Since taking on my role in the team building the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales, I’ve been lucky enough to visit some spectacularly uninteresting places: motorway service stations, forgettable B&Bs, generic fast food outlets, characterless pubs. I’ve spent countless hours in my battered little blue car, crawling behind tractors on snaking mid-Welsh B-roads, swearing loudly as traffic stops to standstill on some stretch of the M4, stubbornly ignoring the disconcerting noises coming from beneath the bonnet as I reach speeds upwards of 60mph. It has been a pleasure. And I say that without a hint of sarcasm, because if this project has taught me anything, it has been to be attentive to unique moments in space and time.

I’ve also been to some genuinely spectacular places. At the risk of sounding like Rutger Hauer in that scene at the end of Blade Runner, I’ve seen some amazing things this year. I’ve visited Baron Hill, a ruined mansion on the island of Anglesey which nature has almost completely occupied. I’ve climbed sketchy ladders to the top of a church tower to gaze at Skirrid Fawr, the magnificent “Holy Mountain” in the Black Mountains of the Welsh border country. I’ve ripped moss away from gravestones to read inscriptions in a remote cemetery on a mountaintop in the south Wales valleys.

Yesterday, I drove north and visited a breathtaking abandoned slate quarry in Snowdonia. Each of these has been a profoundly moving experience. Each has affected my understanding of spaces and my place within them.

The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales is an AHRC-funded project based at Cardiff University. It is a new exercise in “Literary Geography”, and follows the much-vaunted “spatial turn” in the humanities, which resulted in the reconsideration of the notion of “space” as not essentially “there”, straightforwardly available to perception, but as socially and culturally encoded, an intellectual construct. While there is an undeniable phenomenological aspect to the way we experience spaces, there is also another deeply social, cultural dimension to this: we may experience spaces through the body, but we understand and make sense of them through language and culture. As a result, spaces accrue meanings through time.

As Jon Anderson has written, ‘the product of the intersection between context and culture is place.’ These accrued social conceptions of place invariably impinge on the ways we inhabit and experience them. One of the aims of Literary Geography is to explore the role of language and literature in this interactive process of creating “place”. It asks: how do literary texts affect our conceptions of space/place? How does the location of fiction affect the kinds of stories that can be told? How can a “spatial” reading of literature help us forge new understandings of places and our place within them? And, importantly, how can digital deep maps of literary texts enhance the ways we answer such questions?

In order to explore these issues, the project team is currently curating and building an innovative website – a Digital Literary Atlas – that will provide digital “deep maps” of a selection of English-language novels set in Wales. “Deep mapping” involves not only “geoparsing” the locations described in works of fiction – that is, pinpointing locations on a map

– but, further, supplementing these data-points with a range of other material: historical maps, sociological data, visual representations of the regions (films and paintings, for instance), interviews with authors on location, and more. This material is then curated and read against the themes and plots of the texts themselves.

We have deliberately chosen novels set in “real”, or at least “locatable” places in order to do this. One of those we have chosen to map is Christopher Meredith’s Shifts (1988), a brilliant novel that charts the personal, emotional effects of the decline of the steel industry in south Wales. This is a text closely attuned to the meanings that places accrue in time, and the ways in which individuals and communities construct and experience themselves in relation to them. Based in the town of Tredegar, close to what was once the colossal Ebbw Vale steelworks in south Wales, the novel explores the ways in which the economic forces that were dismantling those steelworks in the late 1970s were at the same time dismantling the social and psychological frameworks that gave the region its sense of identity. Shifts periodically clocks into the consciousness of three main characters, each struggling to locate their identity at this time and place of profound social change. Tellingly, the characters visit “real world” locations in their process of reflecting on their place in this changing community.

One site of major significance in the novel is Cefn Golau cemetery, a burial ground built high on a mountain above the valley for the victims of a nineteenth-century cholera epidemic. Gathering material for the deep map of Shifts, Kirsti Bohata and I visited the cemetery with Christopher Meredith on a windswept day back in September. It is, undeniably, a profoundly affective place.

