The creation, presentation and publication of new creative work has been a core element of undergraduate teaching programs at Queensland University of Technology for over four decades now. What started as the writing and performance of works for the stage by drama and dance students, has been transformed via a tsunami of consumer-led technologies and pedagogical incarnations to embrace work designed for stage, screen, new media, animation and numerous digital delivery platforms. And in recent years the practice of creative writing (in all its forms) has evolved from a traditionally individual process to that of a vibrant team-based practice with writers working in vertically integrated, interdisciplinary production enterprises. 

The School of Creative Practice in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT is comprised of six discipline areas; Music, Dance, Drama, Creative Writing, Visual Art and Film/Screen & Media. The Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees that span these six programs incorporate discipline specific practice units, shared academic and critical studies units and in the final year, a suite of interdisciplinary creative practice units. These capstone interdisciplinary practice units were conceived in response to industry consultation, and the reflective and lived experience of creative practitioners in the teaching faculty, as critical to preparing emerging creative artists for the team-based creative environments they would engage with.

On July 2, 2020 Queensland University of Technology Art Museum launched an exhibition of William Robinson’s artworks titled By the Book at the William Robinson Gallery in Old Government House. The exhibition was partnered with the publication of a non-fiction novella of the life and works of William Robinson by award-winning Australian writer, Nick Earls. The exhibition curator proposed a format where an audiobook read by the author would guide visitors through artworks, photographs and artefacts referred to in the text.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

As a music academic at QUT, my role in the exhibition was to produce the recording of the author reading the book and to coordinate the subsequent editing and assembly of the sixty individual audio cues that accompany the in-person and virtual tour of the sixty works on display in the exhibition. During the editing and post-production process of the voice recordings, and in conversation with the curator and the author, the brief began to expand to include additional audio resources to enrich the audience experience in the gallery and online. A sound artist named Lawrence English had captured and made available nature soundscape recordings from selected field locations that featured in many of Robinson’s landscapes. William Robinson is also an accomplished pianist and a recording of Bill playing Brahms Intermezzo in A Major was offered to accompany the field sound recordings as additional media and context to complement the reading.

Nick Earls reading during a recording session (Photo: Michael Whelan)

With the production brief now expanded to include location sound and occasional musical cues, I proposed the inclusion of small musical motifs to conclude each cue to signal the end of the cue for listeners (You know it’s time to turn the page when Tinkerbell rings her little bell). Using Bill’s recorded performance of Brahms Intermezzo in A Major as a point of departure, I recorded a series of fifteen separate five-second improvised variations on the main theme to place randomly at the end of each cue as our Tinkerbell signal to virtual and in-person viewers that the audio for that particular piece had concluded. The final format for the audiobook descriptions was finalised and the sixty cues were completed with author voice recording, location sound, background music and cue-end markers.

Final year Creative Writing students in the School of Creative Practice participate in a range of these interdisciplinary creative projects; some connecting with various aspects of the publishing industry (zine, blog and online formats etc..), some leading community writing initiatives and some collaborating with visual artists on illustrated poetry and prose publications.

The By the Book project with its combination of written text, recorded spoken word, sound design, music creation, neutral and character performance, audio recording combined with the design, production and publication of streamed programs and podcasts provide an exciting format for creative writers to participate in a wide range of team-based interdisciplinary practices. Within this model, writers are the creative and conceptual nucleus of projects that may include acting students, for whom training and experience in recorded voice-over and character performance will be extremely valuable. Audio and technical production students have the potential to collaborate, design and produce audio environments that capture core themes, locations and psychological landscapes. Music producers and composers interested in music and sound for film, television, multimedia and games can find a variety of challenges supporting and foregrounding key themes in the text through leitmotif and underscore. And Film, Screen and Media students may collaborate with the QUT student record label, Vermillion Records to realise these audio programs for distribution online.

The rise of the enhanced audio podcast has been hyperbolic in recent years on the back of genres such as audio books, serialised true crime, news and current affairs commentary, short stories, comedy, in-conversation and, wellness and mindfulness programs. According to US marketing firm Brandtastic, podcast listeners consume an average of seven different shows per week and podcast review sites speculate that there are currently between than 700,000 and 1,000,000 active podcast programs available for download. Apple podcasts alone feature more than 500,000 programs in over 100 languages. With blockchain tracking so simple with this digital delivery format, there are abundant analytics outlining the production growth and market penetration of podcasts as the entertainment format with at-home and in-transit the most popular.

