Tag Archives: storytelling

Today I choose to try a new format for reading material (TIC00024c)

The PolyBlog
August 14 2020

I will read just about anything and in just about any format. Except in this context, format covers two aspects.

First, we have format in terms of content.

Cereal boxes have held my interest when nothing else was around, for instance, all the way down to copyright info or patent numbers, just noticing the different types of info included. If I’m given a choice, I’ll opt for mysteries most of the time, but I also read sci-fi, fantasy, young adult, middle grade, historical. I’ve read a few modern chick-lit and even, in a desperate weekend in my youth, a Harlequin romance that was the only thing in the trailer I hadn’t already read. It’s an hour of my life I will never get back.

I am not a voracious reader of non-fiction, although I try from time to time. I’m great at starting, lousy at finishing them.

But when it comes to short stories, I prefer older ones or mystery stories. In both, I am almost guaranteed a complete story. That sounds a bit cryptic, but a lot of modern short stories I find are almost “slice of life” stories. They start in the middle of a story, give you a snippet, and then end without any real resolution. The literary mags LOVE them; I would rather read the cereal box.

Second, we have format in terms of the physical format. I grew up on paper books, read stories in newspapers and magazines too. Abridged versions with multiple books in one volume, like Readers Digest Condensed Books, were among the forms. But all types of paper.

Electronically, I have read lots of stuff online, but usually non-fiction articles.

My first e-book was actually on a Palm Pilot, and I don’t remember what it was. I think, but am not sure, that it might have been a Sherlock Holmes collection. My second e-book was actually read on a computer screen. I downloaded a copy of the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown [Edit: James Patterson…thanks Kathrine!] as I wanted to know what all the hype was about. I thought, from the way some people had talked about it, that it was some sort of non-fiction thesis. I didn’t realize it was a novel. And with it downloaded on to my monitor, I sat and read it all in one sittting. My first full-length e-book. Which made me realize, as I had long suspected but couldn’t confirm, that I didn’t care about the physical format. If I can get lost in a story, the physical aspect disappears into the background. I have read on computer screens, Palm Pilots, Kindles, phones, and tablets.

Challenges for formats

The only real formats that I haven’t embraced are audio books and podcasts. Some of it is technical, in that I haven’t found a good workflow that just gets me listening quickly, although it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out of course. Some of it is space and time…I rarely have long periods of time where I’m driving alone, which would be the likely time to listen, and when I do have time to relax and ingest stories, I tend to be more looking for quiet and separation from noise than someone droning on in my ear. If I want sound, I’m more likely to opt for serialized storytelling through TV shows.

But some time ago, I read about new stories coming forward for the TV series Orphan Black. If you never watched the show when it was on, the basic premise is a mystery with a sci-fi backdrop. In the opening episode, you see a girl named Sarah whose life is a giant crapfest (she’s stolen drugs from a drug dealer in order to sell them and run away with her daughter to start a new life). She witnesses another woman who looks JUST LIKE HER commit suicide by stepping in front of a train. She steals the woman’s identity while looking for a place to crash AND trying to figure out why they were twins, and fast-forward a couple of jumps, and voila, she finds out they were clones. And it wasn’t just the two of them, there are MORE. None of them knew they were clones until Beth, the suicide victim, figured some of it out. The series ran five seasons, and some of it was crap while other parts were AMAZING. The biggest part of the show that DID work was Tatiana Maslany who played all the clones. Each was REALLY different from the others, and she embodied all of them uniquely. It was astounding.

Anyway, I digress. The announcement was that there were NEW stories, further adventures after the series ended, and Tatiana would be doing the voices. Wait…voices? Is it animated?

Nope. They’re a relatively new format, or an old format reimagined, but they are podcast-style episodes (audio only) on a site called Serial Box (yeah, my mention of reading the cereal box wasn’t accidental hehehe). I mention “old formats” because in a sense, they are like old-time radio shows like the Shadow or Arsenic and Old Lace. Fibber McGee and Molly maybe. Or Dragnet. But not all of them are like that. Some are just narrations, like audio books, except done as episodes.

You can buy an episode at a time, like you can on places like Apple Music for TV shows, or buy a “season’s pass” for about $10.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note that I don’t do audio books and I don’t do podcasts. So why would I be interested in this? Because of three things. First, I loved Orphan Black and it intrigued me. Second, I really enjoy old radio shows. I know there are lots of places on the net that have the old recordings, and some day, when I have time, I’ll curate myself a decent list to get going. Third, they aren’t just selling narrated versions. You also get the prose to read. Every word is on the screen, so you can just READ the stories. And since I read faster than the narrator, I can finish them way quicker.

