Matt Finch writes and helps communities, companies, and institutions around the world to do useful and surprising new things. His latest digital work is the interactive narrative, The Library of Last Resort.

You have a varied background including a Ph.D. in Modern Intellectual History. How did you arrive at this nexus of strategy, storytelling and technology?

I wrote a Ph.D. about people who fled the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe and how they adjusted to live in their host countries, including the stories they told about their pasts. At the same time I did work with asylum-seeking children and then a stint as a kindergarten teacher in England. I also wrote travel guides, magazine articles, and worked in local government and the tech sector. Increasingly, people asked me to work with them on high-level strategy, or getting a wider community involved in conversations they were having. 

I suppose all of those jobs were to do with relationships, and questions, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: where we’ve come from, who we are now, where we’re going next. 

For potential clients you describe your work as “scenario planning and foresight, policy consultation and strategic direction, plus facilitation and professional development”. How would you describe it for a broader audience, or for people who might take part in one of your sessions?

I help people, communities, and organisations to make better decisions about what they want to do in the future. Sometimes that involves imagining the futures which might await, in order to expand our understanding of what’s going on in the present. That’s what people call foresight, as opposed to forecasting, which is the traditional notion of trying to correctly predict the one future which will definitely occur.

Most recently, I’ve worked with Energy Consumers Australia to imagine the energy sector of 2050 and with the University of Oslo exploring the future of digital technology in schools. I’m currently advising a project called IMAJINE on the future of regional inequality across the European Union. It’s fun and rewarding to help people explore their strategic blindspots.

What are the creative works that have most inspired you?

I could and probably should reel off a whole bunch of writers and artists who have stayed with me and who I want to be associated with, but really I think that everything you take in inspires you. Right now I’m absorbing a bunch of Gail Simone’s glorious comics; José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, about queer identity and the future; and the catalogue from an exhibition of works by the surrealist Dora Maar. All of those are massively feeding my head.

The story of inspiration I most want to tell comes from my kindy teaching days. One afternoon, out of the blue, this kid Josh said, “I love melon. My mum says if I eat too much melon, I might turn into one. I could become a superhero…Melon Boy!”

He started laughing, absolutely killing himself with laughter, crying, doubled up, the whole thing. I think it was the first time he had ever made himself laugh in his whole life; he was almost surprised at the reaction he’d triggered in himself.

It was so cool. We stopped what we were doing and ended up making a Melon Boy comic together as a class, piecing together the story one image at a time. (A malevolent witch tricked Melon Boy into losing his powers by feeding him so much cake he became Cake Boy). Everyone had so much fun and was so into it; and it all came from this first moment of Josh surprising himself. I find those moments, those sparks, inspiring.

You work a lot with libraries, notably as creative in residence at the State Library of Queensland and Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs. What is it about libraries that has made them particularly receptive to your work?

In the information age, it’s fascinating to see libraries change with the times. Libraries are about discovery, not instruction; it’s a different power dynamic to other knowledge institutions, more open-ended and exploratory. There are also some significant tensions as our notions of the public and private shift. But even in the shelfiest old library of the past, the user went in, chose a book for themselves, opened it, made meaning for themselves as they read. That’s what I hope we can take with us into the future from the library tradition.

A library should be a place where communities connect with knowledge, information, and culture on their own terms, and that could even mean a place where the professional gatekeepers abdicate their power or are radicalized, letting themselves be surprised and led by the community they serve. There are things to learn from Ludi Price’s work on fanfiction archives, Audrey Huggett’s immersive play experiences in libraries, and grassroots “fugitive libraries”.

From your observations around the world, do you see trends or outliers today that may point the way for libraries to thrive into the future?

The world is changing so much and so fast, it’s difficult to make predictions. I also don’t think that you can necessarily copy-and-paste what works in one context to somewhere else. Good strategy is about making a diagnosis specific to your circumstances and then taking a smart bet on what you ought to do next. I think that great libraries now and in the future will be deeply attentive to the current and emerging needs of the communities they serve and which fund them.

How are libraries adapting to an environment where staying at home and social distancing are essential for the public good? Do you see these adaptations remaining in place beyond the pandemic?

Martin Kristoffer Bråthen, a Norwegian librarian, has written and spoken about this, asking, in an age of lockdown, “What is the library’s value if they focus on being the middleman between digital content and an online consumer?” 

I suspect that the changes libraries are making to adapt to the pandemic will be like those being made in wider society; some of them will stick because they are more desirable or more efficient. When there was a strike on the London Underground a few years back, researchers tracked the journeys made by commuters when their usual journey to work became impossible. A significant number of travellers stuck with their alternate routes after the strike ended; the crisis had actually shown them a more efficient way to get from their home to work and back each day.