Chris summed it up in our interview with him later that day: ‘it’s a powerful place […] something comes out of the earth there’. Indeed the gravestones do appear to rise out of the earth in an almost elemental way – jutting out of the ground at all angles, with some so heavily mossed that they appear almost timeless, part of the fabric of the landscape. Even without an understanding of its historical origins, it’s impossible not to be moved by the rugged, ghostly power of the place. But beyond this, viewing the cemetery through the lens of the novel enables other kinds of perception. Indeed, Shifts’ depiction of Cefn Golau invites us to think about the symbolic power such places accumulate over time, and the ways we locate our selves in relation to them.

In Shifts, the cemetery is viewed very differently from the perspective of two different characters. Jack experiences the site from a purely personal perspective, through the lens of personal memory and physical experience. Visiting the cemetery on a hangover, the physical experience of being exposed to the elements offers Jack a (perhaps unwanted) reminder of the life left in him. Yet at the same time, the powerful symbolic charge of the site forces him to reflect on his mortality:

A sense of space. Journey’s end. The two sounded at odds, yet he felt them both. He felt, too, the blood move in his head. A full throb in his temples and pain in the eyeballs.

Jack’s friend Keith, however, experiences the site very differently. An amateur historian, Keith attempts to combat the encroaching anomie caused by the decline of the steel industry by learning about the history of his town as an early industrial ironworking community. His visit to the cemetery is informed by his understanding of its past, and he finds solace in situating himself within the historical continuum of the region and connecting himself with the people that once inhabited it.

He walked on a few paces. The ground was rutted with settled graves, which were very close together. The next stone was wide, not such a dark grey as John’s. Benjamin Davies. A man in his thirties. 7fed Mawrth 1850. How soon after John? Keith imagined John small and dark with curly hair. At nineteen, already working for nine or ten years. Ben was a larger man, looked older than his age.

Shifts is a novel that eloquently explores the ways in which locations and landmarks function as part-real, part-imagined co-ordinates, symbolic reference points by which we orientate our senses of self. Moreover, its own depiction of the cemetery has now further contributed to its symbolic, cultural resonance; I would now find it impossible to visit Cefn Golau cemetery without contemplating Meredith’s descriptions of it in Shifts. Read against the real landscape it describes, the novel throws into relief the curious ways in which we both physically experience and intellectually construct the spaces we inhabit.

The aim of the Digital Literary Atlas of Wales is to encourage readers and writers to explore the symbolic resonance of such places for themselves. On one level it will serve as a digital resource, providing textual and contextual information about novels and the locations in which they are set. The deep map of Shifts, for example, will provide maps, images and video footage of the locations imagined in the text, alongside historical and cultural material to augment readings of the novel. When explaining this, I usually reach to Damian Walford Davies’s description of deep mapping as a ‘critical and affective inhabitation of the cultural dimensionality of a literary work’. In this sense, users will be able to adopt Keith’s perspective, and experience places and landscapes through a culturally and historically-informed lens. Indeed, even if users are unable to visit the locations in question, the website will itself be an online space with which they can digitally “inhabit” these places.

But crucially, the website aims to encourage readers and writers to adopt Jack’s perspective too. Part of the pleasure of working on this project has been the sheer phenomenological thrill of visiting new places, seeing new things; of embracing the unusual, the new, the accidental –even the banal. The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales aims to show that literature can provide the starting point for more responsive, sensitive understandings of places and our relation to them. It invites people to step outside the normal flow of their lives, to re-orientate themselves within known and new landscapes, and inscribe places – and themselves – with new meaning.

The Digital Literary Atlas of Wales project team consists of Jon Anderson, Reader in Human Geography within the School of Geography and Planning, Cardiff University (Principal Investigator), Kirsti Bohata, Director of CREW (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), Swansea University (Co-Principal Investigator), Jeff Morgan (Research Associate), and Kieron Smith (Research Associate).

