Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

The Cartographer’s Confession
By James Attlee

The Cartographer’s Confession is the story of Thomas Andersen, who, as a child, migrates to London with his mother during the second world war and the fallout from that event in the decades that follow. Presented as a series of source documents—tapes, letters, and photographs—collected by the present-day researcher and screenwriter, Catriona Schilling, the app reveals its story through layers of fiction and non-fiction, timeframes, and locations.

Commissioned by the Ambient Literature project, The Cartographer’s Confession is designed to be experienced on location, appropriately using a map as its primary navigation. It’s not hard to imagine the power of walking through the streets of London as the story unfolds on in your ears and your phone. Though it does offer a chronological ‘armchair mode’, the app’s dreamy soundscapes and contrast of present and past lose some of their impact 16,000km away.

But even with a diminished experience, Attlee’s writing is concise and emotive, the performances are solid, and the app’s design, especially its sound, shows beautiful attention to detail. The soundtrack by The Night Sky is also very cool, if sometimes distracting. Given the quality of its writing and production values, it’s easy to see how The Cartographer’s Confession won over the judges of the 2017 New Media Writing Prize.

The Cartographer’s Confession is available to download from the App Store and Google Play.

What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you?

Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

Can we shape a digital literary form using the world around us?

What happens to literature when a reader is mobile and engaged in a narrative both spatially and temporally?

How can a writer use ubiquitous computing, available using a smartphone, to situate readers in a literary work?

Such questions brought together researchers from three universities in the UK (the University of the West of England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham) to think about the intersections between place, technology and literature.

The resulting Ambient Literature project is a two-year AHRC-funded research collaboration investigating the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, which respond to the presence of a reader to tell stories. Such stories take place both in time and space; the reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of a narrative.

Works of ambient literature can be shared with the reader in different ways, including through text and audio, and the reader is asked to also read situation and context. They may read text on the screen of a smartphone and listen to audio through headphones but also read the physical environment around them, walk along city streets or experience the sights and sounds of a single location. For example, in work resulting from the StoryPlaces project at the University of Southampton. This has both the potential to offer both an immersive literary experience as well as a reframing of the everyday world.

The technology used by the Ambient Literature project is often not new. For many years, artists, writers and performers have experimented with locative storytelling and used GPS tracking to tell stories through tagging locations. There is a long history of this type of media and creative production; in arts and performance by artists such as Janet Cardiff, who creates audio walks, the writer Eli Horowitz, who in The Silent History^⁠ tagged stories to locations using GPS so the reader had to move between spaces to access story with the use of a smartphone and, working at the intersection between performance and games, Blast Theory , an artist group that uses interactive media to engage audiences.

Countless others have explored this terrain and experimented with the idea of the situated participant who engages with a physical location through their movements in time and space. To add to the work of these artists, writers and performers, the Ambient Literature project wants to experiment with how ubiquitous technologies found within smartphones, such as sensors, can be an opportunity to access the data that is all around us to produce literary works.

To help us understand what ambient literature might become we have commissioned writing projects from writers Duncan Speakman, James Attlee and Kate Pullinger . The first of our commissioned works, It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman, launched in May. It is a book and audio experience that uses music, narration and field recordings from three places in the world experiencing rapid human and environmental changes; the swamplands of Louisiana, Latvian villages and the Tunisian Sahara.

During this work, the reader is asked to physically seek out, by walking, types of locations in their own environment, such as elements of the natural world and human-made feature, and, in response, are given sounds and stories from remote but related situations.

At each location, the reader is invited to make connections between places and, in the process, create a map of both where they are standing and places that may not exist in the future. As the reader is encouraged to walk along city streets, there is space around the narrative for interruption, unpredictability and serendipity and this is a potentially exciting feature of ambient literature. A writer is unable to know exactly what a reader will encounter and so must think about their experience. For example, there may be an interruption from a passerby, an unexpected encounter or a strange sight in the physical environment.

This experience of being part of a narrative but staying open to these uncontrollable parts of a real-world space can resemble the visual art and performance art practices of participation and improvisation. The reader may be reading a text and listening to audio but, at the same time, they are part of an immersive experience that includes everything around them. It Must Have Been Dark by Then encapsulates this idea. In the experience, a reader is asked to navigate city streets through walking but there are physical boundaries and borders in place. The city controls their movements and they cannot pass entirely freely from one place to the next. There are rivers, commercial and business areas, fenced off areas and unsafe places. You can’t get to certain places and this becomes an interesting metaphor in the work. You experience a work about physical global borders while experiencing the borders in front of you.

