Scott Rettberg

A few months back, I linked to Kate Armstrong's trAce article on location-aware narrative.Jill then found a list of wireless art projects and later linked to The Case of the Molndal Murder, a full-immersion, non-linear narrative utilizing PDAs and Bluetooth technology that is installed in a Swedish Museum. I revisited the topic this afternoon, and discovered that Jeremey Bushnell is also tracking the topic. The Annotate Space project, an electronic walking tour of the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood of DUMBO, looked particularly interesting. A 2001 article from the New Scientist provides some general background on the technology. A dailywireless.org post from last year links to a bunch of sites on streaming location-based content sites. The Embedded Theatre project by Ryan Genz looks like a compelling and technologically advanced use of location-aware narrative, using GPS and mobile technologies as well as “a simple and unobtrusive garment that can provide directional video and sound, becomes a participant in a context-specific story that evolves based on his position and movements.” The user scenarios used to illustrate and test the concept included “Invisible Cities, Venice Ghost Stories, and Harry Potter.” There is a good short quicktime video on the invisible cities scenario.

Stockon is currently involved in a GIS project. I'm wondering how much of a learning curve I (and my students) would have to mount in order to put together some kind of location-aware narrative, and if we could do it using available technology.

We're reading Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen in Internet Writing & Society, and tomorrow we're discussing artificial intelligence. While googling around trying to see if there was a working version of Depression 2.0 out there, I ran across Jabberwacky, a Web chatterbot that took 3rd place in the 2003 Loebner Prize. The bot is different from earlier systems, such as the classic Eliza, in that it learns from the aggregate knowledege of its users: “It stores everything everyone has ever said, and finds the most appropriate thing to say using contextual pattern matching techniques. In speaking to you it uses only learnt material. With no hard-coded rules, it relies entirely on the principles of feedback. This is very different to the majority of chatbots, which are rule-bound and finite.” The bot provides a compelling experience. While it wouldn't pass a Turing test, it returns some very interesting responses, and can respond in many different languages (Jill had a little chat with it in Norwegian, and it was capable of sliding in between French and English just as well as I could [which isn't saying much]). The winner of the 2003 Loebner Prize, Jabberwock actually comes a lot closer to passing a Turing test, even though its system is more like the standard “Eliza-style” AI.

The Guardian is running a special on weblogs, and just handed out British blogging awards.

From trAce, an article on Location Aware Narrative projects including [murmur], an “archival audio project” that establishes links between narrative fragments and specific points in city neighbourhoods. When a user calls in using a cellular telephone, points in the city scape marked by encoded street signs trigger stories collected from other users and residents.”

I've been bouncing around ideas of how I might do something like this with my students, though I think that given tech resources, the best thing I could manage would be some kind of GPS treasure-trove project.