New tools – how can writers benefit from using the Internet?

Much of the publishing industry’s interest in digital media spins around questions of marketing and packaging books. But last December I gave a presentation at a conference which explored how writers could also take advantage of a range of new tools, to save themselves time and increase the depth of their research.

While writing Damn His Blood, I used several new resources at one point or other – most of them falling under the Google umbrella of products. Google Books was probably the most prominent of all them. Google estimate that around 130 million unique books exist in the world and, of them, that 15 million had been scanned by the end of last year. All these books are keyword searchable, and they were handy for early explorations of a topic and for starting points before I set off for the library.

Similarly useful were Google Maps and Google Street View. For the poor (in the monetary sense) author, snared in an inflexible routine and unable to afford the train fares for everywhere they want to describe in prose, going for a walk in Google Street View is a worthwhile pastime. On top of these was the British Library Newspaper Archives, which have been gradually opening up over the past few years and contains thousands of pages from nineteenth century publications. And, finally, there was Delicious – a handy repository for all of the links.

There are many other services I could mention, and I’m sure that in their own way a new generation of writers are sifting the Internet in their own way. But just the other day I spotted Google’s Ngram Viewer – which was the catalyst for this post and something that I thought was worth a mention.

For those familiar with Google Trends, then Google Ngram works within a similar interface. But as Trends enables you to compare the popularity of search-terms on the Internet over a set period of time, Ngram allows you to plot the changing popularity of specific words of time – something that it does by combing the data from Google Books.

You can narrow the timeframe to a period you want, and all the results are plotted on a graph. Below is an example that I’ve just processed – showing four words that have gone in and out of fashion over the past few centuries: countenance, digital, jolly and awesome.

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But while this is obviously useful to the curious or armchair etymologist (if such a person exists), is it of any practical value to the writer? I’m not immediately sure, though words are writer’s tools and it is always useful to know as much about them as possible. A decline in a specific word is usually going to be tied to the downfall of a sub-culture, a fashion or a belief. The words that we use tell you lots about who we are, and what were our thoughts and preoccupations at a given time. Google Ngram lets us visualise this.

In this second graph, I’ve put in the words ‘phrenology’ (a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain character traits are indicated by the size and shape of the skull), and ‘scientist.’ They’ll serve as an example for what I talking about.

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It’s interesting to see the high water mark of phrenology in the 1820s and 1830s plotted here, and you can see just how quickly the theory fell out of popularity. Likewise you can see that hardly anyone used the term scientist until the 1860s – and therefore to describe anyone – such as Priestley or Jenner – as a scientist in 1800 would be anachronistic. (In fact the word scientist was not invented until 1833 – and there’s an interesting article on this here).

So, in its own little way I think that Google Ngram does have its place. It’d be interesting to see what words came to prominence during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, or earlier in the dark days of the wars or McCarthyism in the fifties. For editors and subs it’s a useful fact-checker, and – like most of the innovations from Google Labs – everyone else can spill quite a bit of time over it too.

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Image credit: Dani Sarda

How interactive maps are being used in today’s journalism

Last week, Paul Lewis, a Guardian reporter, linked to a piece of collaborative journalism that he had been working on and had just been published. ‘There can be no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account than this,’ he wrote on Twitter.

The link in question directed readers towards an interactive map, depicting the movements of the newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, who was unlawfully killed during the G-20 Summit protests in the City of London in 2009.

The interactive map is a clever, clear, accessible piece of journalism. The protestors and police are plotted, mostly huddled about Bank tube station; Ian Tomlinson’s path is shown, zigzagging along St Swithans Lane and on his ill-fated route to Cornhill. PC Harwood’s numerous scuffles with protestors are also documented, starting in Cornhill and extending out to Threadneedle Street and into a side road, where he met with Ian Tomlinson at 7.20 p.m.

Twenty different interactive boxes, beginning before and concluding after the incident between Tomlinson and Harwood, annotate the two men’s paths – all numbered in chronological order. The boxes contain captions, snippets of mobile video clips, CCTV outtakes and snatched photographs taken by protestors.

This is one of the most effective map mashups that I have seen. It portrays a clear yet raw account of what happened on 1 April 2009, using material from a range of non-traditional sources and stitching them all together with code and graphic design. The videos convey the brittle, hostile atmosphere of the day with an immediacy that is difficult to replicate with words. They also carry the additional benefit of being more faithful and incorruptible than human memory. When Paul Lewis claims that there is no better example of how digital technology can hold the state to account, I know what he means.

Interactive maps are a useful tool for journalists, for digital storytellers or for simply setting data out in a digestible way. It’s now more than six years since Google Maps launched and in that time they have been used for all manner of purposes with a steady stream of the latest creations featured on a site called Google Maps Mania.

Still, I wonder if journalists could make more use of these maps. Last week I saw Joseph Stashko give a great example of how a Google Map could be used to visualise the results of local elections in Preston. And there are other tools too, such as UMapper, which allows users to create maps with more flexibility – from basic embeddable maps, to maps of tweets, to specially-tailored weather forecasts and so on.

I’ll finish this post off with a nod to the British Library. Though not a journalistic outlet, they seem to have taken to digital with surprising comfort over the last few years. At the last count they had something like 16 blogs from experts that covered a range of topics. They have released a beautiful iPhone App, which includes material from their ‘treasures collection’, and, during the last of their exhibitions, they produced an interactive map of their own.