For further information: Literaryatlas.wales

Literaryatlas.cymru

@LitAtlasWales

litatlaswales@gmail.com

If you’re a writer interested in finding out more about immersive entertainment – discovering how your audiences can be immersed and play an active part in your story – then we have a great series of specialist immersive writing guides made available to The Writing Platform by Portal Entertainment and the Immersive Writing Lab team.

The guides, created by Mike Jones, Portal Entertainment’s Head of Story, will help writers who want to write ‘immersive entertainment’: writers who want their audiences to be immersed and play an active part in their story. This fourth guide explains how to create audience user-journeys.

Active Audiences

Whilst all forms of narrative writing share common elements, interactive and immersive experiences have particular demands that are quite unique; demands that will shape and influence the way such stories are constructed. Such forms change the nature of the relationship between the audience and the work.

We often hear traditional media such as books, film and TV referred to as ‘passive’ media, and interactive formats such as video games, as ‘active’. But these terms are a misnomer and largely unhelpful. There is nothing ‘passive’ about watching a movie, unless it’s a very bad and boring movie! Any good narrative is very consciously engaging the audience in an active mental process. In the previous article we referred to dramatic questions and the implication of an audience posing questions to themselves, as they are watching, results in them being compelled to speculate on possible outcomes and assemble the story for themselves. This is very much an active audience.

We also looked previously at the idea of role-play and the specific roles assigned to audiences within the storyworld. It is this idea of a an active role in the telling of the story, and which can effect the chain of causality in the narrative, that results in the real measure of an interactive and immersive experience; the user-journey.

User-Journey

In an interactive story form, or one that moves across different mediums rather than a single medium, the user-journey is the mapping of the paths the audience may take through the storyworld – the actions they take, the choices they make and the platforms they move through. The key questions to ask are;

– Is there a single entry point where every audience person starts? Or are there multiple entry points for different types of audiences?

– Is there a single ultimate conclusion? Or are their multiple possible conclusions to the experience?

– How do the audience’s choices effect the possible conclusions?

The answers to these questions will inform the shape of the user-journeys as a document that informs both the development and the execution of an interactive and immersive storyworld.

A typical user-journey map shows the branching paths of the experience and how choices and actions effect the path an audience member is following. Such maps are most commonly shown as flow-charts and as such are very visual tools for being able to trace the movement of an audience member against the events of the plot and timeline.

Importantly, undertaking the process of creating a user-journey map also allows you to recognise that not all audiences are the same and there may be different archetypal users within the experience. Open-world sandbox computer games deal with this by providing scope to satisfy different user demands and expectations in different ways. A clear goal orientated plot with very specific prescribed tasks will appeal to one type of player, but would frustrate others who wish to explore in a more free-form and self directed way. Conversely, a storyworld that is pure exploration without dynamic motivations may feel very un-dramatic and unmotivated. Such immersive worlds therefore often offer a clear motivated plot but which is also able to be completed in stages and doesn’t lock the player in to completing within a specific time frame. Some players will bang through the main plot, others will meander.

A simple scenario like this can be seen in numerous video game storyworlds such as Borderlands, Skyrim or even Heavy Rain; all have room for free exploration whilst still including a central motivated narrative spine. This principle of recognising different user types and the different paths they may follow is as applicable in transmedia and multi-platform experiences well beyond self-contained video games. A very useful exercise therefore for storyworld creators is to begin by articulating two different user journeys through your storyworld; one as a highly involved audience member and the other for an audience that is more reluctant. These two extremes will shape the extents of interactivity within your storyworld and allow you to design specific motivations for each type.

For example, lets say you have a story where the audience is engaged directly by a fictional character and is asked to perform a specific action – e.g. to lie or steal. Some audiences will jump right into that role play and explore the ramifications of the illicit or illegal action. A different audience type however may baulk at performing the action and choose to resist; wishing to observe rather than partake in the lying and the stealing.