In the long run, while some changes will stay, others could revert, and yet others will shift into even more novel and unfamiliar configurations. It’s nice to imagine life “beyond the pandemic” but I suspect we have a sustained season of turbulence ahead of us, not just COVID-19 but all the other social, economic, environmental changes which might now shake up our way of life.

Your most recent creative work is an old-school branching narrative, set—of course—in a library. Why did you choose a branching narrative design for this particular story?

I think a lot about the balance of power between author and audience. We talk about interactivity, but mostly it’s just inviting people to make choices from a set that has already been devised for them. Library of Last Resort was an experiment in finding the limits of that framework, and then trying to jump beyond those limits to a place where the person who starts as the reader can do something which the author couldn’t see coming, enlisting them as a creator and someone who can surprise others, forcing them to confront the blank page.

I’d previously written a “choose-your-own book review” in a similar vein for an Aussie arts journal, and through them I met the excellent and assiduous editor Adalya Nash Hussein, who worked with me on the Library of Last Resort. Her insights improved the text and structure, making the Library a better, richer place to visit.

The Library of Last Resort occupies that very blurred space between “game” and “narrative”. Do you lean towards one or the other label when framing the piece? Are such labels even helpful?

I like a good blur! 

If you approached it as a story, it’s probably quite frustrating because there’s a lot of wandering around and extraneous material in there – I wanted people to have the sense of getting lost in a collection, overstuffed with reading, before they made their escape. I think that happened to you when you first entered the Library, Simon – you had to ask me if there was a point to it all, or the point was just to get lost!

If you approach it as a game it’s probably equally frustrating because there’s only a token sense of mission or victory! I’m not really into keeping score. There is a hidden ending where you can escape from the Library in a hot air balloon; one of my playtesters found it on his first playthrough, just by making the choices that he would make if he was really in the Library. Some people’s brains are just wired that way, I guess.

Maybe the Library of Last Resort is an experiment in frustration and release…I think one of the hard things about trying something new is figuring out how to work with people’s expectations. When you click that link, do you want to be told a good story? Do you want to be given a good puzzle, with the satisfaction of finding the “right” solution? How much effort should you be expected to put in? How much uncertainty should you experience?

You present The Library of Last Resort as a form of escapism, but the story contemplates fundamental ideas around the nature of play and narrative, as well as truth and objective reality. How important is it for you to strike a balance between having fun and addressing some of the deeper complications of contemporary life?

When you’re a kid, the world is so new to you that you’re constantly exploring surfaces and probing the depths, asking the big questions, where do we come from, why does this happen. It’s also an emotional journey: losing your teddy bear can feel like cosmic despair, but jokes about eating too much melon can conjure sheer delight. All of that – the deep stuff, the superficial, and the make-believe – mixes with the everyday and apparently trivial. That’s a cool place to be.

I’m not pretending the Library of Last Resort gets anywhere near what Josh achieved with “Melon Boy”, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

Find out more about Matt at mechanicaldolphin.com.

This is the final installment of a three-part series on the work of the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Part 1 & Part 2

“Not my world. Not my accent. Not my story.”

We could be talking about marginalised communities working with visiting artists, or institutions trying to address social exclusion.

We could be talking about science-fiction exiles visiting an imagined alien world.

We could be talking about the frustrations of being forced to study Shakespeare’s language in a postcolonial nation.

We could be talking about all three.

In the final installment of this series on the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab, we turn to the inmates of Australia’s prisons. What part are they offered in digital life? What would they make of it for themselves? What might other communities learn from work with the prison population?

Making the Connection is a government-funded project to educate Australian prisoners using digital technology. Inmates are denied internet access, so five higher education courses are offered using an internet-independent server and notebook computers running a modified version of the University of Southern Queensland’s StudyDesk system. Since 2013, thousand students across Queensland, Tasmania, Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Australia’s federal capital have taken part in the course, studying modified courses across the arts, science, and business.

Associate Professor Helen Farley leads the project. Helen’s eclectic career has embraced musical journalism, veterinary science, and religious studies – but this made her the perfect candidate for the challenging business of prison education.

“I used to think that working with prisoners had to be vocational, it’s such a specific context,” Helen explains. “In fact, it took someone with my particular combination of skills to devise this project. I had knowledge of educational technology, the practical ‘just-get-it-done’ mentality of veterinarians, and my studies in religion gave an awareness of the spiritual dimensions to our lives – which you need when you are going to look at a prisoner and see beyond the crime to the whole person.”

Students on Making the Connection can feel liberated to write their lives anew, even when the courses are practical or prosaic. “One of our students told us than when he first went to prison, he would only think ahead five or ten minutes at a time. If someone approached him, he’d bash them. Becoming a student gave him a vocabulary for discussion and a sense that there were alternate outcomes for him to choose from. He could employ that new vocabulary as he wished to. And in an environment where there is very little opportunity to make choices, he could look forward to choosing the next course he took with us.”

