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

Relationship mapping, power and influence

I've finally got round to starting to map William Hayley's relationships. I realised fairly quickly that I'd drive myself nuts if I tried to do them all at the same time, so I've gone for three categories: family, friendships and work. So far I've had a bash at family and friendships

Naturally the different types of relationship overlap, so some people – including Hayley's first wife Eliza, his son Thomas Alphonso, and Tom's mother, Mary Cockerell appear in both.

Two issues troubled me during the mapping process: time and power/influence.

 Time, power and influence

The only nod I've made to the former is by putting the descriptors of relationships with William Hayley's father and brother – both of whom died while he was very young – in the past tense and in pink. More on time in a bit…

I've signalled the different degrees of power and/or influence in the relationships by using

• bi-directional straight arrows and reddish-brown text for relationships which seem/feel equal 
• uni-directional straight arrows coming from the individual with greater power/influence in the relationship plus blue text
• uni-directional curved arrows coming from the individual with lesser power/influence in the relationship, plus blue text.

I've only deviated from this is in the (family) relationship between Eliza Hayley and Mary Cockerell. Although Mary was Eliza's servant, it was William Hayley who, ultimately, had control over both women: control he exerted on at least one occasion, post-separation, when Eliza challenged his authority. There were also times when Eliza depended on Mary for care and companionship and, even – in once instance (also after the couple had separated) when both women were lodging together in Derby – for sourcing food.

The only other fact I want to highlight at this stage, is that there are, unsurprisingly, more asymmetric power/influence relationships amongs family than there are amongst friends, and that the distribution is – even less surprisingly – gendered.

But, as I've already indicated, the two masses of text and squiggles below don't show how relationships evolve, wax and wane over time.

A "Dislikes" arrow?

I need to do something more sophisticated and (almost certainly) animated to evoke these changes, to demonstrate the way marriages, deaths and fallings-out impact on friendships and family relationships: to highlight emnity as well as amity. I'm thinking here not only of William Blake's initial attraction to, and sympathy for Hayley crystallising into fury and frustration at the latter's attempts to direct his work, then, ultimately relaxing into gratitude at Hayley's successful efforts to ensure he was acquitted at his trial for sedition. I'm also wondering how to represent, say, the poet Anna Seward's disapproval and violent criticism of poet and novelist Charlotte Smith's work. Both women were close to Hayley at one time or another, with Hayley even negotiating on Smith's behalf with her publisher. Seward eventually, angered Hayley, by writing about Eliza in a way Hayley considered both unkind and – given her privileged knowledge of Eliza's mental health issues – a betrayal.

And I'm also thinking about how to represent the relationship between Hayley and Reverend John Johnson: Cowper's relation and carer. Although Hayley would have considered Johnson a "confidential" friend, a couple of comments in Johnson's letters to others, along with a few of his editorial markings on the manuscript

Finally, before I finish I'd like to critique the terms I've used to define the relationships. They are all possessive: hasWife; hasFriend; hasEmployer. I should have used isHusbandOf; isFriendOf; isEmployeeOf. But they are also too static for my liking. The next thing I need to understand is how to model flow.

Narrative flow, relationship flux and nuclear reactors

Think I need to ask my friend who used to design software for nuclear reactors… Meanwhile, here's where I've got to so far…

Interactive biography: players, actors, protagonists

A Fortunate Man?

Towards the end of John Berger and Jean Mohr's photo-essay A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor, are a few paragraphs musing on the difficulties of writing biography – particularly of living subjects – compared with fiction or autobiography.

"In a certain sense", Berger writes, addressing what he feels to be the impossibility of concluding this essay, "fiction seems strangely simple now. In fiction one has only got to decide that a character is, on balance, admirable. Of course there remains the problem of making him so … But still –outcomes can be decided. Whereas now I can decide nothing."

Autobiographers, he reckons, have it even easier – or are, at least, "freer" – than novelists. The autobiographer

"is his own subject and his own chronicler. Nothing, nobody, not even a created character can reproach him. What he omits, what he distorts, what he invents – everything, at least by the logic of the genre, is legitimate." (p159)

(As an aside, Berger's text is, throughout, as sexist in a thoroughly-of-its-moment (1967) way as the above quotes suggest. Jean Mohr's accompanying portraits exhibit a much better gender balance.)

