visualisation

The global coronavirus pandemic has brought up a series of challenges which have made us change our lifestyle by balancing work and family life, education and recreation. It has brought up feelings of uncertainty, isolation, hopelessness, fear, anxiety, depression, stress; impacting on our mental health and well-being as well as our economic situation. This global disaster has hitted harder those people from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as socioeconomic status, physical and health issues, living in violent and abusive relationships and has brought up to light the imbalance in society. For some of us, online platforms have served to make this situation more bearable. We are learning to do what we did before, at a distance. Based on this and previous creative projects where we were already dealing with a community-based goal, the aim of this workshop is to make visible (through sharing) social, personal or collective issues/challenges which have become more apparent during the pandemic. We will be using digital methodologies of collaboration and visualisation to highlight the main concerns of the community taking part in this discussion. For this purpose, we are providing you with an online platform where you will be able to share a personal or collective issue to heal. The shared stories will be distributed amongst the participants, who will find solutions to heal them through a creative digital proposal. All participants sharing and healing will be anonymous.

GOAL: The workshop is directed towards authors and translators of hypertext fiction and poetry created in Storyspace. We demonstrate the future direction of the in-house development environment used for translation and migration of Michael Joyce’s afternoon.a story (2011) and Twilight. A Symphony (2015) into browser/online ports. The framework has been recently updated to its third edition which – apart from its support for guard fields, roadmaps, link scripting – introduces form-based import layer and a mobile friendly visualizations of Storyspace Map Views based on D3.js JavaScript library. During the workshop a workflow of importing the work, processing its metadata, and preparing the linking system for the visualization module will be demonstrated and analysed. The hypertexts used during the workshop are: Izme Pass by C. Guyer, M. Joyce, and M. Petry; WOE by M. Joyce, and The Life of Geronimo Sandoval by S. Ersinghaus. Participants will prepare an html export from Storyspace and be able to then upload these files on a server for further processing in order to prepare an online, mobile friendly version of a Storyspace work. BACKGROUND: More than 20 years after their publication web-based hypertexts such as Hegirascope or The Unknown are available, read and viewed just as intended on their publication date. “Html and a bit of Javascript” or “Javascript and a bit of html”, in case of Web based text generators such as Taroko Gorge, seem to constitute the best formula for creating long-lasting e-literature. Any platform, old or new, which supports exporting to html improves not only the longevity of the work, but can also bring it new life on platforms of the future. Important platforms, most notably Flash, did not follow this path. Some platforms, including Storyspace, did. In spite of being a paid software and the popular perception of it as a platform for commercial circulation of e-literature, Storyspace managed to preserve its path to open formats in form of its html export functionality (although by default in limited form).