Even the transformation from inmate to student was significant, says Helen. The identity of “prisoner” is heavy with shame, but seeing oneself as a student creates a sense of new possibility and common cause with other people studying for qualifications in the outside world.

These qualifications might be directly relevant to practical life skills, but they don’t have to be. Although correctional education tends to focus on vocational programs and outcomes, recent studies from a project in Utah indicate that even “impractical” courses such as astrobiology generate positive outcomes for prisoners, prisons, and wider society.

A paper from the 2017 Astrobiology Conference, “Facilitating transformations: Bringing astrobiology to incarcerated populations” (PDF download), sets out how astrobiology and space science activities can help inmates connect to the cycles of the cosmos, our common origins, and the possibility of life elsewhere in the Universe. Consideration of extraterrestrial life is linked to sustainability activities such as gardening, recycling, apiculture, and aquaculture. Researchers argued that these opportunities for reflection help prisoners to consider their place in the world, and the need to look after one’s self and one’s relationships.

These science-fictional enterprises are not so distant from the kind of arts outreach which also seeks to empower prisoners’ creativity.

Since 2006, the University of Queensland’s Rob Pensalfini has worked with the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble on the Shakespeare Prison Project, which enables prisoners to participate in performances of Shakespeare’s plays using the original text.

“Shakespeare Prison Projects have existed for some time in the US,” Rob explains, “and the American setting is rather different to ours. While US projects often run for twelve months and are tailored to older long-term inmates who are keen to reflect on their lives, we are often delivering three-month projects for young prisoners who are on relatively short sentences and are often moved between prisons.”

This might limit opportunities for prolonged rumination, but as Rob argues, “we give prisoners an opportunity to develop their social and emotional skills. This isn’t necessarily vocational training: we’re not looking to train up a new generation of stage managers, although, after their release, prisoners have gone on to train with the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble and even do backstage work for us.”

“The real question is, What would you rather prisoners do? Most of them are going to return to society eventually: how do you want them to behave when they are released?”

The Shakespeare Prison Project draws on Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” to encourage prisoners’ creativity and expression. Rob explains:

“We don’t lecture on ‘how to put on a performance’. The process flows from theatre games to rehearsals to performing in front of people. All the games we play break down authority between facilitators and participants so that when we put on a play we’re all in it together.”

Rob gives the example of one withdrawn prisoner whose only words in his first Shakespeare session were, “Thanks for coming, this is a miserable place.”

One week into the project, he was offered Macbeth’s final soliloquy: “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time…”

The prisoner delivered the speech with simplicity and honesty, finding that the words echoed both prison life and the addiction which had led him there.

“It seemed that the words spoke him, not vice versa,” Rob explains. After this moment, the prisoner became enthusiastic and keen to contribute, witty and hard-working. He played Caliban in The Tempest and Cassius in the following year’s Julius Caesar.

“The journey with Shakespeare’s language goes from ‘that’s a really weird way to put it’ to ‘that’s a really cool way to put it’,” Rob says. Rob had felt much the same as the child of barely literate Italian migrants, a first generation Australian subjected to tedious high school Shakespeare lessons: “Not my world. Not my accent. Not my story.”

The encounter with Shakespeare’s language isn’t just about coming to terms with the pre-existing text. The opportunity for self-expression and creativity comes in interpretation and realisation – including the need to think on one’s feet when someone flubs their lines or takes their cues from a scene that hasn’t happened yet.

The need to listen, respond, and embrace consequence during performances echoes Linn Ullman’s description of writing itself as a listening experience:

Some writers say “the characters come to me,” or the “characters become alive to me at night.” […] I don’t believe that my characters are alive. But the process requires a form of artistic listening, of understanding the consequences of the decisions you’ve made. If you are lucky enough to find voice and place, there are real consequences to those choices. Together, they limit the possibilities of what can possibly come next—and they help point the way forward. Your role, then, is to not stick to your original idea—it is to be totally faithless to your idea. Instead, be faithful to voice and place as you discover them, and to the consequences of what they entail.

Understanding consequences and rediscovering hope for the future are the kind of revelations we might hope for in prison: changes which mean that inmates return to the outside world more able to cope with its demands, and ready to write their own life stories.

Although the Shakespeare Prison Project is not tech-heavy, Rob argues that its work is still of particular benefit for prisoners who will face a world of increasingly complicated media and technologies.

“The digital world is still created and operated by bodies, hearts, minds, and souls. We don’t train people with technology but, for example, two prisoners who met on our project went on to work together in the graphic design studios at Borallon. There, prisoners are trained in design using computers with no internet connection – which incidentally makes their work a lot more original – and we’re using them as our designers now.”