The only thing that has held me back in the past is the format. I know, I know, which format? The physical format in this case. You CANNOT download the prose. It is only readable within the reader app that Serial Box uses. And I REALLY don’t like locked formats for reading content. Every e-book that I read, I backup into a different program so that if application X suddenly stops working, I can still access it. I paid for access, I’m keeping my access unless and until someone wants to refund it to me. Usually, at least.

But Serial Box doesn’t have any download options, their way of preventing retransmission i.e. piracy. I hate the business model, and I would have balked at paying for Orphan Black for a season only to have it potentially disappear at some point on me. But I was so excited that I bought it on sale before I knew.

The neat thing, though, is that every Thursday night at 9:00 p.m., they give away some “intro” special for a particular series. Most of the time, I forget to log in to see it. Or I remember at 10:30 p.m. by which time all the free passes are gone. I bought OB, but I never did get around to listening to it. Or reading it online. I really wanted to read it offline, or maybe on my phone or tablet, and have just never made the time to set it up.

But tonight, I got a prompt on my computer reminding me of the weekly freebie, and I managed to snag one of the passes. A four-day free overview of The Triangle, a 10 episode show created by Dan Koboldt and written by him, Mindy McGinnis, and Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. It is described as a Michael Crichton-style adventure thriller, and that is probably close enough. Not as good as Crichton, maybe more by way of James Patterson clones, but it was REALLY good. I binge-read all 10 episodes tonight while sitting at my computer. It was a cool story about the Bermuda Triangle and an explanation of what caused everything to go haywire. Not all the pieces work, but it was pretty well done.

And since I enjoyed it so much, I started reading the Orphan Black series before remembering I have to get up early tomorrow AND I still had this blog to write. The format is not universally good for content, however. There was another show that I got a free pass for a number of months ago and could barely stomach the first two pages before tossing it. The writing was terrible. On the other hand, they have some Marvel shows too, building on Black Widow.

I haven’t quite decided if I will review the Triangle or not, but since I have only four days of access, if I want to make any notes for a review, now is the time to decide. I review just about everything else I consume — movies, books, TV shows, etc. It seems only natural to review it, but I’m not even sure what to call it. A book? A podcast? A TV series? A radio drama?

Whatever it is, today I choose to read a serialized story in a new format.

What choices are you making?

Metaliteracy – Week 4 – Creating a digital artifact

The PolyBlog
May 21 2020

The final assignment for the course, “Metaliteracy: Empowering yourself in a connected world”, is to create a digital artifact of some kind — a story, video, podcast, etc. — tied to the theme of metaliteracy, metacognition, and the topics of the previous 3 weeks. The goal is to help teach some aspect of it to someone else. For me, one of the most interesting areas of metaliteracy falls into the area of ethics. And I think I have something unique to say.

Metaliteracy and Ethics

It’s quite interesting that so many people talk about the “ethical use of information” on the internet and in journals, on talk shows and in lecture halls. Yet none of them seem to stop to ask themselves what they mean by ethics? In most cases, the explanation is quite simply “do no harm” or “don’t do bad things with the info”. It is akin to Google’s slogan, “Don’t be evil”. Except that isn’t really about ethics so much as simple right and wrong. Following the law, or just not doing something wrong, is not really an ethical dilemma.

Ethics is much better understood where two principles that are both positive come into conflict. For example, as a physician during Covid-19, you want to protect the health of other patients and citizens but you also want to protect the privacy of an individual. While it might be efficient to just publish the names of someone who was sick, and let anyone else know, the point is not “who” they were exposed to but that they were exposed by being in contact with someone. As such, much of the tracing behaviour for people doesn’t reveal who was sick, just that “someone” they came into contact with was sick. The ethical “solution” is to protect the privacy of the individual who was sick while still ensuring that the people they came into contact with are still notified. It’s the only ethical solution that satisfies both principles — privacy and protection.

Yet when it comes to the area of metaliteracy and our roles within the field, it is where those roles are in conflict that ethics is needed to help resolve them. If we look at the materials provided in the course, we can see nine defined roles for a metaliterate learner (in the outer ring):

(Coursera course, Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World, Week 3, video resource, “Empowered Metaliterate Learning”, frame at 2m09s, as captured from https://www.coursera.org/learn/metaliteracy/lecture/rXsGo/empowered-metaliterate-learning-2-09 on May 21, 2020).

