Instead of a Zine Highlight, I thought I’d give a shout out to a Zine which hasn’t even been created yet. Young Blood is “a UK based zine dedicated to showcasing work by young creatives from around the world under the age of 25; covering art, photography, music and literature.” They are currently asking for submissions for the debut issue, which will hopefully be published in late March. I think it’s a great way for young uns’ like myself to showcase their work, and am considering doing a similar zine with bookleteer, so for anyone interested, drop me an e-mail at: haztag@msn.com. It’s likely this would take the form of a literary / short story / poetry zine, but I’m open to input.
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New Year Discount!
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Outside The Box – Prototype
Here at Proboscis, we’ve just recently finished a prototype of “Outside The Box”, created by Many Tang. The project was conceived back in September, spurred by the Love Outdoor Play campaign, and we’ve been constructing and tinkering with it since. Last week blazed past in a frenzy of activity, with everyone pitching in to get a working set finished. On Saturday, Alice took a set to “Re-Thinking Space”, a day-long discussion in Nottingham organised by Learning Space, to play around with.
A set of 27 Storycubes to inspire children’s play, indoors or out, alone or with others, this cube of cubes has 3 layers of games which can be used in endless variations. We’re currently thinking about different ways to play, and producing an eBook of game suggestions, so we’ll soon be having fun testing them on ourselves and with kids. See more photos here.
Next in the Songs trend is “Sea Shanties” – two volumes of songs sung at sea, selected and introduced by Francis McKee. He states “Beyond society’s canons of literature there are the outlaws – songs and stories that survive in the wild.” It seems these songs are memorised and passed on through their performance alone, rarely being recorded on paper, so it’s unlikely they would be heard outside of sailing circles. Shanties are work songs, the rhythms in time with sailors hauling, and barely sung today due to modern rigging changes. This compilation ensures these tales are not lost to time; these eBooks can be downloaded and reproduced anywhere – perhaps even on deck!
Read more at Andrew Draskóy’s website, Shanties and Sea Songs.
Just before Christmas we implemented a major new feature on bookleteer – an API (application programming interface) enabling eBooks and StoryCubes to be generated by users direct from their own web applications and stored in or downloaded from their bookleteer accounts.
Realising Tangible Souvenirs
This has been a long-cherished ambition for us – harking back to plans we made for linking the earlier Diffusion Generator to our Urban Tapestries public authoring and mapping platform in 2004 – where we imagined people being able to select or collate material on Urban Tapestries by theme or around a geographic place and outputting it in different paper formats (Diffusion eBooks, postcards and posters). This was the origin of our concept for creating tangible souvenirs from digital experiences – bridging different media (online/offline, digital/analogue) with the different capabilities that people have. Our experiences of working with local communities in social housing and other contexts showed us how important it is not just to be able to share things in many ways, but to tailor a range of modes of interaction to the capabilities and capacities of the people who had the knowledge and experience to share, but not necessarily the familiarity with web and mobile technologies to be engaged by the opportunities we saw them offering.
We’ve continued to develop our tangible souvenir concept through other projects – such as the Sensory Threads prototype – but the bookleteer API now represents a crucial milestone for us in building the links between our earlier work on public authoring and media scavenging and the current ecosystem of web technologies and public/open data initiatives. We hope to see lots of exciting ideas building on the first experiments – bookcubes – we commissioned from James Bridle last spring. Look out too for some forthcoming experiments by Simon Pope & Gordon Joly.
Accessing the API
Access to the API is limited for the time being to Alpha Club members and guest testers whilst we put it through its paces and explore how it can be used (our resources are rather limited for supporting it). We’re hoping to organise some events in 2011 where people can come along and explore what they might do with the API. In the meantime, if you’re taking part in Culture Hack Day this weekend (January 15th & 16th) then you can ask to test it out using the special account we’ve created for participants (ask the organisers for access details on the day).
If you do have an exciting idea for mashing up the bookleteer API with your own web service or public data please do get in touch, we’d love to hear from you and see how we can help.
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Zine Highlight: The Gentleman Caller
I’ve just ordered “The Gentleman Caller” by Andrea Kearney, but can’t wait for it to arrive, so I’ll highlight it instead. This caught my eye whilst browsing the Zines page on Facebook and seems to be a piece you need to appreciate in physical form, so I might post a few more photos of it when it’s in my mitts.