The internet is not available to prisoners in the facilities served by Making the Connection and the Shakespeare Prison Project. However, the question of inmates’ access to offline digital devices still leads us to wonder what other liberties might be achieved in digital space. How could digital technologies help people to leave the correctional system with a better future ahead of them – better both for them and for the society that incarcerated them?

Prior to her prison education work, Helen Farley had developed opportunities for university students to visit the online virtual world Second Life in her religious studies courses.

Her students chose avatars with which to explore the possibilities of a virtual existence. This invited experimentation with identity, with participants choosing characters that crossed boundaries such as gender.

For Helen, this work with Second Life connects to Making the Connection through the chances it offers us to imagine alternative identities. That might involve religious studies students experiencing Islam by going on a virtual hajj in Second Life, or prisoners reflecting on where they want their lives to head after the term of their sentence.

“Both projects are about taking people out of their usual context and inviting them to express themselves differently,” Helen says. “The next step would be to take Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality – natural successors to Second Life – into prison settings.”

Work in digital education for the incarcerated speaks directly to the tensions present at the heart of Australia and many other countries. So many remote and rural communities in Australia are still ill-served by the national broadband network – indeed, they may lack any form of internet access. The internet-independent learning technologies piloted by Making the Connection may prove equally useful for excluded outback communities.

It is all too easy to interpret digital inclusion in terms of mere infrastructure, or extending the opportunity for citizens to become digital consumers – ensuring that online banking or shopping are available to all. But what of the digital opportunities which allow people to express themselves on their own terms, or change the course of their own lives beyond the one-click options of a retail experience?

Projects like Making the Connection take seriously the notion that, in a world permeated by digital technologies and media, inclusion means the freedom to be creative as well as freedom of participation. Their findings apply far beyond the walls of prison facilities to all lives constrained by authority and social order.

As the poet and essayist Darran Anderson reminds us in his Imaginary Cities, a survey of visions for urban living: “We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems … that provide poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups.”

It’s a chilling thought – but initiatives like Making the Connection and the Shakespeare Prison Project challenge received notions of inclusion; they invite us to question who we are allowing to write the digital future. We should hope for such initiatives to converge, bringing more opportunities for self-expression into digital education and more opportunities to use technology in traditional creative practice.

These projects show that even for the most physically isolated communities, there are opportunities to change, grow, and dream of better things, on and offline – because this digital life is lived by us all.

This is the second of a three-part series on the work of the University of Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Find Part 1 here.

Last time, we touched on a quote by the father of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser. Twenty years ago, he wrote that, “Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”

Today we recognise that even “taking a walk in the woods” is a complex experience, both as metaphor and reality. As digital beings, we are moving through manmade environments shaped by inequalities and injustice, by obligations and relations, including those we have with animals and nature. And a wooded landscape in nature is also burdened with history, the constraints of land management, and a growing understanding that trees, too, interact and communicate with one another in complex and multifarious ways.

When we think of who writes the digital future, we have to allow for the possibility that the author will be entirely nonhuman. The Naruto “monkey selfie” case – where animal rights group PETA went to court over copyright claims in an image taken by an Indonesian monkey – might seem extreme, but it speaks to increasing discomfort with traditional understandings of who gets to speak, to write, to be heard – and to guide their own lives.

In a 2016 interview, Beth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, set out her understanding of the collapse in traditional Western distinctions between life and nonlife, between the animal kingdom, human society, and the wider environment.

As climate change and human impact on the ecosystem become more pressing and their consequences more evident, Povinelli argues, traditional modes of power are challenged, and with them a way of understanding the world which presumes to distinguish between the living and non-living:

Climate change depends on an entire assemblage of things—sands, clouds, plants, micro and macro organisms, fresh and saltwater. Organisms depend on nonorganic matter […I]f I depend on the air to breath am I inside my body or outside in the toxic clouds over Fukushima? If I am dependent on ingesting water does my body stop at my skin or is it part and parcel of the lead poisoned pipes in Flint, Michigan? If the planet breathes are stones part of its organic nature?

Developments in artificial intelligence and autonomous digital technology exacerbate the crisis in determining what is alive and what is not. The smarter and more interactive nonliving digital devices get, the closer we come to a society where we might need to treat them with the same respect we would accord to people – and to the natural world.

Povinelli goes on to claim that:

a new interdisciplinary literacy is the only hope for finding a way to square our current arrangement of life with the continuation of human and planetary life as such. Scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, politicians, political theorists, historians, writers, and artists must gather their wisdom, develop a level of mutual literacy, and cross-pollinate their severed lineages.

This is an ambitious and revolutionary intellectual project, but also one which extends plausibly from the move towards interdisciplinary, collaborative forms of knowing.

What specific endeavours can researchers, writers, practitioners, and communities undertake to begin this “cross-pollination” of knowledge in the digital age?