Berger makes one comment on biography that clarified what I'm trying to achieve with this project He's explaining the difference between writing a biography of a living, and a dead artist.

When work is no longer in progress

"The painting you saw last week when you assume the painter was alive is not the same painting (although it is the same canvas) you see this week when you know that he is dead." While an artist lives, every work is

"part of an unfinished process. … When the artist is dead, the painting becomes part of a definitive body of work. What we can think or say about it changes. It can no longer be addressed to the artist … we can now only think and speak for ourselves. Because he is dead, we become the protagonists." (p160-161, my italics)

There's a lot written about the relationship between the roles of author and "audience" in interactive narrative, much of centred around the relinquishing of authorial control and the correlative increase in audience agency. In "Player Agency in Interactive Narrative: Audience, Actor & Author", for instance, Sean Hammond, Helen Pain and Tim J Smith write

"A player in an interactive narrative can be a spectator in the sense that she is a witness to the dramatic spectacle. She can be an actor in the sense that she plays the role of one of the characters in the narrative. And she can be an author in the sense that she collaborates with the system (and perhaps with other players) to produce the resulting narrative experience. The player is not exclusively a spectator, nor an actor, nor an author, but in any given example of interactive narrative the role of player combines these three traditional roles to different degrees"

Emily Short in a 2011 blog post on An Alternative Taxonomy for Interactive Stories explores the different ways in which, and extents to which the "player" can become actor, character, protagonist and/or author, and offers useful examples of/links to games and fictions for each mode.

The framing of the audience (or reader) as player is, of course, a trope drawn – along with many of the techniques and technologies of interactive narrative – from gaming. But I don't think it's apposite for a zoeography, where, although the interactive element is playful (or "sportive", to employ the term Hayley would have used). I'm still not sure what the right word is, and may need to coin another neologism.

A protagonist in someone else's life story

In attempting to create the simulacrum of a relationship between the audience/reader and the biographical subject, while, at the same time, positioning my commentary on his life as marginalia, I don't feel I'm ceding any of my authorial control to the audience/reader. What I'm aiming to do is expand their role as protagonist, if not in Hayley's story, at least in the telling of it, while diminishing the role of the biographer-as-protagonist and/or narrator, and morphing it into something else. Commentator, perhaps?

What's different here from the other player-as-protagonist examples that Emily Short provides, is that it's the audience/readers' selves – or how they choose to identify/describe themselves and their circumstances: the app and I will have no knowledge of whether they're answering Hayley's questions honestly or not – that will influence the course of the narrative.

Modelling William Hayley's relationships

First baby steps

Inspired – and emboldened – by having battled my way through Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, I decided to try applying what I've learned from the book to modelling William Hayley's relationships.

I started with a blank A3 page and my trusty Muji mechanical pencil, and got as far as this –

First attempt at modelling Hayley's relationships. HasMaster and hasMistress will be replaced by hasEmployer. And hasInBed (well, it was a first attempt) will be replaced by hasMistress.

– before realising

1. I needed a different term for "mistress". HasMistress could be used to describe both William Hayley's relationship with Mary Cockerell, the mother of his child, but also the relationship Mary Cockerell had with Eliza, Hayley's wife: Mary was, for some of the time, Eliza's maid. (I'll now be using hasEmployer for the servant->master/mistress relationship, and hasMistress for sexual relationships. Not yet sure what I'll call the inverse relathionship, though, but would welcome suggestions in the comments or via Twitter).
2. before starting this process, I needed to list all the people Hayley had relationships with, and then select those who were most significant.

Urk. Is this really a good use of my time?

So, worrying that this might all be a colossal waste of time, I trawled through the 1,858 relevant records in my database, identifying 375 individuals with whom Hayley mentioned contact, along with a number whose work or reputations influence his work or behaviour. Then I picked 87 out of the 375 whose relationship with him felt significant enough to model.

There's a second page, too…

The highlights mark friend and/or family relationships, the ticks signify predominantly work relationships, although some of these are debatable. For instance, I've ticked Dr Nathaniel Cotton but although he and Hayley didn't have a lot contact over time, their interests and relationships had several significan overlaps.