 Content has always been king, and undergraduate creative practice at QUT will increasingly embrace creative writers as core contributors, project leaders and collaborative artists in a diverse range of interdisciplinary production projects. Enhanced audio podcasting with its booming market consumption and dynamic combination of media, creative stakeholders and production practices seems certain to generate a curriculum and project-based learning wave to surf into this fertile future of storytelling. The By the Book project at QUT has provided an exciting stimulus for academics and students in creative practice disciplines to reimagine writers and writing. 

I set out to make ‘A dictionary of the revolution’ in 2013. I planned to record conversations with different people, asking them to define words I heard people using to talk about politics in Egypt. Then I’d use transcriptions of their speech to create entries in a subversive ‘dictionary’ that tries to represent language as a material, capricious and changeable. At the start, I proposed it as a printed book project. 

It’s not that I had never worked with text outside of a book before. More than a decade earlier, I’d ventured away from left-aligned stanzas into making visual and concrete poetry, maps and drawings made of text, and poetry games. I adored artist books, especially those that play with structure to conjure new ways of reading. Cards come up repeatedly in my practice. Cards are unbound pages that allow for fragmented and fluid narratives. They can be laid out on a surface, shuffled, and recombined. 

The dictionary project started with a set of cards. In 2014, I gathered a list of 160 words that I heard come up frequently in conversations about politics in Egypt. I printed 250 sets of vocabulary cards, each housed in a palm-sized box. Conceived as a research tool, the box also works as a game or conversation starter. 

Vocabulary cards for a dictionary of the revolution (2014), photo by Amanda KM

Six months later, I started listening to recordings of nearly two hundred people interacting with the vocabulary box. First I edited an audio archive, then worked with transcriptions of the archive to assemble the text. The process was years-long, obsessive and laborious. I took the long route. Rather than work with each recording individually, I listened to recordings by term. This meant that I was constantly rotating between recordings of different individuals. I wanted to reach a plural understanding of each term, with many individuals near to each other giving unique definitions. My circuitous route through hundreds of hours of recordings demanded a publication twisted out of the linearity of the bound book. 

Working log for the project, image courtesy of the artist

To be honest, other pressures pushed me away from print. I wanted to launch the publication to an Egyptian audience first, and if I tried to publish a book in Egypt, the text would have passed through the hands of censors. I was not at all confident that it would return intact, or that I would be willing to make changes. Moreover, I didn’t want the attention such a process might bring to me or the project.

Earlier, I met a young publisher in Cairo who was interested in putting it into print. I brought up my concerns to him, which he addressed this way: One, he planned to write a foreword to the text which would directly declare that I was a foreign researcher, a US citizen, or something along those lines. Two, the book would not be placed in bookshops, but would only be available by mail order.

The question of access was the decisive factor in publishing digitally. By 2017, the public atmosphere had changed dramatically in Egypt. The loud and unrelenting conversations that had inspired the project, expressing ideologies previously relegated to very private spaces, had disappeared under great weights of intimidation, harassment, prison, and other methods of repression. I was uncertain how to distribute a printed object about a subject most people had gone silent about. It seemed intuitive to turn to digital space, where a large audience could access the text at any time. 

Next came the question of how to organize a text originally intended for the page in digital space. I thought back to something Ahmed Refaat, the lead researcher, brought up during the research. He wanted to ask participants to group cards into families of related words. I thought it might distract from the intimate flow of conversation I wanted to record. But now, with texts woven from everyone’s speech, it was possible to assemble those families. By searching for a term in the complete text of the dictionary, I could locate the entries in which it appeared most frequently. I could answer the question, “What other terms do people talk about when they talk about a given term?” I did this myself for a few words, but needed a machine to do a complete and accurate analysis.

I was getting close. I looked for a programmer. After a few failed attempts, a friend introduced me to Youssef Faltas, who immediately understood what I was looking for. With his background in physics and art, he was the perfect person to work with to find the form to best suit the publication. We settled on a chord diagram, a data visualization that represents connections between nodes in a circular layout. Faltas programmed the machine reading of the text, animated the diagrams, and insisted on a one-page design. We used line weight to indicate the closeness of the relationships between words. Together, we overcame some challenges, including coming up with a vocabulary to talk to each other about what we were doing. (It wasn’t until after I completed the project that I learned about corpus linguistics, making me feel foolish as many of the problems I encountered along the way had already been tackled in the field.)

Screenshot from http://qamosalthawra.com

The website allows a non-linear reading through a web of connected concepts, events, objects, and characters. Definitively, it organizes the way people read the text. According to analytics, people spend only brief amounts of time on the site. I suspect that most play with the chord diagrams more than anything else, resulting in the curiosity of the text’s effective disappearance. If I’m correct, they’re playing with a surface, navigating through a text they don’t read. The project is translated into its visualization — or, as Faltas says, is gamified —and reading becomes clicking on words and navigating their relationships.