In ambient literature, as an emerging form with its roots across media and literary production, there are opportunities for writers to play with the physical material of the city to shape a story. Technologies that have become a part of our everyday lives can be used to build narratives that are immersed in places. Through a carefully orchestrated experience, a writer can draw a reader’s attention to different aspects of the environment, highlight what is usually unseen or distract them from the familiar. This involves a re-thinking of what we understand as literary, what we mean by reading and how we can use the technologies all around us to tell stories.

You can follow the progress of the Ambient Literature project on our website [www.ambientlit.com] or on twitter @ambientlit.

Our second work of ambient literature, The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee, will be launched in September followed by our third, Liquid Continent by Kate Pullinger.

All images by Mark Lawrence capturing It Must Have Been Dark by Then. 

What new kinds of stories can we tell as our media become pervasive? What kinds of new experiences do location based technologies offer readers?

Ambient Literature is a two-year research project, a collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa, and Birmingham Universities, involving a combination of historical and theoretical research and tangible practice-led inquiry. The post will be based at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.

They are commissioning three authors to make original works and working with readers to understand the beauty and the power of situated literary experiences. The post will run over the length of the project, the post holder assisting with research and delivery in the process of production for each of the three original Ambient Literature works.

As such the post is aimed at a suitably qualified creative producer, who is committed to both delivering excellent projects as well as furthering their research by practice or publication. This research may be in the field of – for example – digital cultural forms, creative practice or new markets in publishing.

Deadline: 27 May 2016

Location: Bristol

Find out more…

I’m always disappointed when I see a band play the song the way I heard it in my living room. Whether it’s in a pub, a concert hall, or giant-sized festival stage it has to be more than a listening experience. I want something I can raise up and pour over my head. It’s not just for my ears. Like a Hobnob in a hot brew, I want to dunk all my other senses in it too. I want to mangle the lyrics of songs I’ve (partially, sometimes horribly) memorised and hurl them back at the artist. Call me greedy, but I want value for the time and effort taken to nurture that small but necessary bit of love. I want to see the band play, feel the bass in my chest, and taste the joy, or sorrow and everything in between. I still have Charlie Burchill’s guitar pick from a Simple Minds concert. I know exactly where I keep it and where and when I got it, but couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to one of their songs in earnest (though finding the link did make me nostalgic).

I love reading. Screen, page, cereal box, it matters not. I throw myself at it. If a story expects me to get off my arse and engage with it in its own environment, there better be good reason. Locative literature, the name most commonly given to in-situ story telling, takes the reading experience and lets the reader wallow (or paddle, depending on the story) in the physical dimensions of its setting. Locative literature is, as you would expect, a synthesis of characteristics of oral story telling traditions, city walks, and serialised fiction. These stories aim to take their reader to the place and time and drop them in it.

Regardless of their nature, great stories want for the same basic elements: characters, conflict, premise, plot, and so on, but they all happen some where at some time. Setting is an all-encompassing must-have in storytelling. Well-crafted settings carry the reader to their world, inspire emotional tone, and affect the characters – they can also take a dramatic role. At the very least, even when it doesn’t really matter (I’m looking at you Edgar Allan Poe and your Tell-Tale Heart), a story has to happen in a place. If the reader engages with the story in that particular place, there has to be more. And fortunately, in most cases, they usually do.

Locative literature projects can cast long shadows on the pavements tread to get through them, where others will disappear in the space of a frosty breath. I’m going to tell you about some now. It feels sexy to say I’ll be taking you to New York, Edinburgh, Oslo and Melbourne, but in doing so I will only highlight the classic premise and fundamental tension in locative literature – it really is one of those things when you have to be there.

Today, the practice of presenting a story in its most relevant physical environment, and augmenting it with digital tools and techniques, has become inordinately sophisticated. Take [murmur], an audio documentary project that collects and presents stories told by residents in specific locations. Launched in Toronto in 2003, the project spread to Vancouver, Montreal, San Jose, Edinburgh (2007), Dublin (2007), and Geelong (2009). Using mobile phones and a website, it captures locals’ experiences of a locale. Places you’ve been or recognise are given pinpoint depth and texture. The project seems (quite unfairly) antiquated alongside contemporaries such as Craig Mod’s Hi, with its stylish sophistication and reach (you may also like Jonathon Safran Foer’s Cultivating Thought, but they do the same thing, bring a very personal view of the world to your doorstep.

