The Medium is the Message on the Web

Disclaimer: This post arose as a result of some half-baked thoughts & tweets on the train journey in to work today, partly inspired by a lot of thinking about social networking, also by Michael Smethurst’s excellent blog post which is basically the post to read for any self respecting developer or designer on the Web.

Two of the great success stories of recent years have been Facebook and Twitter. Now, no matter what you think of them now, whether you agree or disagree with where they are headed (I for one think that they’re both showing various signs of getting slightly too big for their boots, Twitter much less so than Facebook), it’s extremely interesting and important to investigate why they’ve been so successful. The simplest analysis to make is that they’ve succeeded because of some ill-defined ‘power of social networking’ or ‘social media’ or ‘user-generated content’. Whilst this is true, it’s a very cursory explanation, and often leads to the conclusion – well, we better put ‘social media’ features on our company’s website if we want to succeed/compete with the likes of Facebook & Twitter.

This isn’t a criticism of social networking in general, either. Rather, it’s a call for us to examine and understand why social networking has taken off so well on the Web.  Obviously, an important part of people’s affection or dislike of Facebook & Twitter is the content. Meaningless, useful, lighthearted, dangerous, and so on. I’d like to take the time to examine this phenomenon from the point of view of the theories of Marshall McCluhan.

I’ve gone on about his theories a fair amount before, but I do think there’s something useful to be gained by testing out his theories on contemporary culture. The theories may not be perfect, but they provide an interesting perspective on the success or otherwise of media, and, I’d argue, can inform the design and strategy of new things that can utilise the properties and effects of a medium to its full advantage. To put it simply, his theory that ‘the medium is the message’ means that what’s important when studying the effect of a particular media is not the content, but rather the form and characteristics of the medium itself. From what I’ve read, McCluhan had a pretty hard-line stance on the issue of content – that, essentially, any debate over whether a medium was ‘good or bad’ that focused solely on the content was ultimately useless. I’d temper this by saying that the content is important to some extent, but I’d certainly agree that of much more importance is an examination of the medium itself.

McCluhan was writing in the 1960s, and so was able to examine various forms of media, from the formation of language and written communication down to television, radio and cinema. I’ve been gathering his quotes as I’ve been reading his seminal work, Understanding Media, and what’s interesting is that much of what he says can be applied to the Web, providing an interesting angle for discussion and debate – something he was unable to take part in, in terms of the Web.

I won’t go into massive detail here, but I’d argue that when examining the Web as a medium in and of itself, we need to ignore the content and indeed, to some extent, the tech stack. What’s more important for me is the general conceptual form of the Web, by which I mean that it is a web. Dots and lines connected to each other. The dots can represent anything. The lines link dots together, but they also describe how and why the dots are linked.

So, if it’s important to study the medium rather the message, and Facebook & Twitter are the two services we’re going to use as case studies, why have they been so successful? Acknowledging but ignoring the actual content for now, let’s take a look at each service in turn. What we can see is that they both have taken advantage of characteristics of the Web in slightly different ways.

Facebook – Yes, they’re not great. They’re obtuse, follow the ‘walled garden’ pattern and are showing rampant signs of the misguided mentality of a ‘big’ successful company, namely, that they know best and everything should go through them. But think about it. Part of the big struggle the Linked Data and Semantic Web communities, myself included, have had to face in the past year or so, is the obsession with documents and pages. All too often when talking about the Web or designing new ‘products’ and services, we fall back into the metaphor of pages. “What does the page look like?”, “We need to promote this page” etc. But notice that we scoff at people who talk of ‘my Facebook page’ or indeed ‘my Twitter page’. That’s because Facebook have succeeded to some extent where we’re still struggling. The user mental model when engaging with Facebook, primarily through networking with friends, is not through linking and visiting pages. You don’t become a friend of a page, in the user’s mind. You’re not making links between pages in their minds. You’re connecting between people. You’re using the Web to represent (for the most part) the connections you make between people in the real wold – linking things, not pages. They’ve seamlessly converted users to thinking in terms of a Web of things, even if the technological background isn’t quite there. And thus, social networks are so successful precisely because they’re networks of things. And that’s what the Web allows us to do – which we should celebrate and make more of. There’s so much creativity we can unleash if we don’t limit ourselves to the restraints of pages, and think in terms of things.

Twitter – Now, obviously Twitter has similar characteristics to Facebook, when looking at a glance, even if the ‘friendship’ model is rather different – again, they’re making you think things, not pages. But there’s a couple of other things they do which use the Web as a medium. Firstly, as Michael puts it – “every nugget of content [is] addressable at a persistent URI…Every tweet, no matter how mindless or empty of content and meaning has it’s own URI.“. In other words, in this case the message hasn’t shaped the platform – the medium has. Of course, with domain driven design, the content should also shape the platform to some extent – design with the ‘world’ of content you’re aiming the platform to hold in mind – but with something like Twitter, the whole point is that you can talk about anything. Secondly, although this seems to be changing more and more (perhaps for the good, perhaps for the worse), Twitter has kept things simple. It hasn’t tried to do everything. Instead, it has a clear, simple structure, which, importantly, is open and addressable. There’s no fancy widgets or complicated APIs. There’s just simplicity, so that others can build on top of this. Who would those others be? Anyone, even Twitter themselves. but the important thing is that they not only use the medium in terms of URIs for each Tweet, but they don’t try to ‘own’ everything – others can build stuff on top of their data, and if it’s successful, everyone wins.

To be honest, these aren’t earth-shattering revelations, and indeed I’m sure I’m not an expert in any way on either of the services above – but just thinking about the Web in these terms is what I’m trying to encourage.

In conclusion, if you want to think about why Facebook & Twitter have been so successful, and you want to achieve such heady heights, you should at least consider the above factors. And remember, it’s not so simple as adding a Twitter stream to your company’s page, or having an account on there. Nor is it about Facebook widgets or a ‘fan page. Instead, look at what made them successful, They used the Web. Really used it. They concentrated on things, not pages – they had a domain model and an idea of their users’ mental model. They didn’t try to do everything themselves (at first, at least), and (at least one of them) kept things simple and open, so others could build upon it, and make things better for everyone. Most importantly, they took the time to think about how their service would work when stitched into the Web, and moreover, how it would work as a web itself. So think about how you can do the same too. Oh, and again, seriously, if you want to do any kind of Web design/development, read this first.

Tags: Facebook, fantasticlife, Marshall McCluhan, Social media, social networking, twitter, World Wide Web

This is the News

aka ‘Doing Fewer Things Better, The Problem with Infographics, and The Tyranny of Breaking News’

I’ve been meaning to write something about news for a long, long time. I’m not sure I’ll be saying much that hasn’t been said elsewhere, but hopefully it will act as a useful synthesis of the current debate, with a smidgen of my own thoughts on top.

Firstly, it’s widely said that the news industry is in trouble, or at the very least, going through massive disruption at the moment. And the finger of blame, more often than not, is pointed in the direction of the Web. No-one seems sure what to make of it, or indeed how best to use the Web for news. At times, it seems that in reality, things aren’t much different. Write your articles, and post them on the Internet. just like this blog. Which is where the first ‘battle’ seems to be – between traditional, professional journalists, and those who just write because they want to. Now, it must be said, that I’m absolutely not arguing that plain text writing, as it were, is in any way wrong, dying, or should be outlawed. Indeed, I’ll go on in this post to consider how we can best use the Web to experience news, advocating the importance of the Linked Data approach, just as I have for drama and sport in previous entries, but the fact will remain that this post will be first and foremost a textual essay. And that’s a good thing. But at the same time, it’s not the only thing, and moreover, given the potential of the new Web medium, we should at least be exploring and trying new things out, embracing the complexity and experimenting, rather than just being content with what we know and seems safe and simple. I’m not claiming I have the answers, but the willingness to explore, for me, is the key.

In a very similar vein to the content producers of television and radio, as I’ve explained in the past, journalism, in the main, treats the Web purely as a distribution mechanism, matching McCluhan’s hypothesis of old media confronted with the new. Frustratingly for me, and perhaps others, new platforms, rather than new media, are often lauded as the game changers. For instance, the iPad, and the current vogue for ‘apps’. I’m not disputing that these new forms offer simplicity and opportunities to experiment with presentation and user interaction, but more often than not, they tend to be blind to the massive opportunity for real, genuine, exciting change that the Web offers us. The whole debate around economic models for news on the Web is important, probably, but for me, again, it’s just background noise. It’s like we’ve discovered electricity, and instead of experimenting and investigating its properties, uses and opportunities, we’re sitting around debating how to bill people for their use of it.

More relevant, though, is the seemingly wasted opportunity of simply packaging up existing forms of news content into ‘apps’. As others, including Martin Belam, have pointed out, (here and here) this really is no different from the mid-nineties craze for CD-ROMs. Yes, it’s new, it’s simple, but beyond the immediate experience, does it really change things? Is it really something new? No. At the end of the day, it’s still just textual reports, or video clips, or images – and that’s a real shame. Again, ‘apps’ themselves aren’t inherently a bad thing. Something that packages up content and provides a coherent journey and experience around the Web is useful and should be encouraged – but it shouldn’t be just a surface level thing. The beauty of the Web is in the connections, in the way that it is free-form, the way that it has the potential to be an extension of our minds, freely linking between concepts with no artificial boundaries. If you’re reading something in the Times, you’ll be thinking about the subject of the article not just in the context of that report, or indeed in the boundaries of the Times, but as a general thing, linked in your mind to all sorts of related concepts.

A bit of history and hypothesis, then. News emerged as an industry dependent, really, on the format of the paper, on the medium of text and some images. On rolling TV and radio, of course, news reporting, as exemplified by Charlie Brooker, has not only expanded to fit the medium, but has almost become set in its patterns and ways. More worryingly, though, is the feeling that news currently inspires, across both paper, TV and radio media – dissatisfaction, bewilderment and despair. In the desperation to sell papers, to keep eyes and ears on channels, news outlets are forced to fill time, to fill space with whatever stories they can find (and/or make up!). And the emphasis is always on the breaking story, the immediate, the new, the now. I would argue that again, this isn’t inherently bad – people want to know things as soon as possible, often before others, so that they can then be the first to share it. But this constant barrage of ‘news’ is overwhelming and tends to lower the overall quality of journalism. Ironically, people like Nicholas Carr have been critiquing the Web for ruining attention and making people ‘surface skimmers’, but I’d argue that this is more the result of the pace and quantity of news through traditional means.

Indeed, the Web has the potential to be the exact opposite of this surface world. On the Web, there are no deadlines. There is no material constraint of having to fill the paper with whatever you can. And most importantly, there are no physical barriers to connecting ideas. If everything, potentially, is for the long term (and almost permanent), then there is simply no excuse to be focusing solely on the current, the present. I would argue that it’s completely the wrong model for the Web. Quite frankly, I find it incredible that there is no easy, official way for me to see news stories from any day except for today on the main news websites. Instead, I’m forced into Google searching for content. I’m looking for information about the news, why shouldn’t I be able to find it on the BBC, or on Sky, or any other news outlet. Why are old stories hidden away? There’s no need – and in fact, it’s completely illogical. More often than not, today’s current news is simply building on top of events that have previously happened. Events that will be referenced in the text of the ‘new’ article. And yet, unless a journalist has kindly provided a manually entered link back to a previous story, I’m forced to make the link back implicitly, in my mind. Yes, this made sense in the days of broadcasting, or of papers, where everything was ‘one-shot’ – you couldn’t get the past back, so you had to summarise in your ‘new’ content. But that’s simply not the case now. Perhaps the BBC news outlet shouldn’t try to cover every single story. Instead, perhaps it should pick and choose stories, and cover them in depth, with decent analysis that seeks to help people understand, not just to keep them up to date. Perhaps this is what is meant by doing fewer things, but doing them better. And perhaps it’s important to phrase it like that – not just as ‘doing fewer things better’ – the comma is of prime importance, else it seems we’re advocating doing fewer good things, and lots more bad things.

All this provides an interesting position for news outlets. They’re still trying to work out how best to position themselves on the Web. Yes, there’s the economic question. But paywall or no paywall, it’s really not a question of distribution. It’s a question of form. And whilst images, text and video are not dead, and are still useful, they are not going to solve any problems. My personal opinion here, of course, but if Sky’s position is to be first for the story, to be the arbiter of breaking news, that’s fine. That’s a useful service. But, I contend, it’s one based in the old world of news. It’ll still survive, but there’s an opportunity for others to provide something different, something that can truly revolutionise the news industry, whilst also sating the desire for understanding, the desire that is being so sorely underprovided in the current climate. People are crying out for understanding, for context. And the Web can offer this, not just in terms of lengthy ‘analysis’ articles and the domain of the personal blogger, but by using the building blocks of the Web itself – URIs and links.

Before I go into some examples of what this could turn out to be, I want to take a little time to talk about data visualisation and ‘infographics’. Again, it’s something which is currently in vogue, and very much the subject of debate. I think that infographics can be useful. They can reveal interesting patterns, and of course, look good. They can be, as the regular creators of infographics often acknowledge, misleading and dangerous – a form of propaganda. But again, this whole debate on the merits of infographics often (but, to be fair, not always) misses the point. Data gets collated, the infographic drawn. The graphic is provided as an image, and if you’re lucky, the data in a spreadsheet alongside it. Yes, sometimes it’s in a flash file where you can click on things. But most of the time it’s an image, which can be easily distributed by the Internet. To truly be using the Web, to be creating something new, however, we would need to be creating these graphics from the raw materials of the Web. It’s not going to be easy, at the moment, as the tools are only starting to emerge, and often the beauty of these visualisations are severely compromised. But more effort has to be put into it.

So, finally, a case study. As I write this, today is the hundredth day of the current Coalition government in the UK. There seems to have been plenty of reporting around this in the news. The significance of the hundred days, of course, is a reference back to the tenure of Franklin D Roosevelt in the USA, who used the first hundred days of his presidency to revolutionise American society by introducing economic reform and the New Deal. Not that you’d know from the current reporting. It looks to be just a random milestone chosen because of the niceness of the number.

More importantly, though, we need to consider why the first hundred days of a government is worth reporting on now. It’s precisely the kind of news content that the Web would be perfect at delivering – it’s a retrospective, a review, a summary of events. And what can I find if I turn to the BBC News website? Either a hundred second video (which plays without me asking it to – grr!) with clips of significant moments, or a long textual analysis. The video, especially, is frustrating. It’s offering me a whistlestop tour through time. And yet it’s not allowing me the opportunity to explore, to find out more, to discover. It’s just video. The text article doesn’t even have any real point by point summary of the hundred days. I want to know what the significant events were, why they were significant, and how they were reported at the time. But this isn’t provided. I can read, or I can watch. But I can’t explore. I must consume.

We can also use a related example to illustrate the frustration around infographics. This is a really nice infographic summarising and comparing the first hundred days of presidencies from FDR to Obama. We have nice colourful lines, an easy to use key to ‘types’ of event, and each event is summarised and dated. But it’s just an image. There’s dots, there’s lines, there’s text. Potentially, there could be sound and video. But it’s a flat file. There’s nothing I can click on. I have to consume. All the significance, all the message – it’s all implicit. It can’t be explored, it can’t be journeyed through. And this is where the Web can, and must be used to help.

I’m very much aware that I’ve been quite harsh in this post, and perhaps not providing examples of the solutions. I’m also aware that it’s a difficult time at the moment. In the overwhelming chase for the ‘new’, and with financial constraints, it’s often not regarded as possible to consider anything which doesn’t provide a simple, quick and easy solution. Perfectly understandable. But also perfectly misguided and wrong. Yes, in the current society, we need to make money to survive, and yes, experimentation often means failure and drains on resources. Yes, we should give the public what they want, and if they want more, faster, fresher, we can provide it. But that’s not the be all and end all, and simply can’t be. If we don’t explore, if we don’t try new things, then we’ll never progress. I believe that the lack of comprehension, of attention, of willingness to understand each other, ultimately stems from our preoccupation both with the ‘now’, and with the obsession with single narratives. The Web can allow us to break free from this. It can allow us to create and explore overviews, multi-faceted analyses of situations, which can be consumed in better ways than ploughing through a huge book or long documentary. It’s not the Web which is ruining our attention and/or critical faculties. It’s the lack of consideration, of experimentation, of effort to comprehend and acknowledge the complexities of the world – ones that can only truly be reflected by networks of concepts and ideas, not only in our minds, but on the Web. And it’s up to us to try.

Addendum: Other articles I didn’t get a chance to talk about in this post, but are well worth reading, and I may come back to, include Stijn Debrouwer’s ‘The Basic Unit of Information‘, Megan Garber’s ‘Following up on the need for follow up’, Philip Trippenbach’s ‘News: Rewired‘ and Silver Oliver’s blog.

Tags: infographics, linked data, media, news, web

The Mythology Engine

Finally, after months of writing, thinking and beavering away with the good folks of the BBC’s R&D Prototyping Team, we can reveal a prototype featuring many of the concepts I’ve been discussing here. Thanks must go to the great team there, who’ve helped turn these ideas into some form of reality. Now, I’ll be doing what I can to take things onto the next level, and get something fully built. I’ll blog more about the development process of the prototype and what it’s capable of, on the weekend, but until then, here’s the official BBC blog post: Mythology Engine on BBC Blogs

On Avatar, 3D, Augmented Reality and Truly Interactive Television

Happy New Year! Firstly, a little apology – I put a note at the top of my last blog post saying that I’d explain my use of the terms ‘Internet’ and ‘Web’ soon – I did in fact write a post – but somewhere along the line it never made it out into the wild world. So for that, sorry – but the gist of it was that perhaps I should have used the term ‘Internet’ to refer to the underlying infrastructure network, and the ‘Web’ to refer to the network of information that can be built on top of this.

And now on to the main topic for today. I’ve talked previously about how we could/should be using the Web to provide representations of the narratives we currently tell via radio and television. I said that whilst on-demand services such as iPlayer have had great success, and have certainly improved the consumption of media, they’re not really game-changers, in that they are an attempt to replicate the form of a linear medium within a non-linear medium. As such, although they benefit from the latent abilities of the Internet (speed, distribution, on-demand), they do not take full advantage of the Web. These are still TV or Radio ‘adaptions’ of stories, being distributed by the Internet. What we need is the ‘Web’ adaption of the same story.

I’ve been working over the past month or so on a prototype that will explore these possibilities. At first glance, it seems to be very similar to Wikipedia, in that there are pages for characters, places, events, and links between them. The audience can undertake similar journeys to that of a visitor to Wikipedia – i.e. non-linear, explorative journeys – things which people are already doing (for instance when they say they got ‘lost’ on Wikipedia – in a positive sense!). However, what is different is that these URIs, and the HTML representations of their subjects, are connected directly in the same way as the story itself is being told. Thus, a collection of these URIs, joined together through hyperlinks, can be seen as a small web, or constellation, representing the story itself – a Web adaption – which allows the audience to explore the story from all angles, and gain new perspectives.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking of how the mainstream user will benefit from all this. I think the effect will be fairly subtle at first, and I was imagining two ways of experiencing the story – firstly by hopping from URI to URI and being immersed in the ‘world’ of that thing, and secondly, by taking a step back and examining the web of connections between things, and travelling through this web along a particular path – the act of telling the story. The latter, I imagined, would be through the form of some fairly standard ‘dots and lines’ visualisation, but at the back of my mind, I wasn’t satisfied with this. Co-incidently, I then saw Avatar in 3D at the cinema. Personally, I felt pretty let down by the paucity of imagination shown in the storytelling, but I had to admit that the 3D effect was intriguing. Perhaps, rather than visualising the links through a limited, 2D ‘dots and lines’ diagram, the audience could gain a greater understanding by viewing the story’s Web in 3D, allowing them to see all sides of it.

This is still a possibility, though again I’m very aware of the lack of availability of devices and technologies in the consumer market which support 3D. That, of course, may change, but I wondered whether there were other ways of improving the experience. I was worried that without this, it would just seem, to the general audience, like a replication of Wikipedia (albeit containing information that neither Wikipedia nor fan-wikis hold in such a structured, clickable manner).

And then I considered the ideas of convergence and Augmented Reality – essentially reminding myself that the Internet and the Web, and our interaction with it, need not be restricted to the browser. The Web is, at its heart, merely the highly structured data store – on top of which we can build user interfaces across virtually any connected platform. So, I started to think about mobile and TV viewing. When I’m watching drama, or sport, or the news, I often want to know more – why something is important, what someone is referring to, more about a player, what’s the bigger picture etc. At present, the content is communicated to me via the screen, I interpret it, and then have to go off on my own search to find out more. When doing so, I have to begin again from scratch, communicating the same content (or a near approximation of it) with a computer connected to the Web. What if the content presented to me on screen also had the underlying semantic structures that meant it could do the communication with the Web?

The simplest form of this would be on a mobile device, where, whilst watching the programme (and indeed at any other time), you would navigate to a portal which can guide you to the correct URI contained within the narrative structure – this could take the form of a search engine, or a listing – that way, I could search for ‘Jack Bauer’ and be taken straight into the ‘world’ of 24 – or, more powerfully, if I witnessed an important event happening on screen, I could click the relevant link in the portal, and see other events that have led up to this, more information etc.

But there’s an even more advanced version of this, which I strongly believe could be prototyped and developed pretty quickly. There are technologies available which can take a drama script, and output RDF triples, creating Web structures which represent every element of the narrative, down to the words. These can also be enhanced by matching the triples to timing information within a media representation – so, for instance, identifying that an event happens at 20 minutes into this particular version of the episode, but 15 minutes into another version.

Couple this with the growing links between the consumption of media and the Internet – TV over IP, such as BT Vision, or even on-demand services such as iPlayer. The media is being streamed to the audience – but this is potentially a two way channel – and if we have all the information about the narrative structure and timings for the programme available on the web, then the user can access that wealth of information whilst they are watching – either directly onto the screen, or on a supplementary mobile device.

Just think of what this means for drama, for starters. The ‘flashback’ device in storytelling, essentially used to give the audience a reminder of previous events, so that they can greater enjoy the current story, no longer needs to be incorporated into the linear representation of the story – because as the story is produced, it is connected on the Web to all previous parts of the story. Thus, if the audience wishes to learn more about something, or get a reminder of previous events, they can access them. If you were watching a programme, you could pause it, or activate your mobile device – the playback device would know the timing information of the audience’s action, and could query the Web to find the relevant URIs of information, and present the knowledge found there, back to the user. For instance, if a reference was made on-screen to a past event, rather than the production team having to add in a flashback sequence, the audience could activate the communication at the point of reference, and be presented with the original clip of that event happening. Taken further, this then starts to really break down the linearly-imposed walls between ‘episodes’ of programmes – which are, of course, relics of the original linear nature of television – and instead presents the audience with something much more suited to their own mental models of the narrative they are consuming. In the end, it wouldn’t really matter what episode you were watching – you could be freely exploring the whole universe of narrative, surfing between clip and clip, consuming the story in the order you prefer. Obviously it’s not something you’d want to be doing constantly, but it brings the freedom of the Web to the self-imposed closed structure of the television – and opens up whole new ways of experiencing the stories we tell.

As I mentioned, these are only fresh ideas being formed as we speak, so I’m sure the solution isn’t completely straightforward, but it really does seem that all the various puzzle pieces exist, they just need to be brought together – and the potential could be huge.

Tags: Entertainment/Culture, Hypertext, semantic web, Technology/Internet, World Wide Web

The Fourth Medium

Stories as TV Programmes, by tristanf

It’s been a while since I last posted. Things are going well, and I’m glad that all this has come on leaps and bounds since this time last year. Hopefully, by this time next year, there will be something practical to show for all of it – stay tuned, and keep an eye here if you’re interested in the Ontomedia work.

I’ve been busy refining the ideas that I’ve discussed here, experimenting and talking to others about it. In the course of doing so, however, I’ve felt that there’s one major part of what I’m trying to put forward which doesn’t always get through. It’s something I touched upon in the last post, but I thought it might be good to expand and explore again here.

In the case of drama, the writer is the starting point for everything. Their ideas and the ways in which they are communicated through their writing are central to their craft. The story comes first, and then it is translated and adapted to suit a number of different media. There are, of course, three main types of media that I’m referring to – text, speech and (moving) pictures. This then roughly translates to the medium of print, radio and television respectively. The audience for the writer’s work is implicitly aware that they are experiencing the story through the filter that the medium overlays on the narrative. In the mind of the audience, then, they must decode the filter in order to get to the real ‘prize’ – the narrative, the context, the ideas being communicated.

This isn’t to say that the filtering effect of the medium (be it text, speech or pictures) is necessarily a negative influence. Careers and whole industries have been built on the ability of people who understand the natural tricks of the medium, and are able to utilize them to create an effective and compelling representation of the story. Equally, tricks of the trade can be noted and enjoyed by audiences who find comfort and satisfaction in familiar practices.

Of course, when constructing a narrative, the creator is likely to be aware of the conventions, limitations and advantages of the medium they have chosen to communicate through. This may indeed shape the narrative itself, but it remains true that you should be able to strip away the medium’s influence, in order to access the ‘pure’ story at the heart of the work. This can then be re-contextualised through a different medium – some of its beauty in the former medium may be lost, but a new perspective may reveal new highlights in the new medium.

OK, so far, so (fairly) obvious, if a little abstract. The point that i’m trying to make is that when you use a medium to construct a representation of a narrative, the medium plays an active role in the communication of that narrative to the audience. Or at least, it should do, if the medium in question is used to its full potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s examine the media that we’ve discussed. We’re all aware that print, radio and television (alongside film) have their own techniques, advantages, quirks. Writers, producers, technicians, artists, all use these quirks to make representations of a narrative in a way which is best suited to their chosen medium. That is to say, you have the book of Swallows and Amazons, the TV adaption, the radio version, even the film. Note also the language being used – adaption, “…brought vividly to life…” – each acknowledging the fact of the different media being used to tell the story.

However, then we come to the Web – and what do we find? It would appear that, from current use, we cannot call the Web a fourth medium. Instead, it is merely a distribution channel for the other three, akin to a TV set, a radio, or a bookshop or printing press. Not that this is a bad thing in and of itself – applying the technology of the Internet – of a network – in this way is pretty obviously a good thing, despite the legal ramifications – communication has never been so cheap and widely distributed. But earlier I said that representations of a creation through a medium involve some form of adaption, not just delivery.

The book, the TV, the radio, the film – these are all isolated, one-shot representations of a creation. They are produced, packaged, sold, distributed, consumed – in isolation. In order to remix, re-adapt, and so on, we either have to go directly back to the source, to the creator, and ask them to rework their creation, or we have to cut and paste, knowing that in doing so we are left with the pieces of the story still in situ of the media from which we took them – they cannot truly be extracted.

However, the Web is different – it has the potential to be the fourth medium, a networked, connected medium, thereby very different from the other three. Rather than sound effects, paragraph breaks or camera tricks, the Web has its own natural tricks and advantages – the network, the connections. These, of course, are the same connections that we all make when consuming narrative from the other three media – but rather than being isolated within us, the Web allows us to expose these connections, explore them, analyse and create new links, enabling us to enjoy narratives and stories in a way which is both natural to the Web, and, more importantly, natural to our minds.

Just as we take a story and adapt it for a book, for TV etc, so we should adapt stories for the Web. We should forget about scenes and chapters, and concentrate instead on the story itself – the events that take place. In this way, we can begin to construct entirely new adaptions and representations of stories. Only then can we say that we are using the Internet to its full potential, and only then will we have added a fourth medium to our repertoire of cultural and creative expression.

Tags: digital, media, Narrative, stories

The Web as a Creative Tool

Radio Daze, by Ian Hayhurst – creative commons license from Flickr

This year, the World Wide Web celebrates its’ 20 anniversary. I’ve been thinking about what use we’ve made of this technology during this time, and the way in which I like to think about how we could help fulfill the potential of the Semantic Web. As ever, thanks go to several people and bloggers out there whose ideas have inspired me, and the conversations I’ve had with them in general. Again, this may be stating the obvious to some people, but I feel it’s important to try and draw the threads of the patterns I’m seeing together in the hope that it will help others make the leap to looking at the potential of the WWW in a completely new way.

Up until recently, the Web has mainly been used as an enabling technology. By this, I mean that it has allowed us to do things faster, easier, cheaper, wider and for longer than ever before. However, these things that we’ve been doing with the Internet are, in the main, very much things that we were doing before the Web hit the mainstream. If anything, we’ve concentrated mainly on transposing these traditional methods of communication and interaction onto a new platform – and a platform is exactly what we’ve been using the Web for. Essentially doing the same as we’ve been doing before, but “now with added web!” as it were. On the way, we’ve (possibly accidentally) created concepts that didn’t exist before – for instance the whole notion of websites, but overall it’s been a case of doing the traditional things, using the web – and the benefits listed above have come as a kind of side-effect.

The industry in which I attempt to make a living – television and radio – is doing the same thing. The on-demand products from all the major UK broadcasters offer the benefits I’ve mentioned, but when it comes down to it, they are still just replicating traditional platforms – it’s all about using your device as a substitute for your radio or your TV. Yes, we get the extra benefits of stuff being available for longer, and potential personalisation, but we still haven’t fully escaped the mindset of using the Web purely as a platform – as if it was just a new type of box for watching or listening. It can be, but it can also be so much more.

The other way in which we have tended to use the Web has been as a commercial tool. I mean this in two ways. Firstly, again, it’s a case of imitating existing processes on the Internet – hence the success of retailers, such as Amazon and Play. However, I think that the main use has been the way in which the Web has been seen as vital to a commercial strategy – not just in terms of selling goods directly through the Internet, but in a promotional sense as well. If you want to be successful now, you need a promotional presence on the Web. Again, however, what role is the Web playing in this, apart from the side effects? Very little. We’re still promoting and distributing things, it just happens to be a new platform for doing so.

I think it’s especially interesting to note the dichotomy between the way in which we’ve transposed old methods of ‘doing’ onto the Web, whilst creating new ‘things’ which are ‘of’ the Web. But the crux of the matter is that we’ve never really (in a mainstream sense) tried to properly transfer the traditional ‘things’ which make up our world onto the Web, and then set about creating new ways of interacting with these things via the Web.

So that’s what we’ve done up until now. But what of the future?

In the mid-1990s, when CD-ROMs and the Web were beginning to puncture mainstream consciousness, the buzz-word was ‘interactive’. Yet I think this has always been a mis-nomer. The way we’ve used the web so far in terms of the creative arts still conforms to a flat structure. People create things, whether they be songs, pictures, television/radio programmes, even blog posts, post them on the Web, and that’s it. The thing that has been created is effectively fixed, static. Other people can create their own works as a result of these things, but again, it’s almost as if they perform the act of creation ‘offline’, and then only when it comes to ‘publishing’ does the thing go ‘online’.

The Web, as I understand it, is essentially very simple. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, it’s just dots and lines. The dots are the things we identify, and the lines are the links we make between them. So far, we’ve concentrated on using the dots to represent ‘pages’, and the ‘lines’ have been (mostly) simple navigational links, with little meaning invested within them. These dots and lines, though, could be used as a model for almost anything – they are, after all, the essence of communication, the construction of a narrative. What we should be doing, is using the Web in the same way we would write a book, or make a TV/radio programme.

By this, I mean that just as you pull together ideas, resources, things in the construction of a work, we would use the Web to do the same thing – except we’d be able to retain the links back to where the individual parts of the work came from, with less need for someone to do the hard work of analysis for us. For instance, knowing that a line in a TV show is a reference to a famous film from the 50s, knowing that an author is alluding to a Norse legend, knowing that a piece of music is sampling others, even knowing that a work of art was painted using oils or watercolours, or uses symbols which have distinct meanings – all this would be explicit and available to anyone, via the links – encouraging learning, truly ‘reading between the lines’, as it were. Indeed, then we could claim to use the word ‘interactive’ properly – because a work that is published by someone would no longer be a flat, finished structure – audiences would be able to explore it from all angles, trace links to other things, and, importantly, then create their own works by linking things together in a brand new way.

Of course, one of the main objections to the trend of making things available online is that we lose the context of things, the author loses the power. I think that I disagree here – that’s not a failing of the Web itself, it’s a failing of our limited use of it. If we were to use the Web in the way I’ve talked about, then authorship would be another valid link to make – and one that should always be traversable – credit would actually be easier to give, and would also hopefully, importantly begin to encourage a true breaking down of the walls between ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ – we would, and should be, enabling the audience to create entirely new things, using our things – that’s still a valid thing to do, as long as the credit is given, and the links between what one person has originally made, and someone else has remixed, are made.

As I mentioned towards the beginning of this post, it’s almost as if so far, we’ve done things the wrong way round – we’ve been so busy creating the new platforms and enablers that we’ve failed to see the true potential of them – and that can only really be achieved once we start migrating not the processes and devices (e.g. the process of shopping, the ability to watch TV etc.) but the things we create for those processes, onto the Web. Dots can be more than webpages, lines can be more than navigational links. Create the things (from which we may create exciting new things we haven’t even thought of yet…), then refine the processes that help us find, share and experience them.

Tags: digital revolution, future, linked data, media, semantic web, Technology/Internet

Narratives and the Semantic Web

Super Bowl Sunday Crystal Ball, by Circulating, from Flickr, Creative Commons license

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect – but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…timey-wimey…stuff.”

The websites that we create around the narratives we tell currently focus on the objects within those narratives, like the playing pieces in a set of toys. More often than not, these are hand-crafted, static pages about certain editorially defined objects. Although we can record the links between objects implicitly as things that the audience can travel along, we tend not to expose them as things that the audience can explore and see in context. This, however, is what we are really interested in when describing narratives or telling stories. We define the objects within the world of the narrative, and then describe the interactions and changes between the objects. The intriguing thing is not necessarily the objects themselves, but the ways in which they change, or otherwise. A truly engaging website would therefore allow the audience to explore the world of the narrative not only by navigating between the objects, but by exposing and analysing the links between them, in order to derive more satisfaction.

Outside of the web, when we focus on an object, our minds give it context, and naturally establish the links between relative objects. For instance, when on a train journey, if I look out the window, I can see that branch of that tree which is placed there. We are instantly aware of both the object and its context, the thing and its links. Do the same thing with a computer, and it could identify and create a URL for a branch of a tree, but this would exist in a vacuum. It is up to us to give it the context. Using the principles and technologies underlying the Semantic Web, however, we can start to embed the context, the links, the meaning, so that, when using the web, we do not have to define these things every time. Instead, we can concentrate on uncovering and analysing those links, so that we can derive greater understanding and enjoyment from them.

Currently, websites such as www.bbc.co.uk/programmes define the objects, their contexts and links in a semantic web fashion, so that we can uniquely identify a particular object. Essentially, it provides the building blocks upon which we can establish the type of website I hae described above. Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, these building blocks are the limits of what we can currently, reliably, achieve. Emerging technologies such as SPARQL and RDF/graph visualisations will help us to build upon these blocks, but I do not think we currently have an established, reliable ‘toolkit’ or process that we can use to do this. However, this does not mean it cannot be done – it needs further experimentation. In the meantime, we can set about ensuring that the websites we build now will allow us to achieve the ideas mentioned above.

In the context of the BBC, there are two areas in which I can imagine the benefits of such an approach. The first, I will only give a overview of, as I have only thought briefly about the possibilities. The other, regarding fictional narrative, has been the focus of my previous blog posts, and I will continue the discussion here.

The first area is sport, particularly football. The BBC Football website contains a wealth of information, covering what is, in effect, the (almost) closed-off world of football. Fans essentially are following a narrative which spans matches, clubs, leagues, seasons, cup competitions etc. There is, obviously, some organisation taking place on the website – organising the clubs into their leagues, for instance. However, the links between these things – and here I mean not just the clubs, but the players, the action – are rarely revealed. We know that a team is relegated from a division because on one day their page exists within the ‘Premier League’ section, whereas the next, they are in the ‘Championship’ section. Their history may be recorded on the team’s page, or preserved in the numbers of a league table for a particular season, but there is no way of effectively (and, most importantly, engagingly) charting their fortunes. Of course, we can present these things in the numbers and bar charts and graphs, but they do not take advantage of the existence of the narrative behind them – which is really what people are interested in. Similarly with players. When two players go in for a tackle, we know that they have a history of confrontation, or perhaps an embarrasing own goal incident – what if we could provide the context around that tackle as and when, and after, it happens – filling in the back story, and getting the audience excited and engaged.

Similarly, by identifying and putting objects and events in context, we can give the audience something to latch on to. Take, for instance, a penalty incident. Say that the match was being covered on 5 Live with a commentary, it was shown and discussed on Match of the Day by pundits, and then also talked about on forums and 606 by fans. If we had an identifiable ‘hook’ for the incident, then potentially we could build a page which brought together all these different interpretations and discussions of the same event. That way, the audience would have an effective overview of the incident, with informed (and perhaps ill-informed!) opinions – their understanding and enjoyment would be enhanced, and of course, they could make their own contribution.

Back to the fiction – in my last post, I linked to a couple of images within which, I tried to explain what I aim to achieve, and where the benefits could be found. The first diagram establishes the episodes as a whole, regardless of series – and then drills down to a particular series, and a particular episode. A website that deals with a fictional narrative needs to remember that the episodes are merely a window onto the universe for the audience. If we intend to allow the audience to fully explore the universe, then apart from pointers leading them from/to episodes, as a form of ‘way-in’ (which, incidentally, should probably be through /programmes) the episodes themselves should (probably) not be included – all that exists are the objects (the places, the times, the characters) and the events.

The first diagram, once an episode has been specified, identifies the characters and events within the episode that are crucial to the narrative. For this, I limited myself to a handful of events and characters, which meant that I did not fully get the richness of the narrative across. However, potentially, we could identify as many events etc. as we require. Below the timeline of events (as presented to the viewer) there are coloured blobs, representing the characters in the events. This view shows us how the characters come and go throughout the episode (for instance, the Doctor only really appearing at certain points in the beginning, middle and end).

The second diagram gets closer to the value of this kind of site. Here, we see that the way in which each character experiences the events of the episode is quite different. This is crucial both to the plot and to the audience’s understanding and enjoyment of the episode. If, for instance, you wondered exactly how things tied together, then exploring this kind of site would allow you to piece together the parts of the puzzle. Perhaps on each character’s page, we would show their timeline, and how things happened to them. From the Doctor’s perspective, for instance, the event at the end of the episode is the first thing that happens to him – and the last from Sally’s point of view. Also, by showing these different timelines in the context of each other, we see the intricate way in which Steven Moffat (the writer) is able to weave the story together – giving the audience a greater appreciation of the story as a whole.

Obviously, Blink (so far) is an atypical episode of Doctor Who. By and large, the stories do not tend to concern themselves with the ‘timey-wimey’ stuff. However, over the course of a series, or indeed several series, characters, events etc re-appear – for instance the ‘Bad Wolf’ motif – the reason that the cliffhanger to ‘Turn Left’ works so well, is because it draws together elements of continuity established throughout several series. The audience gets maximum enjoyment out of such a moment because they are aware of the links and the context.

So what of the original series, whereby both ‘timey-wimey’ stuff and ‘story-arcs’ were at a minimum? Well, there are still instances of recurring themes, but overall, stories are self contained. That’s fine – they could be slotted into this kind of website just like everything else, because it essentially gives us a great pool of narrative to draw upon – if and when needed. Crucially, though, they represent a pool of ideas that future writers can draw upon if they wish. Continuity should not restrict the writing of future stories – the previous stories merely open out the fictional universe, creating more richness for authors. As such, when feeding the ‘classic’ stories into the website, the site becomes a form of ‘official’ wiki. Users can and should be encouraged to contribute, as a form of writing their own stories, but a distinction can be drawn between the events depicted on screen (it is, after all, and should not be forgotten, a television show..) and those where people ‘fill in the gaps’. The series itself has touched upon this, with the idea of certain events being ‘fixed points’ and others being ‘in flux’. As long as the narrative is not disrupted (i.e. breaks down so that it no longer makes sense to the audience) or becomes to insular (i.e. relying too heavily on continuity, so that new audiences are driven away), then continuity can enhance the fictional narrative universe as a whole.

Finally, a new diagram which, on a very basic level, tries to illustrate the idea that the website could be explored and presented through the model of, as quoted above, “a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…timey-wimey…stuff.” The diagram is quite obviously incomplete, but the idea is that the objects and the links between them are visualised, and the audience can then choose to look at a particular object, and see how it ties in to everything else – seeing both the object and its changing context and perspectives at the same time.

Phew. That’s enough for now. Till next time…

Tags: bbc, doctor who, Football, RDF, semantic web

Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey

No time for a large post, I’ll update soon. However, here’s a couple of links to my first attempt at explaining the navigation around what I’m trying to do…

Feel free to comment etc!

Canon Flux

Blue Box – by Brainless Angel, Creative Commons, via Flickr

Well, that’s been an interesting couple of weeks. I’ve made progress on both the RDF/Ontology and the Ruby/Rails front – although one much more significantly than the other. We’ll deal with both in a moment, but first a few encouraging signs.

Thanks, as ever, to those who have commented on my posts so far – some interesting questions have been posed, of which I’ll get onto later, and ideas have been discussed. One thing that has encouraged me a great deal has been this article by Tom Scott and Michael Smethurst on coherence at bbc.co.uk – most of which I’m familiar with from work, but the references to non-linear narratives, the BBC as a story-telling organisation, and how to adapt that for the web, are of particular interest and encouragement, because narrative and story-telling is at the heart of what I’m trying to achieve. Michael also wrote this article over at the Radio Labs blog, which is gathering plenty of praise (not least from Tim Berners-Lee himself!) – from my perspective, it’s given me a useful focus on the steps I’d need to take to move these ideas from blog posts to a working prototype, and hopefully beyond.

So, how have I been getting on with a) developing a front-end website for exploration and administration of a fictional universe (by administration, I mean the creation of new elements in the ‘toy-box’ and the links between them), and b) an ontology (and accompanying RDF examples) to describe the narrative content of episodes?

Ruby/Rails – A Web Front End

One half of this project has always been focused on providing a front end application/web site. One in which users (I won’t limit or define *who* they might be at the moment) could navigate and explore a fictional universe, in a wider, more open format than the current focus strictly on the episodes. A suggested approach to the project as a whole has been to create the web app first, use that to produce and store the data in a MySQL (or similar) database, and then expose the data as RDF etc. Unfortunately, my lack of technical expertise has severely hindered my progress on this front. Over a week and a half has been spent on just getting Ruby/Rails up and running properly, and learning the basics (for which, thanks must go to Anthony Green and Craig Webster in particular for being patient and offering help whenever possible). Although it’s still a strand which I think is important, and would like to develop, I’ve been worried that concentrating solely on the Ruby/Rails side is taking me away from the semantic web/linked data roots of the idea, which I’d prefer to get sorted out first. I’ve also realised that before I can really begin to develop the front end properly, I need to know the scope and domain model inside out. Both of these I had a fair idea of, but the domain model in particular was very much a work in progress – and so I felt there was less value in developing the application until I had it sorted out. Note my use of the past tense to describe the domain model – which leads us nicely on to…

OntoMedia – An Ontology for Describing the Narrative Content of Media

This is a story of serendipity (which reminds me, of course, of the Jon Pertwee story ‘The Green Death‘, aka ‘The One with the Giant Maggots’, in which the concept of serendipity plays an important role – anyway, where was I?). I’ve already described in detail my frustrations previously with the tantalising prospect of the SUDS ontology – something which several people have helpfully mentioned as a good starting place, but for which an actual ontology specification has been lacking. I’m still pursuing the SUDS material, thanks to Kim in the comments, but I’ve managed to get my hands on an ontology which might just be what I need – OntoMedia. A chance meeting with Mike Jewell at the last OpenSoho (see, networking can be useful) led to a discussion of this project – and it turns out that whilst at the University of Southampton, Mike and Faith Lawrence (amongst others) developed an ontology called OntoMedia for doing just as described in the heading. It has its’ roots in an exploration of online fan fiction, and is extremely detailed and flexible. The fan fiction roots also mean that it has been designed with geeky subjects like Doctor Who in mind, which is a bonus. However, being so detailed and tailored to the fan fiction roots means that, speaking personally, it sometimes focuses a little too much on fantasy genre elements (detailed descriptions of clans, bonds, blood oaths, woods and coppices etc), whilst seemly lacking a couple of minor basics (although I’m still getting to grips with it, so it’s possible that I’m just missing the obvious bits…!). But that’s not to knock it at all – it’s a highly accomplished piece of work, and allows all kinds of narratives to be described. Since our initial meeting, I’ve been discussing the possibility of developing and improving the onotology – I truly believe that with a little more work, it brings me a huge step closer to my goal, and could end up being widely used throughout the BBC. To be honest, I’m just surprised that no one else had picked up on its’ potential yet.

I think I’ll leave a detailed description of how to go about implementing stuff in OntoMedia for another blog post, but what I can do is give you a flavour of the basic principles. Essentially you establish the existence of (at least) two universes – reality, and the fictional universe. Within the fictional universe you establish a timeline, your characters, locations etc, and link your characters to defined actors in the ‘real world’. Here, we can deal with characters and elements which are of dubious or multiple origins – we can deine essentially concepts that are shared between media, and their provenance as part of a universe (or context). I’ve also then defined episodes as being things existing in the real world, with their own timelines – the episodes are then linked into the bbc.co.uk/programme equivalents. Finally, you establish events which can occur in multiple timelines (and in different orders within those timelines). That’s the principle, at least. For me, it all harks back quite nicely to that ‘toy-box’ analogy. You set the scene, choose your characters, then tell the story. It’s also important to bear in mind that we’re not trying to restrict creativity and lay down the law for what happened and when – to use the analogy from within Doctor Who, some things are fixed points in time (i.e. the stuff shown on screen), others are in flux.

As for my progress so far, I’ve been helped by Yves Raimond in particular for reminding me of the benefits of writing n3 triples, Patrick Sinclair and Nicholas Humphrey for other guidance. I’ve been working to two case studies. The first is to eventually show the benefits of linking characters and events across several episodes – for this, I’ve defined the scope as the 2005 series of Doctor Who (including The Christmas Invasion), with the intention to show the Bad Wolf arc (I can then extend this to cover the second, third and fourth series). The results of which can be seen here and here. (You’ll need an RDF extension like Tabulator for Firefox to navigate the links properly).

The second case study is designed to highlight the benefits of exploring events in the fictional universe and comparing them with the order in which they occur within a given episode – so that the skill with which the writer has constructed the story can be fully appreciated, and the enjoyment of the story can be increased. For this case study, I’ve chosen to concentrate on the award winning story from the 2007 series, ‘Blink‘ – famous for its use of multiple, interconnected timelines – very ‘timey-wimey’, as they say. Results so far, which just set up the timeline, the episode, the characters, actors and locations, can be found here.

Events and occurrences are, by their nature, a little more complex, and I’m currently trying to get my head around how best to represent them – the OntoMedia ontology allows extremely detailed representations of the data, but I’m trying to stick to simple representations for the moment – the achievement of which is my current challenge.

The ontology allows, essentially, the description of any narrative. Which leads me to a potential further case study. Obviously for the moment I’ve been concentrating on fictional universes – but this could easily apply to the real world. Could this be a way to describe events and blend the semantic web into other areas of the BBC’s output in an easier and more subtle way? For instance, coverage of a football match – again, define the teams, the players, the timeline of the match and the various events. Then, again, we would have permanent, stable URIs for each team, player, event – I think the possibilities and potential are huge.

Finally, in terms of my overall approach – my current thinking is to continue with writing the RDF, then load it into a triple store. An application would then be written to allow the querying of data in the triple store, and its representation in a well designed, user facing front end. If there are standard patterns in the RDF for creating characters, events etc using Ontomedia, then ideally the application would take these recipies and allow the user to input the data without having to interact directly with writing RDF.

So there we are – a great deal of progress – not all the way there, but a huge step forward – although the phrase ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’ does come to mind… Once I’ve worked ou how to represent events and occurrences, the triple store will be next, then the Ruby/Rails application, and then some design magic. Wish me luck!

Tags: British Broadcasting Corporation, doctor who, online fan fiction, RDF, semantic web, semantic web/linked data roots

Tuning Fork

Tuning Fork, by Toby Esterhase, via Flickr – Creative Commons

Part three of my investigation into fictional content modelling. See the previous two posts for the background to the project. Thanks to those who’ve been discussing the ideas – I think it’s coming along nicely. I’ve been playing around with writing some RDF, trying to link up various ontologies, and explaining what I’m trying to do as I go along. Here’s a plain text file of quasi-RDF within comments – see what you think…(UPDATE: Now here in beautiful RDF format )

One thing that has come up in the discussions, though, is that there’s perhaps two elements to what I’m trying to achieve. The first is to link existing ontologies and, if needed, build a new one, to help describe the narrative content of ‘stories’ within the context of television and radio programmes. The second is to experiment (and for me to learn) with existing ontologies, again, linking them up, to build dynamic and interesting webpages that work on linked data principles.

So I’m interested in the ontology *and* what kind of cool stuff we could build on top of it (which includes ideas around remixing narrative, and audience story-telling). I haven’t got any definite plans on top of that at the moment, but I think the key is to see where it takes us. Well, I have an image in my mind of the types of things we could do, but again, it will be easier to describe them by prototypes. Something that might help is if I was to link to this diagram, from the aforementioned Tristan Ferne’s Radio Labs blog, describing similar things to do with the Archers – except linking that up with linked data/ontology work…

Which would lead to something like the diagram below. Again, it isn’t a complete set of what I want to do, but it shows the types of objects we’re talking about, the relationships between them, and where they link to ontologies:

Contextual Data Model

Actors – Using FOAF, with possible extensions, this would be a URL for each actor who appears in a BBC show. This page could pull in a biography from WIkipedia, for instance, but mainly it will show the audience all the programmes that the actor has appeared in. Linking Actors to Characters, all the way through to Episodes, would allow us to auto-generate the cast lists for the /programmes episode pages. However, one problem in an early implementation might be that if we only record ‘significant’ events within an episode, the cast lists won’t represent everyone – but over time, this could be improved (the rest of the cast could possibly be listed manually against the episode, greyed-out, until they have their own URL).

Portrayal – This would allow an Actor to play many Characters, and a Character to be played by many Actors. Here I’m thinking more of ‘flashback’ scenes where you see a character as a child, but as Tom pointed out in the comments, this could be used to handle the different actors playing the Doctor. BUt how then would you deal with the different ‘characterisations’ of the same character?

This is where the recursive relationship around ‘Character’ comes in – I haven’t worked out exactly what to call this yet, but it would allow both the foaf:knows relationship, and potentially use the owl:sameAs to link different Doctors? (Perhaps not – but something along those lines).

Again, a many-to-many resolver is needed between Characters and Events, which I’ve called ‘Action’ – I’m not sure whether these many-to-many objects would need to be made explicit and have their own URLs, but the main objects certainly would, as they could have useful pages for the audience to explore.

Events would be pages that would describe a significant event in the episode, something that would be worth describing, for instance an event which is part of a wider story arc – we would then need a URL to link these together, so you could say that ‘Someone points out that Donna has something on her back’ is part of the ‘Donna/Time-Beetle’ story arc (apologies for the random example!). This is, though, where the main value of the project would be for the audience. BY giving an event a URL, the user could trace storylines throughout the episodes, outside of the confines of the episode structure – making the fictional universe more cohesive, rather than restricting our view to the episodes, which are like ‘windows’ onto the fictional universe.

Similarly, if a user then wanted to write a story featuring some of the characters, they could refer to the character’s URL (which would then allow us to have something on the character’s page to say ‘others have written stories using this character’ – linking out  onto the web, and promoting new writers and stories. The users could equally refer to events, perhaps building events into their owns stories, taking them as cues for new stories etc. Again, it all fits in with the idea of giving our audience the tools to be creative, whilst using the advantages of the BBC website’s exposure to promote audience creativity.

There’s one many-to-many resolver which I’m not sure about at the moment – between Events and Episodes – what if the same event was  shown, or even just referred to, in more than one episode? We would need some way of defining this – but I’m not sure of the correct term for it yet, hence the ‘???’ object.

So – events could be described using the Event Ontology. Actors and Characters would use the FOAF ontology. Episodes would use the Programmes Ontology. We therefore just need a way of tying them together, and then once we have some examples, it would be good to start thinking about what new things we might need from a new ontology.

On the subject raised in the comments about expressing a person in FOAF as  fictional or real – I’d side withi Tom in saying that it would be  better to label the individual people as fictional, so that it was explicit which FOAF people were characters or not – and then you’d also have the issue of characters being used to represent, for instance, historical figures such as Charles DIckens…

Anyway, that’s enough for this entry. I hope I’ve got a little further in both clarifying the two strands of the idea, and exploring the breadth and potential of it. Comments, discussion, etc. encouraged! I’m hoping to present the idea in a meeting this coming Tuesday as a possible 10% time project, so I will keep you posted…

Tags: bbc, doctor who, FOAF, RDF, semantic web, storytelling