Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Trialing StreamTelling: Wormwoods Store

wormwoods

Whilst many little bits of DGR engineering are coming together behind the scenes, Marcus and I wanted to see if it was possible to produce a 'sitcom' or 'tele-novella' style production using the basic DGR technology and the technique of StreamTelling.

Streamtelling is the process of interpreting the actions of the DGR bots in a narrative manner. With a simple blog, we can record 'our' narrative interpretations of the characters (the cast of the show). With an appropriate context of a shop within a town, we can begin to add some gravity to the relationships between the characters.



Another thing I wanted to see if the level of autonomous activity the characters can achieve. As with Nick's work on enabling the DGR siblings to 'walk' around, it will be curious to see where our cast go in the show -- which streets, stores and homes they visit.

So Marcus will be using each characters (re)Tweets to inform 'their' blog posts, rather like how he produced the 'Felix Freeman' creation.

StreamTelling does not devise narrative arcs, only the generative seeds of the narrative - no one has any idea where this is going. That's the point of doing this -- like any form of generative art making, we're doing this to see what is revealed rather than trying to compose a story to be retold at a later date.

Wormwoods is located upon the town Totnes, Devon in the UK. It's not based upon the town. We're augmented the town with narratives using the "town's" metadata to produce an augmented reality. Anyone who has ever posted a picture, wikipedia note, blog post are all informing the Wormwood Store narration.

totnes - Google Maps


Just like a fiction, it's got lots of details - a high street, a river, a church.

totnes - Google Maps-1

Totnes seems like a lovely place - though I've never been there.



What's fascinating about all this is that we are folding realities back into themselves by using narratives. The images of Totnes oscillate between reality and fiction now that we can recontextualise their meaning through narrative filters.




Like most places, it's already augmented with loads of metadata from Wikipedia, Flickr, Youtube etc - so there is loads of data we can use to influence the characters.

totnes - Google Maps-3

The cast and production was conceived by Marcus Brown and based around the idea of an eco-friendly store in a town that already thrives on local produce. None of the characters are based upon real people, just archetypes based upon their jobs and fictional background.

Here's the Cast.


Gavin Toulson-Davey (about 4o years old): Gavin is a City drop out that may, or may not have more than one skeleton in his closet. Sick of the city, he has moved to Totnes to get in touch with nature. He bought the shop from Mr. Cecil Wormwood who died shortly there after. Gavin likes to think of his little supermarket as an “Eco2.O startup” and worships Innocent Smoothies and Howies and dreams of building a wormwoods in every town! twitter.com/gavintdavey



Crystal Johnston (about 19 years old): Crystal Johnston is the daughter of the local butcher, and a party girl. She has never left Totnes and dreams only of the weekend, booze and drugs. The most important thing in her life are her “best friends” – a group of people who dictate pretty much everything in the town. She has a mouth like a sewer. twitter.com/cpartyjohnston




Stephen Hornby (about 19 years old): Stephen Hornby is the only Gothic in Totnes. He secretly likes pink. He was found 19 years ago on the steps of the vicarage and is considered to be the illigitmate son of Mr. Johnston (the butcher) and …. Mrs Wormwood! He is bullied by Crystal’s friends. Everyday at 6.45 p.m. twitter.com/gothhornby




Mrs Wormwood (about 62 years old): Mrs Wormwood works at check out number 1. She would never work on check out number 2! She is, after all, the widow of the late owner – Mr. Wormwood. She basically thinks that she still owns the place. There are many rumors and secrets about her past. Many of them include Mr. Johnston the Butcher. She hates Gavin, the owner but insists that he’s a charming man. twitter.com/mrswormwood



You can subscribe to the cast on Twitter -- and here's a full cast Twitter List to subscribe to.

Here they are from earlier today.




Anyone is free to interact with the characters - in fact - we'd be grateful if you would. Testing this kind of innovation is all part of the process.

If you fancy creating a character for the show - let us know the persona in the comments below.

But in the meanwhile, visit...

www.wormwoodsstore.com

... and subscribe to the 'show' and the characters.

And if you could Tweet this with this link, we'd all be hugely grateful.


Friday, 13 November 2009

Mapping emotions to pathways




Having the DGRs autonomously wander around their defined territory is one of the project visions I wanted to get to fast. Having the bots leave a trail of data or locations based upon their character definitions, which is feed by social media, seemed like a nice way to get to a mobile Augmented Reality.

Engineering this has been the work of Nick Renny, and his first iteration of this is now live.