In this context [murmur] is hardly old. Locative literature has, Jason Farman argues, been around since Christian pilgrims began walking the Stations of the Cross. Before disruptive tech even opened the door to physical/virtual interplay, a plethora of variations were popular. From Jane Austen’s Bath to Greenwich Village, Lonely Planet regularly update their literary walking tour guide. Their list does not include the Secret Edinburgh tour (by Rebustours), which juxtaposes Ian Rankin’s hard-drinking detective’s best with works of Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. Thanks to sneak peaks from forthcoming novels and irregular but frequent appearances by Rankin, the tour was, for a little while at least, the second most popular tourist attraction in Edinburgh, after the Castle. The combination of settings and the added extras proved deliciously attractive to the crime writer’s expansive fan base.

Edinburgh is also home to imaginative variations of the form. Ghost Walks, or their thematic relatives, can be found in many cities and tourist destinations – the famous cellblock audio tour of Alcatraz is just one example. Whether literary, religious, historical or supernatural, these walks tend to have a guide (even if its an electronic one) and often draw on elements of physical theatre to imbue dynamic sense of drama to their locative and literary nature, such as actors in Roman costumes; paid performers reading the relevant author’s poetry; and dressed up ‘ghosts’ flitting through shadowy graveyards. These works are most commonly driven by enterprise, celebration (spiritual or otherwise), or entertainment – or all three. Sarah Winter’s performance artwork, Library for the End of the World attempted to catalogue and curate a database of participants memories through a growing library of cassettes in Brisbane’s West End. It is a serene example of a work that offered an experience beyond the orthodoxy of enterprise or entertainment.

When Matt Blackwood, an artist, writer and innovator (and personal professional crush), says he uses his work to connect to the reader, he is referring specifically to the level of physical immersion locative literature can offer. Graffitied walls and stale odours take on new significance when a short story is read to you in one of Melbourne city’s famed laneways and alleys. In Blackwood’s 2011 project, MyStory, listeners were led to the setting of a short work by author Tony Birch where they listened to a 5 minute reading. When the story was complete, the small crowd stayed in the alley to talk, touch the bricks, and experience the space with a new perspective. In 2012, for 2Stories, Blackwood linked two three-minute audio stories to bold and beautiful QR codes (see below), decorated with elements of their stories, and hung them next to a studio that used to be a restaurant – he connected a story set in each through two characters.

It’s a strange and wondrous feeling standing in the street listening to a story set in a building you can lean against. In Rita Raley’s discussion of mobile narratives, she notes a story’s engagement with the physical, the material, and the lived space in functional terms and the inherent risks in those same stories denying, or worse, losing sight of the social or political aspects. This is an aspect Blackwood works hard to overcome in these and other works.

While locative literature can be ephemeral and that its impermanence is also part of the attraction of the form. There are long-term works, which take a particular location and build on it, and others which encourage readers to stay longer. Ben Russell’s 1999 Headmap Manifesto highlighted incredible prescience in its encouragement to readers to think about space and location as opportunities for gathering and placing information through interaction with personalised tech (he went as far as suggested use of a proto-Google Glass). Designed to reveal ‘hidden’ stories of the city of Oslo, Anders Sundnes Løvlie’s Textopia was an experiment in facilitating public contributions to an experimental story system. This approach drew in collaborative writing, turned found texts into literary compositions, and sought exploration of place through the act of writing. The resulting work was positioned to read as a form of situated, poetic documentary on an urban textual environment. It required substantial time in its place to engage with the work. No discussion of locative literature can close without mention of Eli Horowitz. The writer followed his collaboration (written under the pseudonym Gus Twintig) on The Clock without a Face with The Silent History. The story of the emergence of a generation of children who would never read or write stands foremost in the canon. Where The Clock without a Face sent readers scurrying across the continent on a real-life treasure hunt for hand-made jewel-encrusted numbers, The Silent History was developed as an iOS app filled with uploaded testimony of its characters and GPS-responsive segments that are switched on where the reader lands in specific locations, such as Chicago’s O’Hare airport or a neighbourhood in lower Manhattan. It has since been cemented in hard copy, which while capturing the whole story for convenience and removing the frustration of never being able to get to New York to try it for yourself, removes the work’s primary purpose.