One answer can be found at the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab, where research fellow Ann Morrison is beginning to explore the place where digital technology, animal sentience, and duties of care towards the vulnerable and needy overlap.

Ann is an interaction design researcher who creates and adapts devices and environments to help people simultaneously develop their awareness of both their immediate surroundings and information available via digital technology.

Projects such as 2009’s MapLens used augmented reality to blend paper mapping, smartphone technology, and users’ awareness of their own immediate surroundings; since then, Ann has also experimented with wearable technologies, interactive furniture, and digital solutions for the safety and well-being of care home residents.

At the Digital Life Lab, Ann now explores how technology can facilitate care for domestic animals. One project, “Dogs and People”, involves working with animal behaviourists to understand how technological interventions can play a part in improving pet owners’ care for, and communication with, their animals. That’s not about using technology to shape animal behaviour through reward and punishment: it looks at digital interactions in terms of relationships which affect both human and pet, such as the use of webcams to assuage an owner’s guilt at being away from their animal while they go to work.

In the long term, Ann expects this research into technologies of care and attention to reap rewards for other dependents, including elderly human relatives. Wearable and awareness-based technologies can help older adults to remain connected to their loved ones and their environment, empowering them to lead an active, effective, and meaningful life well into old age.

These are practical goals for focussed projects, but Ann’s research also speaks to an increasing trend where digital innovators recognize the need to broaden their sense of empathy and identification: to consider how our society’s technological developments impact on animals both domesticated and wild, on increasingly intelligent and sensitive AIs, and on the very land itself – recognized as having its own identity and agency by indigenous worldviews neglected in the age of colonialism.

As our sense of personhood expands to potentially include technological entities and a recognition of animal sentience, this affects our understanding of the question which kicked off this blog series – “who gets to write their own life?”

Sentience may prove to be an increasingly fraught issue for machines as well as nonhuman animals. Will we be programming the computers of the future or training them like dogs? And if computers get as smart as pets, should we be swearing at them or otherwise abusing them? As Michael Schrage puts it, “Just as one wouldn’t kick the office cat or ridicule a subordinate, the very idea of mistreating ever-more-intelligent devices becomes unacceptable.”

Philosopher Steven Shaviro writes in his book Discognition that:

…the nonhuman entities with which we share the world – including, but not limited to, our tools – are active in their own right. They have their own powers, interests, and points of view.  And if we engineer them, in various ways, they “engineer” us as well, nudging us to adapt to their demands. Nonhuman things must therefore be seen as…active agents with their own intentions and goals, and which affect one another, as well as affecting us…

As we consider these questions with regard to artificial intelligence and a collapse between the categories of “living” and “nonliving”, how does this impact on our sense of animal rights? If we come to respect animals wild and domestic as creatures with sentience and agency, how will they be allowed to communicate via digital technology and even write their own stories?

In Microserfs, Douglas Coupland’s thoughtful 1993 satire on Silicon Valley, characters find themselves pondering this question over a game of hackysack:

All of us got into this big discussion about what sort of software dogs would design if they could. Marty suggested territory-marking programs with piss simulators and lick interfaces. Antonella thought of BoneFinder. Harold thought of a doghouse remodeling CAD system. All very cartographic/high sensory: lots of visuals.

Then, of course, the subject of catware came up. Antonella suggested a personal secretary program that tells the world, “No, I do not wish to be petted. Oh, and hold all my calls.” My suggestion was for a program that sleeps all the time.

Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re human. We design business spreadsheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we’re at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

Coupland’s jokes belie a serious engagement with the big questions of how technology shapes our sense of who we, and the other creatures we share this planet with, truly are.

What was the stuff of literary satire a quarter of a century ago now seems a serious and urgent challenge for our digital lives. And it’s through projects like Ann’s that we will begin to discover what it means for us to share this digital world with others: not just animals and intelligent devices, but those human populations who are excluded or distanced from mainstream society. We’ll turn to such communities – principally, inmates of the prison system – in our final report on the work of the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab.

It’s always, ultimately, been about writing your own story.

Modern information science and technology – the knowledge and practices that underpin the ways we entertain and inform ourselves, store knowledge, contact public representatives, commit crime or enforce the law, manage our finances or our health – have been wildly transformed since the heyday of the Dewey Decimal System, but at heart it’s always been about that freedom: to write the story of your life as you see fit.

Once you went into the library, chose a book from its shelves, read it and made sense of it as you wished. Librarians were never teachers or preachers, inflicting a curriculum or credo on you. Even before the digital revolution, pioneers like Aby Warburg, founder of the library that bears his name, experimented with slide projectors and other technologies to allow advanced forms of serendipitous browsing & intellectual connection. A New Yorker piece on the Warburg Institute, “the world’s weirdest library”, described it as a forerunner of Google Images.