Its a beautifully surreal and cinematic illustrative zine, making use of double spreads to convey an amazing and disorientating sense of perspective. I love the bizarre imagery and the shading – it’s like a dream (or nightmare) rendered in a book.
It’s available to order here.
Reflecting back on the 5 City As Material events of last Autumn, we’re really pleased both with the reception of the events themselves by participants and that of the resulting publications with friends and colleagues. Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing the personal contributions of the guests (Tim Wright, Ben Eastop and Simon Pope – Alex Deschamps-Sonsino’s is already available) and an overview eBook of our own. And we will print a special limited slipcase edition of all 10 eBooks using bookleteer’s PPOD service and launch them in the Spring.
Future Plans in 2011
This year we hope to take our Pitch in & Publish series of City As Material events outside of London to other towns and cities in the UK (or abroad). We’d love to hear from people or organisations interested in commissioning us to devise and run a one-day (or possibly longer) collaborative urban exploration and publishing event in their own town or city.
A typical event…
We’ll work with the local hosts to devise a topic, plan the exploration route and design customised notebooks. At the end of each walk we’ll need a space (with WiFi access and ideally a printer) to sit down with the participants as a group and work on planning/drafting the collaborative eBook that will be the record of the day. As before we’ll be using a range of online and social media to post up photos, audio, video etc taken during each event by all taking part – and we’ll be encouraging all the participants to sign up with bookleteer to create their own personal eBooks (and/or StoryCubes).
How to book an event
Please get in touch with us to plan an event in your town or city. Our basic fee for each event (payable by the host) will be £600 + VAT and travel expenses (and accommodation where needed). This fee covers pre-planning, facilitation by 2 members of Proboscis on the day and post-event coordination of the collaborative eBook (+ publication on diffusion.org.uk), as well as printing of a limited edition run (50 copies) of the eBook.
Local hosts will be responsible for recruiting the participants to each event. Proboscis will also help promote each event across our own networks to engage as broad a group of participants as possible.
Continuing the theme of songs and music, I’m looking at the “New Worker’s Songbook – Song Writing Work Book for New Songs” (phew). In collaboration with the Worker’s Arts and Heritage centre in Hamilton, Ontario, Dodolab and Tiny Bill Cody (Tor Lukasik-Foss) created this eBook to inspire songs that reflect the current realities for workers in Hamilton. It asks the reader about their working experiences, both positive and negative, as well as their identity and responsibilities, to form verse and chorus for their own personal chant. The songbook also provides techniques to memorise lyrics, and how to sing with emotion and purpose, complete with iconic stick figure illustrations.
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Idea Store and bookleteer
I chose to visit the Idea Store in East London’s Chrisp Street Market and was quite surprised by how modern it looked inside – it was brightly lit with large open spaces, laptop benches, lots of seating areas, and visitors of all ages. Working areas, books, computers, ‘chill out areas’, and learning labs (rooms hired specifically for meetings and training sessions), are all clearly sign posted and well spaced out, offering an alternative ‘library feel’ all within a comfortable learning atmosphere.
Having walked around the library taking pictures, looking through leaflets and flyers, peeking into learning labs and flicking through some books in their library section, I realised that the Idea Store was definitely the ‘mega library’ of East London. Because the Idea Store has so much going on already, I left feeling slightly overwhelmed and wondered how, if at all, bookleteer would fit in to an already thriving library service. However, after some research, I realised that there were two areas that bookleteer could further help the Idea Store, and this was through advertising and user experience eBooks.
The Idea Store could advertise and promote courses, events, and services through bookleteer by creating mini information eBooks, providing a new and modern way to advertise what’s on offer. Allowing the thousands of people who use the store to create user experience eBooks to map out what they’ve learnt and what they’ll take away from using the Idea Store’s services would help both staff and visitors explore ways of improving services and document their experiences at the same time.
Download my ebook of ideas about using bookleteer in the Idea Store
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Zine Highlight: Who ate all the pies?
“Who ate all the pies?” is an A5 illustrated zine by Mark Long, detailing some of the more amusing chants sang by football supporters in the UK. Though composed entirely with a red and blue palette, hes still managed to create depth with shading and contrast, and I love the multitude of faces – the seemingly simplistic lines belie some great characters. The chants themselves are hilarious, I wonder how many of the crowd are Sun headline pundits. It’s available here.