The Story City project delivers Choose Your Own Adventures through an iOS app, which overlays real environments with fictional tales (full disclosure: I’ve worked on two separate projects). Stories are currently located in Brisbane, Adelaide and the Gold Coast, Australia, where the project partners with local councils. Stories are often purposed as a form of cultural tourism, highlighting specific places such as newly (re)developed parks and laneways, the project encourages the reader to think about familiar spaces in different ways and challenges them to play more active roles such as solver and explorer to follower and leader (Mike Jones highlights even more when he discusses interactive storytelling). Story City stories are serialised or chaptered, have a designated start and finishing point and are often in second person to achieve an immediacy that is much rarer in hard copy fiction. In terms of setting, the narrative moves quickly across interspersed short bursts of text that contain explicit direction to the next point, puzzle or narrative event – a map is often provided too. While a dark, atmospheric short fiction can easily lose its impact in the bright Queensland sun, or turn into a rain soaked unintended nightmare – mobile phones and water don’t mix well – the literal race across an urban park moves the story from the individual reading in a comfy chair to a energetic social exercise.

Locative literature offers those rare elements to reading that the book (I am a little loathe to say) cannot, the possibility of, for example, continuing exploration in a landscape like Textopia, where the specific terrain of the text grows and changes with each contribution. The form occupies the liminal space between reader engagement and play. Some works, those created by Horowitz and curated through Story City, look to facilitate the participants’ travel through the landscape of their works, offering a physical experience, which can change with each read. Others are anchored, but still question the readers’ experience, their engagement with the text and its physical place. The writers noted here use setting as the key element of great storytelling and their augmentation of their work through the possibilities offered by the physical environment and available tech, underline the value in enriching the reading experience. Good locative literature should give you more, it should at the very least, give you the dunk and let you take the pick home for your efforts.

During the summer of 2009 I spent a week reading and writing in residence at the Elizabeth Bishop House, in the tiny and thus somewhat incongruously named village of Great Village, Nova Scotia. Readers may know Great Village as the setting of Bishop’s haunting story In the Village, first published in the New Yorker in 1953. One day I went for a walk to the village store. I was on the hunt for postcards, intrigued by Bishop’s observation: “The grey postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating… one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full-size, and in colour”.

caption Postcards for sale in the village store, Great Village, Nova Scotia. Photo by J. R. Carpenter, 2009.

In the back of the store, which is now an antique shop, I happened upon a well-preserved copy of a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s. Nova Scotia being New Scotland, an old map of Old Scotland seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to find. Why I felt the need to buy an out-of-date-map to a city I’d never been to was not at all clear.

Questions of place have long-pervaded my fiction writing and maps have figured prominently in many of my web-based works. An outline of a map of Nova Scotia served as the interface for one of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996). In The Cape (2005), I used an assortment of maps, charts, and diagrams borrowed from an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979 as stand-ins for family photographs. In In Absentia (2008) I used the Google Maps API to haunt the satellite view of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with stories of former tenants forced out by gentrification. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008) included an impossible map of ancient Rome. I’d never set out to map a place I’d never been before, but then sometimes maps seem to call places into being.

City of Edinburgh Transport Map published by the Edinburgh Geographical Institute in the 1940s.

In 2011 I was commissioned to create a new work for an exhibition called Remediating the Social, at Inspace gallery in Edinburgh. Handily I already had a map of the city. In May 2012 I travelled to Edinburgh to begin research for what would eventually become a massive hybrid print and digital project called The Broadside of a Yarn (2012). More information on that project can be found in an article called The Print Map as a ‘literary platform’ published on The Literary Platform in May 2013.

During my research I used the 1940s edition of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map purchased in Great Village, Nova Scotia, to undertake a series of experimental walks, or dérives, in and around the modern city of Edinburgh. Dérive is a practice first explored by the Letterist International in Paris in the early 1950s and later taken up by the Situationist International. The concept of dérive was introduced by Ivan Chtcheglov in his Formulary for a New Urbanism (published under the pseudonym Gilles Ivan). Chtcheglov proposes a future city, in which “the main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING” (1953). In The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International  (2011), McKenzie Wark suggests that Chtcheglov “sought not the rational city but the playful city, not the city of work but the city of adventure. Not the city that conquers nature, but the city that opens toward the flux of the universe” (2011: 20). The advertising copy on the back of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map hovers between these states — on one hand promoting such solid stolid institutions as the Bank of Scotland, North British Rubber Footwear, and Scougal’s Oatcakes, “Scotland’s National Food in its Most Palatable and Convenient Form” — and on the other hand issuing imperatives toward the exploration of a playful city, a city of adventure, and, read from a contemporary vantage point, a city safely adrift in simpler past:

Follow the Star of Health.
Encompass the City.
Map it Out For Yourself.
Do Not Allow Your Holiday to be Spoiled by Rain.