Digital technology, permeating everyday existence, increasingly shows its capacity to constrain and surveil us or to distort our perceptions of the truth. Yet its abilities to liberate and empower users are also developing.

Twenty years ago, the father of ubiquitous computing Mark Weiser wrote, “Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”

Today, we recognise that when we take a “walk in the woods”, we are moving through a complex social environment shaped by inequalities and injustice, by our relationships with animals and nature, and by the basic bonds of parenthood and family.

Out on Australia’s Darling Downs, a team at the University of Southern Queensland have founded the Digital Life Lab – a unit exploring the ways in which Australians and others experience life shaped by the impact of information technology.

Over three installments, we’ll be looking at their research and how it intersects with The Writing Platform’s focus on authorship and literature in the digital age. This week, we’re joined by social scientist Kate Davis.

Kate’s research is in the field of information experience – using qualitative approaches to get to the heart of how people encounter, make sense and use of information – especially via social media.

“We’re increasingly immersed in social media and in the streams of information that form there,” she says. “Whatever your preferred social media platforms, whichever social media spaces you inhabit, you encounter vast amounts of information every time you open an app to see what’s happening online. I’m interested in understanding how we experience that information: how we create it, how we share it, how we use it, what impact it has on our lives, how we feel about it.”

Kate’s doctoral thesis looked at how mums use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.

“Watching my friends’ use of social media change as they became parents, I became intrigued with how they shared advice, health information, recipes, and even the occasional roar of frustration online.” Kate used in-person interviews to talk to new mums about their experiences and backed that up by observing their social media activity.

The age of smartphones and social media has put vast computing and communication power in the hands of ordinary people, with an enormous impact on both Kate’s field of information studies and our capacity as individuals to write an account of our own lives across various media.

“On blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter,” Kate says, “mothers write out their stories as a way to normalise their experiences, to help others, and to make sense of their new identity as mothers.”

“Some post to social media with the express aim of contributing to the discourse on what it means to be a mother. Others are simply enacting and documenting their lives online. But regardless of what motivates them to post, they are writing a narrative about what it means to mother today.”

Social media allows us to blend word, sound, and image to account for the past, chronicle the present, or even express hopes, fears, and plans for the future. Becoming a parent is a dramatic transition in the lives of many, and therefore ripe for exploration in these terms.

“It takes a village to raise a child,” says Kate. “We make parenting decisions amid a flow of shared stories, hints, tips, and parenting woes – but these days the village has become a digital metropolis.”

“You have mummy bloggers, ‘parenting experts’, friends, relatives, and health professionals all producing and sharing information across social platforms. That’s not just knowledge consumption, it’s creation: the writing and telling of new folk wisdom for the digital age.”

The changes creating this new culture are not just technological, but demographic. Women are having children later in life and returning to work sooner after birth; a declining fertility rate in Australia means that there are fewer “peer mothers” in any given neighbourhood as mixed-age families transform our suburbs, with a potential for physical social isolation.

“Becoming a mum can be one of life’s most rewarding experiences,” says Kate, “but also one of the loneliest. Your baby doesn’t come with a manual and the emotional connections you develop with fellow ‘virtual villagers’ can supplement or even replace the connections you make offline.”

The information mothers create, share, and consume on social media might range from recipes, cat videos, and funny memes to opinion pieces and informative articles on parenting, healthcare, and other issues that might inform the choices you make about raising your child.

Just as the words of a recipe transform foodstuffs into a meal, the words and information consumed online contribute to the material decisions which shape your child’s own life story.

Some of this information might be problematic or pernicious: Kate’s next project focuses on social media content related to immunisation, and how mothers navigate vaccination decisions as part of their online knowledge experience.

“Immunisation is a hot topic right now and over and over again I see information about immunisation – both for and against – popping up in my social media feeds, often triggering heated debates. Some of that information is evidence-based, considered and trustworthy, but some of it isn’t.”

“I think there are opportunities for health information providers to disseminate information about immunisation via social media. But to do that, we need to understand how mothers interact with information they’re exposed to in social media, and how that impacts on decision making about immunisation.”

So much of the fight against fake news currently focus on elections and the political sphere, but the phenomenon arguably has roots in earlier forms of misinformation. Economist Tim Harford’s piece “The Problem With Facts” describes one antecedent of today’s fake news: the deliberate work by 20th-century tobacco firms to produce ignorance about the real health consequences of smoking.

“The facts about smoking — indisputable facts, from unquestionable sources — did not carry the day,” Harford writes. “The indisputable facts were disputed. The unquestionable sources were questioned. Facts, it turns out, are important, but facts are not enough to win this kind of argument.”