Screenshot from http://qamosalthawra.com

I included a downloadable pdf for each entry on the Arabic version of the website. I think, more than anything, that was because of residual ambivalence about moving completely away from print. I hope that people might collect the texts and save them locally. But publishing digitally also meant that I could share an archive containing some of the material used to make the project, like the library of audio clips. I still think of the project as a book, perhaps because I recall its five hundred page heft as I was editing the first draft. Now it’s a kind of book on the internet.

Serendipity is the great unsung hero of publishing. We can never be sure of the precise value arising from chance encounters in bookshops, the flash of a good jacket catching the reader’s eye, igniting the purchase instinct so that before they know it they’ve bought another book. We’ve all been there; we’ve casually browsed, and probably found many of our favourite books this way – by chance, in bookshops, passing time, scanning idly. We’ll never know what this is worth, but it is likely to be very large indeed.

How about in digital environments? Well, there has been a great attempt at not just replicating the mechanisms of the physical world but surpassing them, and a good deal of web innovation has centred around recommendation engines, affiliate networks, filtering systems, automatic suggestions and the prediction of taste.

To some this is a world where abundant culture becomes easily discoverable, where we can find what we like and structure our experience in a totally customised way; to others it is what Eli Pariser has called the “filter bubble”, an egotistical echo chamber where we are never challenged by newness or difference aside from our pre-existing predilections.

Regardless of the rights or the wrongs, one thing is clear: where chance is lost, where algorithms replace luck and the keyword search term is king, metadata is the fulcrum of discovery. Metadata, in short, decides whether your book is found, and by extension whether your book is bought.

So what is metadata and why is it important? The word is part of the problem. It sounds fairly technical and abstract, the kind of thing requiring specialist knowledge. In fact metadata is easy. Metadata is just all the information around a book that isn’t the content. That’s it. People have been using metadata for centuries; they just called it something different.

The name of the book is metadata, the cover is metadata, the word count and page count are metadata, as are the formats. The blurb, the tagline, the keywords attached to those (e.g. which words summarise the book best?) are all metadata. Price, publication date, review quotes, sales points, promotional opportunities, territorial rights, ISBNs and the author name are all metadata to.

Then there are the subject categories, known in the US as BISAC codes and in the UK as BIC codes. If you Google for your subject you will quickly find the correct codes for your books. Metadata can become quite ‘granular’ as the parlance would have it, looking at details like different author roles and different identifiers, but for the most part it sticks to the information readers would find relevant about a book.

Metadata influences search, it influences territoriality and categorisation – metadata is the advert, the sales pitch, the sell in and the advance promotion; metadata is the random book left on the table, the fervent recommendation of a friend, the arresting blurb, the good review, serving the random browser and the determined buyer alike.

Bad metadata means your book is invisible and un-purchasable. Yet compared to many industries either totally or increasingly focused on digital commerce, publishing lags in its understanding of SEO practices, metadata standards implementation, data collection and analysis and systems investment.

A few brief principles for metadata, whether self-published or working with a book publisher, will enormously help your book’s chances.

1 Accurate metadata – it all has to be correct. Wrong metadata confuses the system. This means you need to be meticulous when inputting your metadata and check everything through. One of the difficulties of metadata is that different retailers have different metadata requirements, so you or your publisher need to make sure the right metadata is going to the right retailer. This can be a painstaking and time consuming process but it’s worth it.

2 More is more – if you don’t put the metadata in, it won’t be discovered. Many people only put the bare minimum in. Metadata is boring and tricksy. However by not putting absolutely everything in you will increase the visibility on offer. So if you are uploading work yourself fill out every field on offer. If you are working with a publisher supply them with as much information as they need and monitor what the output looks like.

3 BUT go for quality not quantity. Making sure your metadata is complete is one thing, overloading is another. Book blurbs, tag lines, review quotes, puffs, different regional pricing are all great; but don’t go overboard. A well drafted piece of copy is a much better piece of metadata than a lengthy, search engine friendly piece of text that no one will want to read.

4 Lastly, familiarise yourself with the basic tenets of SEO. Yes, this is a chore and a distraction from writing. We all have to recognise the world we live in, and in that world a bit of simple knowledge can go a long way. All of the above applies. You don’t need any technical knowledge, just an awareness of what kind of thing might help. Have a look at something like this introductory guide from a well-known SEO website: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo.

We still haven’t fully figured out how to replace the experience of shopping in a bricks and mortar store, that sense of surprise, fun, the unexpected – and we haven’t worked out how we can create and capture those impulse buys. We are going to need to, and the answer will be found in a revolution of what metadata we supply, and how we supply it.