Page 141 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

Indeed, location can sometimes be one of the factors that incite us to read a story. The tool Placing Literature88 is based on this idea. Its main aim is to bring books and readers into contact with each other through the places where the stories are set. This website enables readers to take part in and geolocate their reading material, so that everyone can see on a map in what parts of the world books are set – both those they are reading at a particular time and others yet to be discovered.
Paris, London, New York, Barcelona, Madrid
and Berlin are just some of the typical locations where literature is set. But stories can feature a great many cities, regions, neighbourhoods and spots like gardens and squares in which readers might have a personal interest and which can be found or pointed out for various reasons.
The space where the story is set can also evoke feelings, emotions, universal or individual meanings, values and allegories that each reader experiences. So far more than 3,800 places have been located and are accompanied by images and videos thanks to the collaborative efforts of all the readers taking part in the tool.
All in all, it marks the development of a crowd- sourcing project to create a great literary world map. The more people who take part and provide data – all that is needed is a Google account – the more effective it will be and the more books and places will be added for people to discover. The tool is geared above all to very keen readers interested in learning a bit more about the places trodden by the characters
in their favourite books and their next book – which they might not yet have chosen.
BookCities89 is a discovery platform based on cities and places readers are going to visit (and is fairly similar in this respect to Placing Literature). What this tool does, thanks to its search engine, is recommend books set in the places the user
is planning to visit, or search for books set in a particular city. Once it has located the books,
users can read the comments other readers have posted about them.
The tool runs on feedback from its users. If someone wishes to collaborate, all they have
to do is register and upload books set in their city or elsewhere. It is therefore a crowdsourc- ing-based project focused to an extent on travel, though that is not its sole purpose.
In fact, many readers like to contextualise or re- member a trip through books, and not just ravel books or typical tourist guides. In addition, like the other products commented on above, this tool shows that stories can travel with us much in the same way that mobile devices accompany us wherever we go.
Live reading materials
There will also be a place for books that watch us – not to encroach on our privacy, however, but rather to change and evolve as our reading progresses. Stories are going to cease to be linear, static and final. One of the pioneering projects in this field is the now defunct TREEbook, based on technology developed by Medallion Press.
Through projects of this kind, readers will have the chance to experience a new form of reading in which the book “reads” the reader, so to speak, in an exercise of narrative dynamism more characteristic of videogames than tra- ditional books. Technology will thus interpret the reader’s habits, behaviour and choice of reading materials and adapt the book to these characteristics (duration of reading, time of day, average progress, etc.). The book will have a main storyline whose unfolding will vary as the story progresses with each different reader, individually.
This type of interaction differs from the “choose your own adventure” formula described previ- ously. Here it is the book that makes the deci-
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Readers in the digital age