If you’re new to Silent History, here’s a blurb:

‘The e-book tells the story of children who are born silent, but possess powerful skills. It’s narrated via daily updates called testimonials. Each update gives you a glimpse into the characters as the story unfolds over the course of a year. Besides testimonials, the e-book also includes field reports, which can only be read in specific geographic locations.‘

That’s from TUAW, which managed to make a decent stab at describing what Horowitz and Quinn are trying to do, without resorting to the usual “the future of the book” hyperbole. It’s not a book, it’s actually something that’s designed to exist on a mobile platform and be read in short, daily chunks while explicitly asking its reader to participate in creating the world of the over-arching narrative and experience it through a device-specific, location-dependent interaction. It’s not a book.

So, a week in and what do I think?

It’s my job, or part of it anyway, to evaluate how story works, and how platforms are used, and on those measures they’re doing well.

• The Testimonials are short, and don’t overload my time to read. They also unlock and propose the next piece to be read. And, thankfully, you know exactly how big the whole thing is going to be. I can’t emphasise how important I think this is. Books, as physical objects are defined to us by our understanding the length of the thing ahead, and how far we’ve come. It’s an intrinsic part of our understanding of narrative. Ask anyone who hasn’t read War and Peace, or Against the Day, why they haven’t read it and see what the answer is.
• The sense of foreboding (see – FOREboding, that requires us to know that there’s a something in front of us to be boded about) is very well handled. We know this is going to end in 2043 and that 2040 has enough content for a whole section by itself (I almost typed ‘book’ there. We’re going to have to be careful with language from here on in), and that gives me Midwich Cuckoos chills. But all grown up cuckoos. And I’m wondering (because that’s how I approach these things) if the rules for Field Reports are going to change as each section comes on line. And how many of those might not be reliable. And whether there’s a plan for the audience response being significantly different in how they fit into the overall frame. Because that’s how something well designed ought to make me think.
• It’s very linear-led, which while usually is the first casualty of digital storytelling, here is maintained and that’s reassuring.

There are things I think are, or might be, problems with the overall plan, but it’s early days yet. And there’s a lot more to come.

For the last decade, Duncan Speakman has been developing a form for immersive narrative he calls the subtlemob – films without cameras, alternate worlds and poetic layers in the everyday. The antithesis of a flashmob, Speakman’s work asks participants to slow down, to take time out of their day and experience a fragment of participatory story, sometimes collectively, sometimes alone, mediated through sound, imagination and time.

Speakman’s early work included ‘sounds from above the ground’, commissioned by the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol. The walk mixed text, performance and live sound to create a site-responsive work that explored the relationship between sound and memory. Within a small group each participant followed a lone walker through the city streets, his internal monologue transmitted to their headphones. As the walk progressed, the transmitted noise of the city was remixed live around them.

From Speakman’s summary of the piece:
“In the performance the audience are given stereo wireless receivers and follow me through the city streets. I have a microphone on my chest and my backpack contains a laptop computer and stereo UHF audio transmitter. As we walk the audience listens through my ears as I speak memories and place marks in the city, while the laptop processes and remixes the surrounding ambience.”[1]

Drawing on technologically mediated displacement as a method by which to engage his ‘reader’, their walk through the city induced a sustained dislocation from the observed ‘real’ as mediated through sound.

The later subtlemob form asks participants to download a pre-recorded mp3 file to a personal player, which imparts instruction, voiceover and soundtrack simultaneously during the experience. Versions of his practice have included paired files, in order that half of the participating audience are observing the other, who in turn are ‘cued’ by the first set, and with ‘our broken voice’, a narrative about trust and suspicion in public spaces, a Ballardian fiction of events in an unnamed city, the audience play out the moments leading up to the event that triggers the experience.

