alphonso (whose mother was neither of Hayley’s wives), which was mostly undertaken at home in Eartham, West Sussex where he also tutored some of his friend and neighbour, Lord Egremont’s children.

He died aged 75 in 1820.

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.