It might seem like a long time, four months until my Independent Study is due in, but already I can feel the pinch. I don’t know if it’s too soon to start worrying or not – but I am!

Although I started around a month and a half ago, I’m not sure that I’ve done as much as I could have in that time. I’ve done some planning, worked out what research I need to do, and keep coming up with cool new ideas for the site (and promotion, although promotion in itself is not part of the project), I don’t truly feel like I’ve started.

But I have started. You could say that I started several years ago when I first developed the concept for the site – but back then I didn’t know that I would even be going to University, let alone using the concept for my IS. So I think the best start date I can put on this project is October 2007 – that is when I first looked at the second assignment for my (COMP2100) Computing Research Projects module.

The purpose of the assignment was to draft an Independent Study proposal, to be submitted as a regular assignment, so they could give early feedback on the suitability of the project. So, for your viewing pleasure, I present to you the assignment I submitted on the 17th January 2008, for that assignment.

What I find most interesting about this is just how much the idea has evolved since then. The same basic idea exists, but has (hopefully) been improved upon. You might also notice that the Project Plan is a little short, this is because I run out of time (yet another reason to start worrying at the four month point). I was awarded a B- for the assignment, but based on the feedback from it, I could have easily got that to an A if I had spent more time on the Project Plan. Oh well!

TITLE

A web-based multidimensional interactive story application with a focus on Web 2.0 user participation and accessibility based ease of use.

OUTLINE

The aim of the project is to create a multidimensional interactive story application, with a focus on accessibility and ease of use, to help lovers of reading and creative writing join the Web 2.0 revolution – of putting the users of the web into the driving seat of the web.

The concept behind the application involves creating stories which are ever evolving and expanding. It works by first introducing the reader to a character. The user then becomes that character by reading the first chapter of a story written in the second-person perspective, at the end of which two possible paths are presented. Once the user has chosen the path of most interest, another chapter is displayed, with an additional two paths at the end of it.

The user navigates though the story by choosing the paths they have the most interest in, until they reach one for which no chapter has been written, at which point they are invited to become the character at a deeper level by adding their own chapter, complete with two possible paths for the next reader.

The site will adhere to all relevant legislation and web standards, with particular reference to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), to ensure that high levels of accessibility are maintained on the site, to not only comply with legislation, but to ensure everyone can access the site equally.

BACKGROUND

WHY INTERACTIVE STORIES?

According to the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Reading at Risk” report, fewer than half of American adults now read literature. An overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002 was recorded, with the youngest age group; adults aged 18 to 24, having a decline of 55 percent greater than the total population. However, contrary to the overall decline in literary reading, the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent (NEA, 2004).

“Interactivity – structuring information so that users can adapt it to their own needs – is getting a huge amount of hype” Says Alan Robbins (1995). “Interactivity is a way to harness the flux. Instead of being a passive viewer, you manipulate the data-storm, picking and choosing only the parts that interest you.” This is the philosophy behind the application, allowing the reader (and writer) to control the story to make it more interesting to them.

This level of interactivity when reading (and writing) help draw the participant into the story, and achieves a greater level of immersion, especially when combined with chapters written in the second-person perspective, as championed by Arthur Plotnick (2007). “Why open a story with “Melanie woke up and saw blood on the ceiling” or “I woke up and saw blood on the ceiling” when you can write, “You woke up and saw blood on the ceiling”? Bingo – the “you” voice distances the narrator and pulls the reader closer. The narrator hides under the bed, so to speak, inviting the you–reader to climb in with the protagonist.”

Plotnick also recognises the perils of using the second-person perspective, namely the ambiguity of just who does ‘you’ represent, but as a certain element of the site revolves around role play, the creation of the character the story is about is of paramount importance, and is the very first thing that is done. Hope Dahle Jordan recognised this when writing for The Writer is 1962: “I have learned that I cannot write a successful story unless I start with a character. If I start with a theme, and rummage around for characters to fit, they become puppets that I push here and there” (Jordan, 2007).

WHY WEB 2.0?

The phrase “Web 2.0” (coined by Dale Dougherty) can cause a lot of confusion and heated debate. To some, it is the new conventional wisdom, to use “the web as platform”, but to others it’s nothing more than a faux-meme which corporations use for marketing hype.

Web 2.0 pioneers like Tim O’Reilly (2005), who participated in the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004, defends it as being the natural evolution of the internet. His reasoning streams from the burst of the “dot-com bubble” – although when this happened many people concluded that the web was overhyped, he believed that this was when it started to become more important than ever “with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity”. After researching into why some sites survived the dot-com crash (a notable survivor of which is Amazon.com, who O’Reilly classes as Web 2.0, despite its existence since the early days of the web), he concluded that the new web was one in which the users of the web, rather than the corporations publishing on the web, were the most important aspect. It is the move from ‘publishing’ to ‘participation’.

Others such as Tim Bray (2005), the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, suggests that Web 2.0 is nothing more than a faux-meme used for marketing hype, and can mean anything you want it to: “A lot of people using it are hustlers and entrepreneurs trying to paint their Big Idea in attractive colours”. He agrees that the web is evolving, stating “Usenet might have been the real 1.0”, “So a lot of us are already on 3.0”, but puts no faith in the collective term.
Despite this, the supposed Web 2.0 revolution is in full swing, and a lot of “true” Web 2.0 sites have become, and are becoming, very successful.

CONCLUSION

Using everything I have researched above, especially taking note of the volume of literature readers in the adult population, it is clear that efforts need to be made to improve these figures. As the only improvement in relation to literature is that creative writing, the site will enable the latter group of writers to encourage the former group of readers, which can be further enhanced by taking advantage of the Web 2.0 ethos.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

As I’m planning on building this site using the Web 2.0 ethos of putting the user of the site in the driving seat regarding its development, and making sure that all of the user’s needs are addressed, I plan on using receiving qualitative data from the users of the site via a series of online questionnaires using the Likert Scale to judge responses and drive the development forward.

Statistics such as number of unique visitors on the site over a given period, page hits within specific sections of the site, and length of individual user’s visits to the site will be recorded by the server, but this will then be used to generate specific questions in relation to the features which are perceived to be the most popular.

Using the Likert Scale, the type of feedback received will be opinion and user need focused, rather than hard data. An example of the added value of this type of data lies in being able to obtain direct feedback from the users of the application, finding out which features of the site they liked the most, rather than just data such as how many people used a specific feature on the site.

PROJECT PLAN

The development life cycle to be used on the project will be the spiral model. This will allow for continual improvements to specific features of the site and allow for a greater level of site user participation in the decision making process.

REFERENCES

Bray (2005). “Web 2.0 or Not?” 11th August 2005. Available from: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/08/09/Web-2.0 [accessed 12th January 2007].

Jordan (2007). “45 years ago – Beginning with character leads to action.” Writer. November 2007. Vol. 120 Issue 11, p9-9, 1/6p.

NEA (2004). “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.” National Endowment for the Arts. 8th July 2004. Available from: http://www.nea.gov/pub/ReadingAtRisk.pdf [accessed: 15th January 2008].

O’Reilly (2005). “What Is Web 2.0? – Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” 30th September 2005. Available from: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [accessed 12th January 2007].

Plotnick (2007). “When to use ‘you’ in fiction.” Writer. June 2007. Vol. 120 Issue 6, p15-17, 3p.

Robbins (1995). “The great multimedia debate.” Newsweek. 6th May 1995, Vol. 125 Issue 23, p16, 1p, 1c.

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