Speakman’s work draws on conventional narrative devices – the narrator; first, second and third person perspective; plotted events and flashback – however doing so in a manner aligned to N Katherine Hayles’ materially specific design. Our relationship with sound as a principal medium alters the reader’s affective space, positioning them, as one participant expresses it, “within a novel that’s happening right now”.

[1] http://duncanspeakman.net/?p=162

Which brings me to PD Smith’s City.


A piece of design, from Bloomsbury, that is as near perfect in print as I’ve seen for some time. From the jacket through to the interior photography and how that’s used in terms of monoprints, double-page spreads, abstracts and to the use of additional, ancillary information within the design, it’s a lovely piece of work.

Which is crippled by eBook conversion. It simply can’t work, and in trying, really exposes a set of weaknesses that aren’t the fault of the book’s design team – although in transferring City to a digital text they are at least complicit in not considering the specific mechanisms and differences that operate within a digital reading environment – but rather are the fault of an industry selling conversion services as if that were the answer to everyone’s problems.

Baldur is much better on the many faults of the eBook ecosystem but first among them, for me, is the unchallenged assumption that replicating the book in a digital landscape is the principal game in town. We’re starting to see exceptions to that monolithic wrongness –Storycuts come to mind – but they’re rare and need nurturing.

I wish the team at Bloomsbury well – they’re eager for a better solution, for a digital and print ecosystem in which aping the features of one platform in another isn’t the sole solution, but a better solution is complicated and bound up in a shift away from the safety of a model of publishing that sees digital as another market, rather than another medium.

That’s got to change.

I agree. I could make this into a lecture about Marshall McLuhan and cars vs buggies, but you haven’t the time, and neither have I.

However, I am interested in making opportunities happen. Even if we have to give them a nudge every now and again.

I work for the University of the West of England. It’s in Bristol, we work with the very talented people at the Pervasive Media Studio (and the BBC and Aardman, and loads of others) and try to make opportunities happen. For example – this one. The REACT Hub has six pots of £50k to allocate to disruptive innovations in publishing. Go back to that link, the one that says ‘this one’ and download the call. Then come back here.

REACT isn’t the only game in town, nor is it the biggest source of disruptively innovative funding. But it is happening soon, and it’s interesting. With Baldur Bjarnason, I’m running (coincidentally, I hear you cry) a two-day sandpit in Bristol, on the 11^th and 12^th of July, to hammer out some interesting ideas. Some will be for REACT, some will be for other funding sources, some will just be interesting ideas. We’ve got some places left. Steven Hall (The Raw Shark Texts) is going to come along on the second day and help us play with ideas. We’re going to figure out what disruptive innovation might look like and we’re going to bid for some money. It’ll only cost you fifty quid, and that’s so we can pay the caterers.

Here’s the link to book – it would be great to have you along. Especially if you work in conventional publishing.

For Alistair Horne, and anyone who’s interested.

Sam Missingham posted on Futurebook this morning regarding male/female bias in publishing, and I responded by asking about the ex-Public School ratio in the same industry. Alistair Horne picked me up on this and asked about Oxbridge.

As I mentioned – I’m not trying to be chippy (if I say this one more time I’m going to get ‘doth protest’ tweets), but I’m interested in how the perspective within an industry (publishing, in this instance) is shaped by the educational training it’s constituent members received.

My reasons for this are many, and bear further inquiry, but the point Alistair and I started to discuss was regarding entry tariffs for university, and needs a little explanation.

There’s an assumption running through a number of institutions that adopting a higher tariff for students entering courses results in a better quality of graduate. That’s almost certainly true in rigorously academic programmes, but I don’t accept that it’s true in a creative environment. I’m obviously pleading special circumstances, but I can’t see the relationship between success at A-Level and success three years down the line in a Filmmaking and Creative Media degree. Or Illustration, or Graphics, or Fashion or Fine Art. Those subjects aren’t the basis of an A-Level (of course, early training and exposure to ideas helps – in many cases my decision on whether to accept an applicant is guided by their response to ‘what do you read?’ – if I can see potential in their portfolio, then they have a shoo-in, the clincher is often their ability and/or desire to expand their horizons), and as such I don’t buy the over-simplification that better A-Level results = better graduate. Especially when some of the basis for that is bound up in the calculation of League Table results being influenced by that self-same tariff. The Times and the Guardian base part of the League Table calculation on the tariff the Faculty sets.