Kate’s research into anti-vax and social media leads us to question how online information shapes the intimate spaces of parenthood and the choices we make for our children’s well-being today. Rather than take a paternalistic view and focus simply on ways to endorse and support official sources of information, Kate’s study of information experience allows for interventions which support and empower users to make informed decisions on their own terms.

If asserting the facts has not been enough to win the historical battle against “fake news”, it will take the diligent, empathetic work of Kate and her peers to fully understand the spread of pernicious information online – and how best to equip people to manage it.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll continue to explore the digital world we live and write in, asking who is allowed access to the creative potential of digital technology. In an age when a selfie taken by an ape can become part of a court battle, and intelligent machines grow increasingly autonomous, how can we best explore who has authority and agency to create in the digital age?

Australia is a big country. Queensland is a big state in a big country, one that is particularly geographically dispersed and politically fractured. It is also home to some of the poorest areas in Australia that experience many barriers to accessing for arts and cultural activities. 

Government regional arts programs have the potential to develop and deliver arts content, activities and events in and to remote, rural and regional areas that build community, develop skills and celebrate creativity. However, the reality of arts policy and programs has been vastly different to the potential. Funding is too often focused on providing one-off performances of metropolitan shows or replicas of city festivals delivered as satellite events in regional towns. Importantly, local arts organisations are under-funded and under supported to create sustainable long term arts programs.

After three years of making stories across Queensland using post it notes, pens and paper, smart phones and open source storytelling software I have learned a few things about the role of the arts in regional Queensland and the disconnect sometimes between urban and rural areas.

1. Regional areas are filled with passionate creative people. Each town we visited had a vibrant arts culture that was part of the every-day workings of the community, and the creative events put on by locals were crucial to the fabric of the town. Libraries often function as home to the writer’s group, art group, silver smiths and pottery club. These small self-organising entities are dynamic and crucial to well-being of the town.
2. Arts events in Roma or Bundaberg aren’t the same as arts events in Brisbane. Regional events combine different activities and different parts of the community. For example, an art exhibition might find the local gallery teaming up with the bowls club to promote the opening of the art show followed by barefoot bowls and a BBQ. The overwhelming message from regional areas was that they want to share and contribute cultural content not just receive it.
3. Rural towns aren’t intimidated by technology. Remote communities are familiar with using new technology as part of their way of life to combat isolation. Initiatives such as School of the Air, tele and e health and robotics being deployed in agriculture mean that residents of rural areas less intimidated by digital technology than most city workshops I’ve conducted.
4. Lastly and most importantly: regional areas do not feel heard by the cities, and the consequences of this disenfranchisement affect everyone.

In this video I discuss these issues with Matt Finch (Creative in Residence State Library Queensland) and Tyler Wellensiek (Strategic Projects Officer, Regional Access & Public Libraries) both of whom have worked extensively in remote Queensland.  We also manage to touch on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian futures and the rise of right wing populist politics in western democracies!

Why would an Aussie library get its designers to build a drag and drop comics website?

Aren’t there already plenty of free comic makers online?

What are you even playing at?

Last year, Talia Yat and Phil Gullberg of the State Library of Queensland’s innovation space the Edge built the Fun Palaces Comic Maker. It was based on a comic book dice game I devised at the Manila Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in the Philippines.

The maker allowed people to create their own five-panel comic strip by dragging and dropping images. These were published online as part of Fun Palaces, an annual celebration of community, arts, and science around the world.

Our pilot project in 2015 encouraged users worldwide to surprise us with non-narrative comics, cheeky horror stories, and even comics in Te Reo Māori.

This year, people won’t just be surprising us with their stories – they’ll be free to reimagine the project wholesale, as we’ve released the code behind the Comic Maker on Github, with the help of developer Steven Moschidis.

Putting the maker on Github means the public can download the code and adapt it to create variants, add different images, or develop brand new features. The only limits are your ambition and imagination.

In 2015, the Comic Maker permitted web users around the world to create stories which we couldn’t have predicted – smart, sophisticated, crude, dark, funny, twee and all points in between.

This year, releasing the code behind the project opens the doorway to an understanding of “digital literacy” which is not just about consumption, or one institution’s objectives.

We aim to encourage a digital future which is open, flexible, community-led, and most importantly, capable of surprising us all.

So what’s all this got to do with libraries? And what are we playing at?

• Physical, digital, it’s all materialIt turned out that MCAD Manila had a plentiful stock of cube-shaped cardboard boxes which we were able to transform into comic book dice. Players drew on each face of their cube, rolled them like dice in teams of five, and then the teams told stories by arranging the five images that landed face up.And of course, wonderfully, the kids and teens we worked with didn’t just do as they were told. They began rearranging the cubes in other ways, creating towers and pyramids which told the stories they wanted to, in the way they wanted.
• The collaborative approach meant that you didn’t need to be the best at drawing, or the best performer, to contribute to the finished product. You could tell stories in English, Tagalog or any language you pleased. The aim was to juxtapose images in space and then weave a tale which linked those images.
• The comic maker was born from necessity – running a workshop in a modern art gallery with a bunch of Filipino kids aged from infants to teens, not all of whom spoke English.

