booktwo.org

Adobe have just launched a fascinating project called Knowhow which allows user-generation of help data in CS3. Items in knowhow’s del.icio.us network with contextual CS3 terms appear as tooltips in CS3 itself (image and link via swissmiss).

Flickr and many other services uses simple tagging to provide metadata around their content, but this system offers much more: additional content, outside the original system, curated by users, adding information back into the system.

I’d love to see a system like this for books. I search google and wikipedia all the time for additional information on things I discover between paper pages - imagine if this information could be aggregated and linked back to the original book, just like Adobe’s system. Googling dementia praecox from p. 31 of Eric Stanley Gardner’s The case of the rolling bones takes me to Wikipedia’s definition and further background reading on ataxia. Tagging these pages in del.icio.us or similar with not only information about them (ataxia, mentalillness) but why I arrrived at them (literaryreference, ericstanleygardner, perrymason, thecaseoftherollingbones) creates a network of metadata around the book which could be accessed by an ereader - or cross-referenced with other texts to create indexes of mental illness references in literature, medical references in crime novels, and so on.

The joy of this system is that it does not rely on the publisher and the reader agreeing on what’s important information in the book - publishers can still create indexes and concordances to their work, but readers can create and share their own indexes - so a mental health practitioners’ index to Perry Mason would contain differently weighted information to a policeman’s, for example. As with many of these ideas, non-fiction books would probably benefit from this much more than novels - can you imagine a cookbook where you got access to other readers’ researches as well as the authors and your own? - but I like to put fiction through these things too…

A short story for you, in a different form.

I’m not entirely sold on QR codes, but I like the interaction that they create, a physical bartering with the environment to obtain the message - providing people are willing to do so. There’s also the element of surprise inherent in uncovering the message.

I’d like to see one on a book cover, or chalked on a wall. I might print this one out and paste it around town…

[ No idea what’s going on? Here you go. ]

[ More info on the story. ]

An update on some of the locative stuff I’ve been talking about…

I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) - which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor PHP skills. What I did learn was how fun technology on your own terms is; just as we’re moving past the stage of being passive consumers of TV and other media, so we’re taking control of technology at it’s most base level too. But I digress…

In my research, I’ve discovered I’ve been partially beaten to the punch by more professional services. CrowdScapes uses Yahoo’s ZoneTag service to pull in Flickr photos near your location - at the moment it’s limited to Nokia N-series phones in the US, but you can get a taste by hitting “Launch” and entering your location here. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick from mscapers pointed me towards the fascinating stuff that Hewlett Packard are doing with a bunch of UK artists, mostly centred around their research centre in Bristol, from fun locative games like Hidden Danger UXB! which can be played anywhere (providing you’ve got a GPS-enabled HP tablet - anyone?), ‘playable’ guides to specific locations (e.g. The Tower of London), to more meditative experiences like always something somewhere else.

‘always something somewhere else’ is a generative mediascape that creates a temporary map in a location as the user is asked to seek out certain base materials such as glass, stone, and water. As they reach each material they hear the beginning of a fictional narrative about another person in a far off location standing next to the same material. As the map is created the user can return to the points they marked to hear the stories fold in on themselves and conclude.

The associations with storytelling here remind me strongly of earlier, less-tech’d-up locative artworks, particularly the operatic climate-change tour And While London Burns, and Janet Cardiff’s awesome The Missing Voice (which I believe is still available on request from the Whitechapel Gallery, but I’ll double-check). Story-telling is incredibly well-suited to this medium - does anyone have any other examples of such experiments?

For myself, I’m going to keep hacking away - I think I missed a trick not getting a Bluetooth GPS to work with my phone, so that might be the next step. I’m particularly interested in what geocached information we can hack out of Google Book Search:

Literature is inescapably intertwined with our everyday environment. By making this visible, we can encourage and spread it, and send it in new and exciting directions.

A little late for your Christmas presents, but ‘vE-”jA: Art + technology of Live Audio/Video’ is a book about the global VJ scene: creating and producing live audiovisual mixes. The standard edition of the book comes with a DVD containing hundreds of images and video clips by artists featured in the book (the accompanying and slightly confusingly side-scrolling website also contains a wealth of links to these artists, for happy holiday time-wasting).

What makes this interesting is that a special edition of the book will be, in the editor Xárene Eskander’s words, a wireless interactive touch version. Using Touchsmart technology, readers trigger images, videos and sound on the DVD by touching icons in the book itself, the aim being to tie the experience of reading the book to the concept of VJing itself.

Astute readers will remember the blueBook project we covered back in November, which used bluetooth to connect to a PC. Touchsmart appears to work with a variety of platforms including TV and mobile devices, and goes further in describing a “touch user interface” or TUI. It describes itself as an educational application, but as can be seen in the ‘vE-”jA project, it is capable of more advanced interaction than learning and testing.