You have to start somewhere (although in the case of League Tables it seems to me that starting anywhere is a bad idea and we should trust a student’s ability to do some basic research about their chosen institution), and maybe tariff is as good a starting point as any, but it seems reflective of cutting corners and not being able or having time to speak to applicants to determine their potential, and then work with them to achieve it. I’ve mentioned before that the courses I work on and run always interview applicants, and we’ve fought for the right to make a decision regardless of A-Level results.

It’s a battle, though, that I’m never entirely sure we’re going to go on winning.

The first chapter goes to the (potential) editor this week. Here’s an extract:

“Of course, it’s not quite appropriate to liken a multi-decade old medium to a toddler. A more appropriate analogy would be a teenager at a dance, trying to flirt for the first time, a person who is still rocketing through change trying their first tentative steps at what they see to be a grownup thing. The advent of tablet computers and the rise of ebooks has given us several choice examples, digital writing attempting to charm the pants off somebody and, for the first time, facing the terrifying possibility of succeeding.

The advances digital writing is making are on three fronts:

• Phone and tablet apps: native applications go the furthest in experimenting with tactics and methods that are unique to digital media.
• Websites: the most widespread form of digital, or neoteric, writing, also the one that is the most established and set as a genre.
• Ebooks: the form of digital writing that clings the hardest to the conventions, codes, and practices of print media, often going to extraordinary technical lengths to disable tropes means that are native to digital media.

Touchpress’ (supported by Faber and Faber) The Wasteland stands out amongst recent impositions of literary works to a digital environment. Taking Elliot’s 434 lines as it’s starting point, the iPad app deconstructs the experience of reading a linear poem, and re-presents the digital text as an exploration of meaning, significance and context by means of Ezra Pound’s annotations to Elliot’s draft, (etc). Strip away the technically mediated, affective layer of The Wasteland’s iPad instantiation and it is evident that the app is designed around the materially original (one might suggest scroll-like) format of the poem. The app does not simply remediate that form though; slavishly transferring its affordances to a new platform and intending the work to be read in an identical manner as its physical counterpart; it undergoes a process of transposition by which the material original is not copied, nor removed, rather its affordances as a ‘readable’ text are addressed within the transfer to a new formal environment. We are encouraged, as students of Elliot, to read The Wasteland with a book of annotations beside us. The app affords this. We are familiar with the nuance of the spoken word with regard to poetry; interpretation, emphasis, temporal specificity all impact in meaning; the app presents readings from 1933 (Elliot) through to contemporary performances (Fiona Shaw’s filmed performance) by way of Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and Viggo Mortensen. We approach Elliot’s work as acolytes, as scholars, a position the app enforces.

Flipboard is an app that aggregates various news items, blog posts, pictures, videos, etc., from all over the net. It’s both mass media – it has a curated set of news feeds you can read – and micro media, with its deep customisability. Being an aggregator is unique enough to digital media but Flipboard has taken a central role, not only in setting design trends but also because of the lead its lead designer, Craig Mod, has taken in online discourse on the nature of digital writing. It manages to take its inspiration from offline print affordances while still remaining uniquely digital. The folding pagination animation it uses refers to the act of turning a physical page but actually represents an act that is impossible in print, pages just don’t turn like that. No matter what you think about its nature as an aggregator and no matter what you think of the writings of its lead designer, the app itself represents a mature understanding on how digital can reuse print affordances without being a slave to them.