My next step will be to take that list of 87 people, and further explore the nature of their relationships with William Hayley and each other. This will involve thinking about what makes a relationship significant – endurance, impact,  and how I signal the different kinds of significant relationships. Please send large sheets of paper, coloured pens and caffeine.

Impact on the narrative journey

Even this first, hesitant, part of the process has prompted me to think in more depth about the overall reader journey:

• How many of Hayley's friends, relatives and other contacts do readers need to know about?
• How much do they need to know about them?
• How – and when – will they find out about them?
• How and where do readers fit into Hayley's network?

This sparked another, related, question about communicating content. What do I do about those topics Hayley wouldn't want to raise? Or, at least, that he wouldn't want to raise with just anybody?

For instance, from the sheer number of mentions money gets throughout his memoirs and letters, managing his finances, limiting expenditure, and bringing in enough to support his household, were clearly major preoccupations, and cast light on what life would have been like for him and his dependents. But he's unlikely to raise the subject of his own volition.

So how do I build that into the narrative?

Two ways spring to mind

• cover financial matters in my commentary
• have Hayley write personalised accounts to certain readers - which will require a form asking people about their work/status

I'll explore both options. But probably not for a couple of weeks as next week I'll be bodyboarding in the south of France. There will, undoubtedly, be embarrassing photos…

Incidentally, another good thing that's happened as a result of embarking on this, has been contact, through Twitter, with artist China Blue, who's been working on social "connectome" paintings highlighting "the odd and interesting connections that we do and don't know about peoples lives", focusing on artists and artistic genres.

Yep. An excellent use of my time.

Blast Theory's Karen

The life coach from hell (or Brighton)

There are two types of life coach. Those that have led full and/or successful lives, overcome adversity and amassed a bunch of wisdom that they transmit, gently, to their clients, and the others. Karen, played to terrific effect by Claire Cage in Blast Theory's app, is one of the latter.

Designed to demonstrate how much information about ourselves we reveal to commercial interests and others who collect and use our data, Karen is, um, a blast.

During each episode – these are made available once or twice a day over ten days – she asks us questions, most of which are derived from psychological assessment tools. These 'coaching sessions, are interwoven with a story – a forking path narrative – the course of which is, I think, influenced by our answers. Not sure about that: will need to have another play and answer differently to be sure. The events may be the same, the difference may be the part we play in them.

Our answers do, however, contribute directly to the psychological profile/assessment that's available to buy for £2.99 once the app/story has run its course. More on this later.

Within a day or two (the events unfold over 10 days in realtime) Karen abandons her initially professional demeanour, as seen in this introductory video…



… and descend into oversharing and neediness. Increasingly, she implicates us in the messiness of her life and her complex relationship with a man called Dave (played by Chris Jared), who turns out to be more than her flatmate.

Compelling mini-soap

Karen makes for a very successful mini-soap. It's compelling and the excellent scripting, performances, filmed-on-a-smartphone feel, choice of locations and set design render it genuinely immersive and compelling. By day nine, Karen had invaded my dream life, and not in a good way.

The story trajectory feels natural and I felt drawn into some form of 'relationship' with the character: although the suspension of disbelief was enjoyably partial, meaning that I didn't feel I needed to be kind to Karen – or feel guilty when I wasn't. And - given that over half of the people who, to date, have "been measured on this scale" (I'm quoting from my data report) disrespected Karen's privacy – I don't think I'm alone in responding like that. The other possible conclusion is that the majority of us are potential secret police informants. As an article in Der Speigl suggests that about 18% of the population of Rostock occasionally acted as informants to the Stasi, it looks like my initial hypothesis might be closer to the truth (phew).

Controlling behaviour

The questions Karen (and occasionally Dave) ask feel relevant and, often, appropriately inappropriate. Only one tripped me up. I was asked to move a slider on a scale to indicate how far my "significant other" was "in control" or "cared for". I misunderstood. Assuming that "in control" meant in control of their own life, I moved the slider to that end of the scale. Karen's response, made it clear that the question was, in fact, exploring where the power lay within the relationship. Not sure what that misconception says about me and the data report didn't tell me.