The Evolving English Voice Map is a patchwork of different Audioboo recordings, all geo-plotted, that demonstrate different accents from around the world. Is a clever mix of new technology and ancient habits (the pleasure of looking over a map), and it works well. All those who participated were asked to read an extract of a Mr. Tickle story – recording it on their iPhone or computer. The result was a mass of submissions from all around the world, including one listed as Abbots Bromley England 1983 Male – I’ll let you guess who that is.

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Image credit: Chris JL on Flickr – Note, the photograph of the policemen above is not from footage of the G-20 riots in 2009.

Night and Day

The royal wedding and the execution of Osama Bin Laden are a good reminder of how far the news agenda can lurch in the space of a couple of days. On Friday and during the weekend, the run was all for images of expensive dresses, dashing Rolls Royces, cheering crowds and flapping plastic flags. By Monday morning these pictures had been replaced by other more grisly ones, of Bin Laden’s very odd, stark hideaway in rural Abbottabad – his old rooms upturned in the chaos of the gunfight, his carpet smeared in blood, a smashed clock and half-full medicinal bottles on an empty shelf.

Among all the interesting coverage of both these stories are a number of images on Flickr. For some years governments, organisations, political parties and so on have been using Flickr as a medium to publish official photographs and images. A British Monarchy Photostream documents the doings of the royal family and, over the weekend, they uploaded a wide-range of wedding shots that include sets devoted to the balcony scenes, the RAF flyover and a specially-commissioned McVities Cake, which had been requested by Prince William.

More interesting than this, for several reasons, is the Official Whitehouse Photostream. The photos published here are the work of Pete Souza, a photographer who travelled across the Hindu Kush in 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban and, in 2009, was appointed Official White House Photographer.

Pete Souza’s photographs are remarkably revealing and candid. They give a glimpse into the day-to-day life of the President and his aides, and also the decision-making processes behind important acts of government. The photo at the top of this piece is taken by Souza. It shows Obama, Vice President Biden and other senior members the administration receiving a briefing on Sunday night, a time that was described afterwards by counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as ‘one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people who were assembled here.’

Souza’s photograph has appeared in the world’s press over the last few days. On a macro level, it is a perfect example of what the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the decisive moment. Obama is hunched forward on his chair, cold eyes on the screen. Hilary Clinton covers her mouth with a hand, concealing an expression which might either suggest shock or concentration. It feels like a decisive moment because the fate of the mission is not yet determined and, on a grander level, Obama’s hopes of re-election next year might even rest on its success.

Social media is helping to expose these moments, even at the top of society, and more transparency can only be a good thing. It connects people to the political process; shows the care and concern of those in power and encourages interaction. I’m writing this at a quarter to twelve in the morning of 4 May and, over the past few days, 1,621,516 people have viewed the image on Flickr – a staggering number.

Just about all of the White House’s images are available to be re-published by others, being licensed under a special category United States Governmental Work. In the UK all of the royal family’s photos and most of those from the Prime Minister’s Official Photostream are produced by the PA, and are therefore protected by copyright.

While I’m going with Flickr, I thought that I’d list some of the other interesting photostreams that are currently being updated. There are four here which are particularly useful for journalists, as they are licensed to be reused:

Metropolitan Police – Great images of events, vehicles and so on.

Cabinet Office – Good quality photos. They include useful profile shots of various politicians like Nick Clegg and Francis Maude

UK Home Office – Day to day work of the department.

HM Treasury – Really useful. Not just day to day work of the department, but also official graphs and stats.

And some others: (mostly unlicensed)

DEFRA UK

Department of Health

UK Labour

Ministry of Justice

BisGovUK

British Library

Conservatives

British Museum

Liberal Democrats

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Image credit – Official WhiteHouse on Flickr

I suppose it was a sense of occasion which pulled me out of bed at half past six this morning, and drew me off to Westminster to take a few photographs of the Royal Wedding crowds.

I’ve put a set up on Flickr. This post doesn’t stem from any deep interest in those getting married, rather it is just a little document to record that ‘very strange but happy and peaceful atmosphere’ that exisited in London today.

And in other news, this website has just benefitted from a redesign. I hope you like it.

A different perspective

I’ve used a few iPhone photo apps over the last year, but I have never seen 360 Panorama before. A web-developer friend of mine, Xavi Esteve, put together this post of a stereographic photograph that he had taken using the app – and I thought I’d have a go.

It’s not too easy to take the perfect panorama – but as most mobile photos feel more like a work in progress than a finished article, I don’t suppose that it matters too much. Mine is a 360 tour around a room at my family home in Staffordshire that is flattened down to make the image about – which is called a stereographic.

If you do manage an acceptable stereographic, then it can give a beautifully stilted snapshot of your surroundings. Xavi’s works nicely among the fish and chip huts and amusement stalls at Brighton but I imagine that it could work quite nicely in various other surroundings: in stadiums, at conferences or music festivals and so on.

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Here’s a link to the complete photo on Flickr

Autumn 2010 is bearing a distinct resemblance to autumn 2009. It’s busy. But the excellent new PC Site website that we are just finishing off at work will be my last. After three years I’m going to try my hand at something a little different.

If you want to keep up with my writing work, then I’m blogging a little more regularly on my posterous blog.

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Photo of the Boris Bikes – full photograph on my Flickr