Projects 2013 > Writer on the Train > Journal
What’s an architectural historian doing on a project that is exploring how smartphones can provide a different experience for writing and consuming the written word in the context of rail travel? It’s an interesting question, and one I’ve continued to ask myself as the three month REACT sandbox has progressed.
In the first instance my involvement is motivated by an interest in the potential of geolocation as a strategy for engaging users and readers with place. There is a heady feeling for a historian attached to the idea that contemporary places and spaces can be hooked back up with the experience of them in the past – and that the mobile phone is a device that can bring ideas and interpretations usually consigned to scholarly articles or specialist books into the hands of a quite different audience, conveniently situated in front of the objects and places you wish to communicate to them about. As an urban historian this is technology rich with opportunity, and suited directly to my own work.
The REACT print and books sandbox seemed like a good place to explore this. I teamed up with author James Attlee, whose earlier bookIsolarionwas an experiential exploration of a neighbourood by means of narrating a walk up Oxford’s Cowley Road; his new project (already ongoing as a blog) around rail commuting seemed to lend itself to geolocation. I suggested he might like to explore how his writing might follow the train-line, and explore the potential that releasing stories along the route, as the train rattled through the countryside between London and Bristol. We in turn teamed up with Agant – innovators in publishing-related app development – who were interested in how geolocation might work for such a project. The idea went from there…
That was all at the beginning, and earlier posts tell some of that story. What’s been really interesting though as we’ve moved along has been that so much of the initial project has been left behind and other priorities have emerged. It’s a three way collaboration, and discussion throughout has moved forward the project, while the fast pace of deadlines, as well as the practical issues of what is possible in a three month development process have hit home. We’re still on track to produce an app for the App store – but it’s interesting how this has changed from the initial outline.
First of all perhaps what has surprised me most in this project is the fact that the seemingly tight and obvious structure of a text developing in sequence along a train line, like stops on the station, is only partly reflected in the final experience. Instead, geolocation acts, above all, as a strategy for delivering the pace and place of the stories. The magic of the technology, harnessed by the author, is that we can use time and space to control the experience – as people travel on the train, content is released, sometimes in “obvious” locations, where story and station platform coincide – you find out something from the world going by. But often, the location serves as an invisible trigger for delivering a text that has no bearing on the place – but might instead relate to the time of day, the speed of travel, or even less tangible factors. A particularly attractive result of this can be seen in the way the app produces a tailor-made storyline, which is not in geographic sequence, but instead reassembles the times and days when the stories were first read. This will be different from user to user.
Something else I had not anticipated is difficulty: we had a tight proposal and I thought it would just be a matter of execution. How wrong I was! Writing for an app is quite different to writing a long text for traditional book format, article, blog posts or other types of writing. The screen has an effect on how we read –the amount of text on screen, the desire for it to appear attractively but not necessarily in the same way as a book (skeuomorphic – a word I’ ashamed to say didn’t know before!) , the potential to include other media (pictures, moving images, sound), and perhaps also shorter attention spans –these raise a set of new challenges, something to adapt to, even to embrace. For James, this was not easy, but its been enormously rewarding to see how he’s taken on the form, and how he’d like to see opportunities to do more of this in the future. The idea of his writing into a text editor to see his writing appear on the phone screen captures something of how there is an intensely physical aspect to engaging with this seemingly ephemeral or digital format.
To balance the difficulties faced by James, it’s been equally interesting to see how technology isn’t always a “can do” process – there has been quite a lot of “can’t do”, “how do we do”, and “won’t do”! Trying something out – in particular delivery of GPS accuracy moving at very high speed in a Faraday cage on steel wheels – is not a smooth process. The image of Amy coding her way back and forth along the London-Bristol is one that I will take away from this development process. So too with the design process, Dave’s ability as a designer, and the discussions around reader/user/author expectations have brought more than just an attractive skin to the final product. Interestingly, as Dave notes in a blog post, designing the app experience was also shaped by tools that allowed him to view work produced on the computer in real time on the phone screen.
It’s not yet all over, but what will I take away from these three months – other than the obvious? Well, I have learned a great deal about the whole process of geolocated narrative, what it can hope to deliver, and the sorts of collaborative interactions that are needed for the various creative inputs (author, design, technology) to be allowed to give of their best. More widely this has been the experience of the sandbox process as a whole, hearing and sharing the other projects as they developed, and learning a great deal from the observations and valuable criticism and advice provided by the REACT team as well as other project members. Again, this has been a learning process about “open” project development. In many respects this is quite different to traditional humanities research, where we tend to hone and perfect our work in private, and only release it in written form when we are happy with the finished product. I’m not sure that “making things fast” is a good way to publish a REF 4* article, but it is certainly a good way to move ideas along, jettison unnecessary baggage, and create something interesting. So, as a research process, it is one that may well alter the nature of some of the articles I write!
Posted by Fabrizio Nevola