Fun Palaces: The Next Generation

The dice game evolved into a biographical comics version based on the art of MC Escher and a text-based version intended for professional development workshops – alongside appearances at street fairs in Brisbane and London.

That was great, but we also wanted to explore digital offerings with a similar degree of freedom and unpredictability.

One example was a choose-your-own book review for Australian magazine The Lifted Brow, which saw you trapped between the panels of a comic book – but even that was still too constrained by authorial intent for my tastes.

In the UK, I began working with Fun Palaces, an international movement which helps communities to celebrate their own talents and ambitions in the arts and sciences. On the first weekend in October every year, communities around the world take over local venues so that their friends, neighbours, colleagues, and strangers can come together and try their hand at the arts and sciences for free.

The Fun Palaces manifesto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist” chimes well with the vision of libraries as “the TARDIS on your street corner” – a public gateway to all knowledge and culture, which lets anyone, from any background, explore whatever they want to from the realm of human understanding and imagining.

As part of a co-producer role on eleven simultaneous Fun Palaces in the London Borough of Lambeth, I arranged for the State Library of Queensland to build a pilot online comic maker.

Some people wondered why we would do this, when there were already free comic book makers available online.

We turned the question around.

This was about process, not product – the aim was not to build the best comic maker in the world in a matter of weeks during late 2015. It was to invite the community to join a conversation and use our resources – much as we like them to use our collections!

If libraries offer creative play, storytimes, makerspaces, and, yes, Fun Palaces in physical locations – why don’t they do that online too?

Encouraging the library’s web team to design this game meant acknowledging their creativity and capacity to do amazing and innovative things beyond “business as usual” – because good work, in any sector, means respecting your team’s ability to innovate and think for themselves.

Releasing the code behind the Comic Maker meant that we were empowering the community – in the very broadest sense of “all web users” – to play with the infrastructure as well as the content of our digital offering.

The essence of a library project is that it’s not meant to teach, preach, or fulfil the requirements of a curriculum: it’s meant to open doors for people to learn and create on their own terms. Comparing it to existing free cartoon makers is like saying we don’t need libraries because we have Amazon and e-books.

• Games have their own art historyBut the truth is more complex: digital and physical traces are interwoven in the Maker’s history, going back through its comic-game forefathers.These images came from Jessica Abel and Matt Madden’s Panel Lottery, an exercise to help people devise their own comics.McCloud had devised a game called 5-Card Nancy, where players laid out individual panels from the Nancy comic strip as playing cards. The aim is to create a five-panel comic, with players voting to decide if each panel is judged worthy to continue the story.
• McCloud pays tribute to the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse in his account of 5-Card Nancy’s origins, but he also acknowledges a Usenet post written in the 1990s by Barry Deutsch. The comic maker of 2016 traces its history back through physical comics to the Surrealists, to the iconic Nancy cartoon, and back once again into digital space, and the early days of open-ended Internet discussion.
• However, games have their own art history – Abel and Madden were inspired in turn by the work of Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics remains one of the defining studies of the medium.
• The original Comic Book Dice challenged players to tell stories using three simply drawn characters: a tall person, a short person, and a penguin.
• We’re always so attracted by new and shiny things. With the current vogue for everything digital, it would be fun to hold up the Comic Maker as a bright example of 21st century library outreach.

• Nothing new under the sun?An old quarry was transformed into a space with three play areas and a thousand-book library, plus indoor games like table tennis, and workshops for kids to learn dressmaking and woodwork. Brisbane’s Sunday Mail described it in 1937 as a “kingdom of happiness”.Yet the truth is this: libraries have always been about play and exploration, not just shelves and storage. More and more we recognise that that kingdom of happiness should be open not just to children, but to everyone, regardless of their age or identity.And that journey into the kingdom of happiness has already begun…
• US librarian Justin Hoenke compares libraries to video game platforms: if they host storytimes and makerspaces within their walls, stock fiction on their shelves, and participate in events like Fun Palaces that embrace the whole community, then you should expect to find playful as well as pragmatic offerings in digital library spaces too.
• Stories like that make me smile. So often people marvel at the novelty of 21st century libraries being about more than books, or we have to battle against dumb detractors who think that digital media has somehow removed the need to support public access to knowledge and culture.
• I live just down the road from a suburban Brisbane play area called Bedford Playground. It was founded in 1927 after a number of children had been injured playing in the crowded, dirty streets of Spring Hill.

Take your next step here.

Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs and 2016 Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland