Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Last week I did an experiment with a linear story and loading photos from Flickr. This week I made a second experiment using the same code and adding a map. I will try to tell a second story.

About the story
This story is about how fast urban areas are growing. These growing areas aren’t in the west. Of the 100 fastest growing urban areas only two are located in what we call the western world.

In an era where our lives get globally connected through similar culture, mass production and consumption these emerging areas will play a very important role in the near feature.

I’ll try to tell this in a short linear story with the latest photos loaded from Flickr and a map that shows the lights of the world. I love that map.

Try it yourself http://www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrcities/

“UN figures for urbanisation, published this week in the State of the World 2007 report, show that more than 60 million people - roughly the population of the UK - are added to the planet’s cities and suburbs each year, mostly in low-income urban settlements in developing countries. Unplanned urbanisation is taking a huge toll on human health and the quality of the environment, contributing to social, ecological, and economic instability in many countries.”

Guardian January 17th 2007

Difficult
The most difficult part in making this animation is to actually tell a complex story in slides. I want to make something that will make you think about things for a while. The previous Flickr project was easy because you didn’t have to pay much attention. It was a collection of things. This one is more a story making it more difficult to make an impression.

Storytelling tips
The most important thing in interactive storytelling is probably to kill your darlings and only use effects, technology and interactivity if you think it will benefit to the story you want to tell.

Make sure to write out what you want to say. It doesn’t have to be final, but it gives you an idea of what you want to do.

Focus on what you want to say. Focus on the impression your story will have.

All data used in the animation is from this list. Hypernarrative won’t be updated until the first week of March.

Share your best tips and tricks to tell an interactive story? How can I make this better?

Today I experimented with the Flicrk API. An API is an external programmable interface that connects to a database, it allows external developers to access the content in the database. In this case I can access the photos on Flickr by using a free license (API-key).

2.269.526.982 photos
Everyday millions of photos are uploaded to Flickr. While writing this post 4.871 pictures are uploaded every minute and the total of photos uploaded to Flickr is 2.269.526.982. Most of these photos are tagged with meta information, like a title, description, user generated tags and device generated (shutter speed, type of camera, coordinates). That’s a lot of information.

Slideshow experiment
For this first experiment I use thirteen slides to tell something general about myself. Every slide loads the most recent images from the Flickr database based on a tag that corresponds to the slide.

The slideshow plays by itself and has no interaction, it’s linear, but not static. Every time you play the slideshow the content can be different, the story won’t.

www.wilbertbaan.nl/flickrapi/

How would you combine live data feeds with storytelling?

What are you doing? Is the simple question twitter asks you

In July 2007 Edward Mischaud (at that time student Politics and Communication) asked me - and other random selected users - a few questions about how we use Twitter. His goal was to find out if Twitter users actually answer to one thing Twitter asks ‘What are you doing?‘.

65% of his focus group didn’t answer this question. What they did write about is in the graphic below.

These findings correlate with the theoretical foundation presented which is based on the understanding that technologies are not neutral objects that operate apart from society’s influence. Technologies are flexible devices. People often extract different meanings and uses out of a technology – applications that are not always factored into its design. In some instances, however, inventors, or shapers, of technology can themselves determine how a technology is to be used and therefore limit and restrict its ‘interpretative flexibility’.

Download the MSc dissertation by Edward Mischaud *.pdf

What are you doing?
I think the question itself is very important for Twitter. It’s the step that makes it easy to join the conversation. You don’t know what to do, just answer what you’re doing.

With this you start the storytelling. Eventually you start connecting with friends or try to start a discussion. You see people talk about other people and start following them or they start following you. This is how your network grows.

Twitter probably wouldn’t be equally successful without this question. With a simple and personal question that everyone in the world can answer Twitter really lowered the barrier to join the application.

Twitter is more a network than an application. If you ask around you will notice that most people are using different interfaces on different platforms and clients. Because of the API connecting to the network adapts to your preferred way of working.

Twitter

• Is easy accessible
• Is live
• Forces you to focus
• Is broken conversation
• Is open conversation
• Is spam free, like RSS (subscription based)
• Is a network
• Is synchronous / asynchronous
• Is a black hole
• Is a time capsule
• Is a centralized network
• Changes public / privacy
• Is a knowledge base
• Is very unstable
• Is making it very difficult for search engines
• Is platform independent

The best part of twitter to me is the live/buzz effect. What is happening right now. You just turn it on like you turn on television. There’s always something going on, and if it isn’t you can always start it by saying what you’re doing. The two graphs below show how twitter is being used during live events. The same thing happens in the Netherlands during live sport events, news or television shows.

Twitter during the Superbowl

Twitter during Super Tuesday

Examples

Some conferences have used Twitter for a so called backchannel. A live (sometimes moderated) screen behind the speaker that allows the audience to discuss and ask live questions via Twitter and SMS.

Every morning @gvenk presents the Gvenk Daily. Gerard is a programmer and knows what’s going on in the tech scene. Every morning around 7.30 he scans his RSS feeds and drops the highlights in the Gvenk Daily, a series of tweets about tech news.

Last year I wrote a post about @BreakingNewsOn, it’s a newsservice that posts rumors to Twitter and confirms them live. Building the story as it happens.

The Twitgeist is a hourly updated cloud of the most popular words used within a group of twitterazi. It tells you what’s going on.

These examples are just a few spin-offs. Like the conclusion from the dissertation. Twitter has just one rule, a maximum of 140 characters. The people using it are experimenting what they can do with this network.

Jonathan Harris has a very impressive portfolio with interactive projects. He’s an interactive storyteller and great visualizer. Last year I visited his talk at Picnic where he talked about his new project ‘The Whale Hunt‘. Today I discovered the project is public.

In May 2007 Jonathan lived for nine days with the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow Alaska. Het went out hunting wales and documented his story in a wonderful interactive story.

“I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.”

Video: Jonathan Harris at TED 2007 about the Web’s secret Stories.

Hypernarrative has a catagory about interactive storytelling. Well the send.a.message project couldn’t be more about interactive storytelling. You send a message through the website, for €30,- a Palestinian sprays your tag on the West Bank Barrier and sends you in return the photos of your text on the wall.

I don’t like walls, they never really solved problems. We build a wall when the difference between two places or cultures seems too complex to be solved.

We lock up criminals, because they clash with society. We build walls around our belongings because we want to control the climate and protect our belongings. We build closed compounds in rural areas to ‘protect’ ourselves and our belongings. And sometimes we build walls around or through countries.

A wall will never solve a problem, it will make things controllable for a certain time by limiting freedom.

In the book Massive Change, Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard focus on Urban sprawl and a so called tipping point. The year 2006 was the tipping point in how we live. From 2006 on half of the world population will live in cities. Cities grow together creating so called urban cores. This is a very interesting movement and will have effect on how we live and work.

The website 192021.org - a platform for research into the subject - tries to explain this phenomena by using a simple and beautiful animation. The makers have divided the information into small fragments. The story is still linear and doesn’t have a lot of interaction, but how they have cut up the information for digital storytelling is very good.

I love this subject. If you know media that explore this, please recommend me websites, movies, books or any other media.