Many people assume, and the course reinforces this assumption, that most of those roles are played at the same time and that they are, for the most part, complementary. But are they completely complementary and if so, also at all times?

I’ll give an example from my undergraduate work at Trent University back in 1988-89. As part of a course on organizational theory, we were divided into some fairly large groups, and ours had about 20-25 people in it. Our project was to look at control structures, both informal and formal, in 2-3 companies and to use them as case studies to present to the rest of the class as “contrast and compare” examples. This put us all in a collaborative role, also all doing research, participating as well, and ultimately as author/publisher. It seems straight-forward, but we quickly found ourselves with an ethical dilemma in those roles and how we used information.

It may be a bit of a cliché to note that many of these group projects in business studies that work on topics such as control structures frequently become somewhat “meta-projects” themselves. The dynamics in our own group of 20+ business students, many with desires to “lead” or with Type-A personalities, as we tried to come to some form of working consensus on the way forward, how to assign work, who would nominally “lead” when we were all capable of doing so ourselves, turned into an interesting microcosm of the subject matter we were studying.

Five of us had a brainstorm. Wouldn’t it be cool if we created a shadow-report talking about our own experiences within the group? A sort of case-study of the case-study process, or a pseudo-Lord of the (Business) Flies analysis of how we instituted our own control mechanisms. Several of the students were heavily in favour of doing the study. For them, they felt we could resolve any potential ethical issues by removing names from the final report. For two of us, we felt an ethical tug-of-war that we couldn’t name or resolve, and we eventually killed the idea.

Now that I’ve taken the course, the definitions are clearer. It was clear that we were going to be both participant and author in our own research while working on two projects simultaneously — the larger actual project and the smaller meta-project. Yet to be a collaborator in the larger project required us to be collaborators, with key outcomes depending on our ability to form bonds together and to trust each other with what we learned. To share information openly, candidly, honestly with each other as we worked towards a larger project. Yet at the same time, we would be taking notes and hoarding information about the behaviour of our other collaborators in the team, evaluating them, breaking every aspect of that project trust.

At the time, we just felt that it was somehow underhanded and that we could be destroying any trust with our classmates for the coming 2 years of the business program. But if you use the metaliteracy wheel above, focusing on the types of information and the roles being played, the conflict is clearer. And so is an ethical solution that should have presented itself at the time, but didn’t.

The ethical “solution” that would have allowed both projects to continue at the same time and honoured the multiple roles while eliminating the conflicts should have been simple. We could have simply told them up front that we were doing it. We could take our notes, prepare something for the whole group to see and comment upon, and collectively decided whether or not it would be shared with the larger class. An ethical solution to do the same thing we wanted to do in the first place, made possible by simply identifying the clear roles being played, sometimes in overlap. That solution would have been the ethical use of our information, not simply “do no harm”.

There are, however, numerous other potential conflicts in the above model that could be analysed further. The collaborator who wants to share but also wants to publish individually (shared data, multiple artifacts); a translator who must respect the intent of an original creator’s work but who also plays a role as a teacher who transforms that work into more teachable, digestible forms; an author who has a desire to communicate their creations to others, and who has an existing publishing platform (perhaps a blog) that is easy for them to use, yet the ideal scenario for some of the creations may be more of a public domain wiki for multiple people to collaborate in openly.

And that’s it for the four-week course. There appears to be a sequel course, so I may look into that one too. I like auditing these MOOCs.

Metaliteracy – Week 3 – Telling your digital story

The PolyBlog
May 21 2020

This week’s materials are all about preparing a digital story. It starts with a simple example of telling something personal, maybe including some primary materials, adding in some secondary materials, doing research, planning, and ultimately creating the story in some form.

It takes the view that digital storytelling encompasses lots of different tools — text, pictures, video, etc. — and gives examples of how to do that creation, find the relevant materials, and shares a lot of examples from StoryCorps of how to do that creative process.

I have to say that I found it rather basic. Too much of it is about the tools you can use to tell your story, and not enough time is spent on what the story is…for me, all storytelling starts with the arc. A beginning, a middle, an end. And some sort of purpose to the story — or to sharing the story. Long before I figure out what I’m going to use to tell the story, I need to figure out what story I want to tell. Far too many of these stories that have been created through these digital archive stories are “interesting” but not very effective. Put differently, if they were written stories, they wouldn’t make it out of the slush pile as the stories are more “vignettes” or “slices of life” that don’t go anywhere.

I just didn’t find the week compelling.