Information & privacy

"Rest assured," says the intro to the data report

"others are using your data with greater sophistication and colder intent. Hopefully Karen highlights some of the queasy feelings that highly personalised and mildly intrusive data collection can trigger."

It didn't have that effect on me, because – contrary to my report which claimed I have "an external locus of control"  – I felt in control of my answers to Karen's questions. And, to be honest, I feel sufficiently in control of how much I reveal about myself and my life online in general. This is partly, because, however flawed it is, however much I dislike the current government, I live in a liberal democracy, where the worst that's likely to happen to me is that a) I embarrass myself and b) someone tries to sell me something that I don't want (happens all the time) or c) that I've just bought (also happens all the time).

Also – and, according to my data report, like the majority of those who've used/played with the app – I am an open person. I don't believe that someone who knows about me knows, or has power over, me. My story is the lizard tail I leave behind.


Matt Adams from Blast Theory talks to Tech Times about Karen



There's also a fascinating video on Blast Theory's website where Matt Adams explains how Karen uses interactivity.

Karen is made by Blast Theory in collaboration with National Theatre Wales, Dr Kelly Page and the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. It was co-commissioned by The Space.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Chapter 16

In this, the last chapter of Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist, the authors riff briefly on the history and context of data modeling for the web: how the processes and practices build on the "heritage of of knowledge modeling languages", but do so in an environment that "is so revolutionary that it is often compared in cultural significance to the invention of the printing press".

"The Semantic Web is the application of advanced technologies that have been used in the context of artificial intelligence, expert systems and business rules execution in the context of a World Wide Web of information. The Semantic Web… isn't on the web; it is the Web"

Where it's different from anything that precedes it is the way it brings "information from many sources … to one's fingertips". But then a library does that. Or, arguably, an encyclopaedia. What really differentiates the Web is that it brings the information a) sorted and b) on demand.

The reason that OWL seems – and is – pretty "primitive" compared "to the knowledge representation systems that were developed in the context of expert systems" is not entirely because it's at a much earlier stage of development, but because of what people want from the web: "typically people don't want machines to behave like experts, they want to have access to information so they can exhibit expert performance at just the right time." Hmmm… True for search engines: don't know about you, but I definitely want a satnav, for instance, to behave like an expert…

Where the Semantic Web goes "one step further" than the Web, is that while the "Web is effective at bringing any single resource" to our attention, "if the information the user needs is not represented in a single place, the job of integration rests with the user." However, the Semantic Web "uses expert system technology to gather information so an individual can have integrated access to the web of information." The Semantic Web, in other words, makes the connections for the user. Unlike a satnav app, it doesn't tell the user what to do with them.

So, the fact that OWL is comparatively primitive "is appropriate for a Web language", because "a primitive knowledge modeling language can yield impressive results when it uses information sources from around the world." Its power is in how it accesses and assimilates the huge amounts of content available across the web – and in how it enables newly available content to be added to the mix as and when it's added to the Web. Data models "on the Semantic Web play the role of the intermediaries that describe the relationships among information from various sources". And the web ontology language tools covered in this book "provide the framework for the pieces an engineer can use to build a model with dynamic behaviour … and … provide mechanisms for specifying how information flows through the model" and how different bits of information relate to each other.

Or as one, much more technically adept friend put it: it's conceptually difficult because you're modeling information about information. And that, in itself, is tough to get your head round.

So what have I learned from this book?

It's difficult to say at this stage, because, aside from using it for the design of my new MOO Cards…

This makes more sense when you know the job title on the reverse is "Person"

 … I've yet to put anything I've read into practice.

However:

1. over the next few weeks, I'm going to try and model the relationships between as many as possible of the people who appear in the zoeography
2. there's a helpful "Frequently asked questions" section at the end of the book that directs readers to specific pages with instructions on specific issues

I'll report back later. Not sure exactly when: next week I'm planning to write about Blast Theory's Karen. And after that, I'm hoping to have more progress to report on the technical and design development of the zoeography.

In the meantime, if you've been reading this – thank you very much for doing so.
If this is your first visit, my journey through Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist started here.

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.