Visual Editions (a London-based boutique publisher of bespoke editions) venture into the book-App market has, to date, been an edition of Marc Saporta’s Composition No.1. Saporta’s original text – a boxed ‘novel’ printed on 150 unbound pages which asks the reader to shuffle and read in any order, deriving meaning from accidental juxtaposition and aleatory connection – is repurposed for a tablet platform in exactly the same format as the physical original. The reader lets pages skim past, only stopping to read when a finger is pressed upon the screen. The page rests as long as a connection is maintained, upon removal, the motion begins again and a new, randomly chosen page is revealed at the next intervention. Once a page has been read, it cannot (in that sequence) be re-read. The digital edition, curiously, is more successful than Saporta’s 1962 print experiment. The sensation induced by our inability to accurately control the next page we read is more pronounced than in the boxed edition. No-one who has ever shuffled a deck of cards can deny that control is always present to some degree. Magicians make careers of it. Within a digital instantiation of the same process, human intervention is reduced to a truly random moment, and there is no going back. Like The Wasteland before it though, Composition No.1 is built on a thorough and considered understanding of the material process of reading its physical forebear.

Robin Sloan’s recently published ‘digital essay’ Fish, though, is conceived as a digitally-native piece of work. Experienced as a hypertextually linear journey through deliberately short, typographically considered words, sentences and provocations, Sloan demands that we slow down, that we read each smartphone-sized page in of itself. There is no skimming, no skipping ahead or back, as we quickly realise the consequence of not paying sufficient attention is to miss something we won’t experience again (internally aware, the essay makes mention of Sloan’s, and the reader’s, habit of not returning to material on the internet more than once, unlike a favourite book or film).”

A quick, Friday morning response:

I certainly said that (and I’ve said as such before) and Baldur’s use of those words are nicely dovetailed into the McLuhan quote, which certainly shows he was paying close attention. Form invokes content; books are books, and apps are not books. TouchPress’ Wasteland, for example (it’s the piece I use most often to explain this to students and researchers) is not a book. It borrows/interprets a great many of the affordances of books, and conventional reading experiences (can’t think of a better phrase than interprets, sorry), but is not a book in the manner in which it is conceived and read.

I’m very interested in how reading behaviours operate across the two platforms, but to call interactive thingumabobs ‘books’ makes the same mistake that mired us in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation dead-end for fifteen years. In fact, that’s largely why I get a sense of disquiet about calling them books – that’s remediative, reductive thinking and it gets everyone nowhere. Take a look at what’s worked in recent months – Random House’s Story-cuts – short, lovely, well conceived incursions into a digital-led realm, that address the particular branding and design principles that are required to exploit the app store. It’s not remediation, it’s not transfer, it’s transposition, and that’s important.

The other example that shows why apps are not books? Visual Editions Composition no.1 Categorically not a book, and beautifully exploiting the interface, the user-experience and an improvement (not simply an enhancement) on the paper-original.

A quick, Friday morning response:

I certainly said that (and I’ve said as such before) and Baldur’s use of those words are nicely dovetailed into the McLuhan quote, which certainly shows he was paying close attention. Form invokes content; books are books, and apps are not books. TouchPress’ Wasteland, for example (it’s the piece I use most often to explain this to students and researchers) is not a book. It borrows/interprets a great many of the affordances of books, and conventional reading experiences (can’t think of a better phrase than interprets, sorry), but is not a book in the manner in which it is conceived and read.

I’m very interested in how reading behaviours operate across the two platforms, but to call interactive thingumabobs ‘books’ makes the same mistake that mired us in Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation dead-end for fifteen years. In fact, that’s largely why I get a sense of disquiet about calling them books – that’s remediative, reductive thinking and it gets everyone nowhere. Take a look at what’s worked in recent months – Random House’s Story-cuts – short, lovely, well conceived incursions into a digital-led realm, that address the particular branding and design principles that are required to exploit the app store. It’s not remediation, it’s not transfer, it’s transposition, and that’s important.