However many times I set out toward the flux of the universe in search of the points of interest advertised on the map — The Largest Stock of Hand-Knitted Woollies in Britain, Radiator and Mudwing Repairs and Other Sheet Metal Work, Vertical Filing Systems and Visible Card Index, and Carpenter Joiner Jobbing Specialists, orders in any part of the city or elsewhere in towns or country promptly attended to — dérive led me instead into Edinburgh’s wealth of museums, libraries, and used and antiquarian print, map, and book shops.

In the Old Town Bookshop I found an A5-sized staple-bound booklet called Walks from City Bus Routes published by Edinburgh City Transport in the late 1950s. This booklet contains twenty-two narrative descriptions of walks, each beginning and ending within easy reach of bus routes, and each illustrated by a small black and white line drawing. The preface states: “this book is designed for the visitor or the resident who wishes to have a change from the more usual places of tourist interest and to combine a little mild exercise with exploration of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs.” The unnamed author adds that her one wish “is that those who follow these trails derive as much pleasure from them as she has done over the years.”

Many of the lesser known parts of the city and suburbs the author urges us to explore are no longer know-able. Many of the green spaces on the City of Edinburgh Transport Map have long since filled in. Time has rendered these two immutable print documents nearly nonsensical. I decided to further this process.

I created a computer-generated narrative called Walks from City Bus Routes which uses JavaScript to randomly and endlessly recombine illustrations and portions of text from the Edinburgh City Transport booklet and bus and tram route icons from the City of Edinburgh Transport Map. The term “computer-generated” is something of a misnomer here. The computer does not generate these new texts. It selects phrases from the booklet which I have typed into preset lists (variable strings) and slots them into templates (sentences). Take, for example, the following sentence:

Take the #{take} and continue #{continue}.

I went through the print booklet looking for phrases which follow the words “take” and “continue”. Let’s say the phrases which follow #{take} are as follows (there are in fact many more than these):

Take the [‘path leading down the hillside just before the monument’, ‘path that leads off to the left’, ‘broad and easy descent down the grassy slope’, ‘towpath along the side of the park’, ‘dirt road that runs uphill under the wall’, ‘road behind the Inn’]

And the phrases which follow #{continue} are:

continue [‘upstream’, ‘to follow the river’, ‘in the same direction’, ‘through the fields’, ‘as far as the roundabout’,’along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard’, ‘in a roughly southerly direction’, ‘to follow the wall’]

Here are but a few of the possible sentence results:

Take the path leading down the hillside just before the monument and continue along the High Street to the old parish church set in a green graveyard.

Take the towpath along the side of the park and continue in the same direction.

Take the broad and easy descent down the grassy slope and continue through the fields.

Though many of the paths, towpaths, grassy slopes, fields, and roundabouts referenced in the Edinburgh City Transport pamphlet no longer exist, as variables within JavaScript strings these past places are ascribed new locations in computer memory. Called as statements into this new narrative structure, these past places become potential (albeit imaginary) destinations once again (albeit for readers rather than walkers).

The result is a new guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes an infinite number of plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh, and and its book shops, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, reading and writing, fact and fiction.

Detail from The Broadside of a Yarn, J. R. Carpenter, 2012.

In the gallery installation of The Broadside of a Yarn exhibited in Edinburgh during Remediating the Social in November 2012, this new digital variable iteration of the Walks from City Bus Routes pamphlet was accessed by scanning a QR code embedded in a cartographic collage which remediated elements of the City of Edinburgh Transport Map and a drawing borrowed from the Edinburgh Streetscape Manual, published by the Lothian Regional Council in 1995. These visual links to the work were also reproduced in an A3-sized print map handout iteration of The Broadside of a Yarn, which was handed out freely during the exhibition and continues to circulate through gift exchange economies and postal networks.

Earlier this year I created a stand-alone web-based version of Walks from City Bus Routes, which appears in the Spring 2015 issue of The New River – a journal of digital writing & art.

Walks from City Bus Routes, J. R. Carpenter 2015.

Readers keen on bookish-drifting-wander-walking may also be interested in Wanderkammer: A Walk Through Texts a web-based collection of hyperlinked quotations from a wide range of writing on walking, accompanied by a bibliography. Wanderkammer was included in Walk poems: A series of reviews of walking projects edited by Louis Bury Corey Frost published on Jacket2 in 2011.