Here's Nick to explain what's happening here:
DGR location is using a combination of the existing character traits defined in the Character YAML file, and Google local search and Google maps api to find locations to visit. These destinations are stored in the appengine datastore and also tweeted as a 'My Destination' tweet via the DGR sibling's twitter account. Also, the DGR sibling's twitter profile location is changed with lat, lng co-ordinates each time a destination is tweeted.




Once a new destination is tweeted and stored in the datastore the real world location of the previous destination is posted as the profile location of the sibling, this means that the physical location of the sibling is a real world place, and matches the last destination.
Each sibling's journey can be viewed on google maps as a set of walking directions via the dgr/sibling url, which will be the profile website setting on the sibling's twitter profile.

The journey can be viewed in realtime, and a street view trail can be watched via a link from the DGR sibling page - if you want to follow the sibling.



Each destination search is begun on local search by centreing the search on the last destination then searching that locale for the matched keywords. This means that the sibling is constantly on the move, to achieve a degree of random selection the resultset from Local Search is shuffled ( as Google always returns the same set ) and the new destination is found.



Because the search results are limited by Google and generally don't change for a given search in a given location, I have run up against the situation that journey's at the moment can tend to be somewhat cyclical and I am looking to refine the search algorithm to produce better results more in line with the character.
Here's the live Google map mashup from Nicks DGRs '@kidbeats'.

This may vanish as it's on a dev server - the screen shot above was taken today.

The locations are all in a datastore, so we can now reuse this for all kinds of odd investigations, visualizations and narratives. You can too - just grab all the @kidbeats traveling tweets.

For example, as Nick mentioned, using Google Streetmap, you can 'live' the journey of the bot. As seen here.

What I'm really liking the idea of, is the 'cow paths' of demographics, an aggregation of streams represented as a new path, within a new context, is being built up daily in real time. As the DGRs are built upon keyword semantics, the mapping data is a hyper-local visualisation of the conversation semantics of social media, in real time.

Cow path analysis in (web) search is often used to find the optimized route between two things. Not sure what our two things are here - reality and narrative? people and person? Destination or arrival? Only one way to really find out is to keep playing.

In the meanwhile, @kidbeats is wandering around somewhere.

This is sure to tickle the @herdmeister.

Respect to Nick!

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

An Almanac of Human Emotion



DGR is built on top of We Feel Fine - which is a gorgeous piece of work from Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. If you've not seen it, it's an aggregation of bloggers who use the phrase

"I feel ...." followed by an emotion, like Happy, Sad or Grumpy etc etc.

They now published a book based upon the project along with an interactive version online. Free PDFs of the pages too -- that's nice.



There's also some nice plates in there about the semantics of emotions.


And some history on smart folk who studied emotions.



I really like this approach - making books out of an API and presenting the bigger picture of the artworks discoveries and history. It's like an interview with the artwork rather than the artist.

Anyway, it's available on all good online retailers. Links are on the site.

Sunday, 25 October 2009

Look-a-liking

One of the problems with creating the avatars for the DGR (Twitter) accounts is that they may look like someone. This is/was never the intent and something that I need to ponder over.

For example, @DarrylMorris points out to @JamesMonaghan that he looks like DGR sibling @Igguggogg.

  1. Darryl Morris
    darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan I think the profile pic on this looks a lot like you!!! No offense!! :D xx - @igguggogg
  2. James Monaghan
  3. James Monaghan
    JamesMonaghan RT @darrylmorris #followfriday @rosieswash - Guardian music writer and all round lovely lady who I would quite like to marry, if I'm honest.
  4. Darryl Morris
  5. James Monaghan
    JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris Rosie Swash's picture? Looks like me? Have you got your glasses on?
  6. Darryl Morris
    darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan no you sponge, the profile I showed you in that actual tweet.
  7. James Monaghan
    JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris I'm more than a little bit confused Darryl. Its been a long night. Who's profile pic looks like mine? xx
  8. Darryl Morris
  9. James Monaghan
    JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris I'm mildly offended! But I'm very tired so I'll let it pass.
  10. James Monaghan
    JamesMonaghan @darrylmorris ahhhhhhhh. Got it. Its cool. I'm being blonde. xxx
  11. Darryl Morris
    darrylmorris @JamesMonaghan Yes, I expected you to be offended, which is why I tried to say it quick so it would be done with, but that didn't work out!!
-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

I think Darryl is being sarcastic, but all the same, this is a noted point about designing the avatars.