The other example that shows why apps are not books? Visual Editions Composition no.1 Categorically not a book, and beautifully exploiting the interface, the user-experience and an improvement (not simply an enhancement) on the paper-original.

I started to post some ideas in progress a week or so ago, tagged them on a tumblr blog and on twitter – some images, some text; just me trying to get the feel of the thing. Trying out the shape of it, how it sounded and how it might develop. That was then, and this is the start of the new year. I put a novel out in 2011, and learned a lot about what form means to content, and how the two interact as media change (and was delighted to hear Mark Kermode make my points about form and content in film for me a week ago) and how to, and how not to, bring an audience inside the text.

I put a few images up over the holiday, and some words, wrote some things that didn’t make it up online and took more photos than I used, and thought about what it felt like for a few days. And someone (thanks Julian) said they missed them when I stopped doing them.

So – here goes then:

One post a day (or as frequently as I can manage – the proviso is that I get to 365 by the end of 2012); image, text and something else. (Two characters. One’s a survivor, the other’s a victim.) Links from twitter and into a tumblr. Gathered here somehow (I’ll figure that bit out later on).

A continuing obsession with the form of a thing. With what form does to story, how story can be shaped within a simple set of rules. What those rules might do to the eventual shape of the story being told. Who, tells it, and how it is told. I suspect that the regular updates are going to force a shape, that the immediacy of writing day to day is going to rein in some of the extravagances I was guilty of last time out. It has to be a story too. Things have to happen, to be shaped and told.

A very public first draft.

An evolution of the notion of profundicity. The same techniques, the same site, but a different take on things. Those things still remain, but are reduced in significance.

Also, and this is a going forward thing but navigation is going to be important. Tags, and categories. Searchable stories. I’m bearing this in mind as the writing progresses. It’s possible that the searchable version isn’t written in the first draft, but exists somewhere from now, somewhere that looks much more Tinderboxy, for example (it has been suggested at least twice in the last 12 months, and therefore I’m paying attention).

It’s going to be about cities, as that’s the topic circling around my head this year. Cities, and story.

And, to work.

Which is to say, I’m not giving up on this. Especially, as if you’re reading it, it’s survived migration from one server to a new one, with all the functionality intact (thank you Damien, for seven years of excellent service).

I went to Ghent at the weekend. I made some spurious comments online about a book and soundtrack service and before I knew it Duncan Speakman had invited to me to come and put my money where my mouth was, story and sound-wise.

Now, going away to Europe isn’t something the mother of your eleven-week old baby normally welcomes, but Ghent is in Belgium, and the Belgians know how to make chocolate, so I had a covering reason/excuse/reason to live if I brought some back with me. Which I did.

Ghent was stunning. Like being in Bruges (pun intended) without the hitmen – a fairytale city centre (three cathedrals – photos below) and they know how to light a building at night. They also know how to make gin, and beer.

We wrote, Duncan and I. We wrote about families and loss and boats leaving Port-au-Prince in the darkness of a nineteenth century night and losing something precious on the Atlantic ocean. About what people think about when they are alone, when they walk through city streets ay night, and what the look on their faces might mean.

We threw stories away, and I learned about iteration (I knew about iteration before, but hadn’t been that ruthless for a long while) and new platforms and reminded myself how sound is a landscape and not a backdrop. We watched a very old episode of the Simpsons and read some John McGregor, we ate scrambled eggs (the finest in all of Europe, I am told) and drank beer sitting in the window of a bar too beautiful to believe.

And now I’m home, and my daughter has forgiven me for going away, I have brought chocolates back, and sometime soon, a little gothic horror story will get its first airing in Ghent. Once it’s been rewritten, recorded by professionals and generally taken beyond a first weekend draft that is.

An aside: I sat on the Eurostar at 11am on the morning of the 11th of November. I’d thought about that before I left the UK, but didn’t realise that was part of the story we told until it was written.