This ‘reluctant’ audience member is now on a different user-journey and the choice they make should have ramifications. Rather than being pushed out of the experience or into a lesser version of the experience, you have the opportunity to create an alternate pathway of story elements to lead that audience through a parallel branching narrative. Such a pathway may lead back to the same or a different end point but within the storyworld’s plot of timeline events, the two users will have had two different experiences.

Both types of audience are valid – some like to interact more than others. The user-journey map allows you not only to consider the needs of these two types of users but also to create specific motivations for each type to compel them forward. One type of user might respond well to action motivations – choices that offer them greater visceral experiences. Other types of audiences will respond best to emotional motivations, pathways that offer more emotional complexity or compel them forward through emotional dramatics.

In any of these cases the storyworld, its events, plot and timeline remains consistent, but the pathways through those events may vary for different users across different platforms.

Returnable Elements

Just as important as the pathway of choices for a user within a given medium, is the pathway of their experience across platforms. If I watch the TV series of your storyworld, what is it that makes me want to go to the interactive website? If I play the video game, what compels me to read the graphic novel? If I watch the movie, what drives me to sign up to play the alternate reality game?

In a multi-platform project each medium will bring its own type of experience, its own perspectives and paths through the shared storyworld. What we need to consider as a crucial part of the user-journey is how the audience is motivated and compelled to move between platforms. The ‘trans’ part of the world ‘transmedia’ means to move; but audiences do not move unless they are motivated.

If we recognise that multi-platform storytelling is essentially episodic storytelling (stories told in pieces) then we can think of these user-journey motivations across platforms as returnable elements – ie. the element that compels us to return to the storyworld.

There can be all manner of different forms of returnable elements but there are 3 major types that can help us articulate the user-journeys.

Anticipation:

When an audience is motivated by anticipation they are compelled to come back simply to discover ‘what happens next?’. This is the long standing idea of a ‘cliff-hanger’ and is very common in episodic television or in a chapterised novel. In essence anticipation is created by an un-answered dramatic question for which the audience must return to get the answer. But the same idea can apply across platforms as well as within them. A TV series for example may leave big questions for a specific character un-answered and so compel the audience to play the online game version to uncover what happened to them after the series.

Character:

A cliff-hanger isn’t the only way to bring an audience back or motivate them on. If you think of a common TV sitcom like The IT Crowd, there is very little in the way of continuing storylines so the reason to come back for another episode – the returnable element – is not anticipation of what happens next. Rather the compelling reason to return is to spend time with those characters and see how they will deal with new circumstances that befall them. In the case of immersive and interactive media different platforms and different user choices will create different circumstances for the character to respond to. The characters need to be strong enough, their responses and reactions varied and interesting enough to sustain and motivate an audience return.

Feeling States:

The third major returnable element type deals with the emotional expectations of audiences; how they expect to be made to feel? Some storyworlds are built neither on recurring characters nor on-going storylines. If we think of a TV series such as The Twilight Zone we have a storyworld that is unified by common themes, ideas and structures but which otherwise has no ongoing plot or characters. In such a case the reason to return for more is to ‘feel’ a certain way. No matter what the story is or who the characters are, the audience for The Twilight Zone knows how they expect to feel and the storyworld is designed to elicit those specific emotional responses. Now if we imagine The Twilight Zone as an interactive multi-platform project we can see how each medium may present a different aspect of supernatural occurrences and yet the reason to come back for more remains a desire to satisfy a certain Feeling State. Each individual platform, whether interactive or not, will succeed on its own merits if it delivers on that audience expectation.

Anticipation, character and feeling states, three very different motivations for your audience to return to, or move through, a storyworld. Of course, these three elements do not exist in isolation. Any given storyworld may employ aspects of all three together. What is important is to see these three as tools in a development process to allow you to be specific, rather than abstract, about the experience of the user and their journey.

The narrative-based user-journey map should articulate not only what happens and the branching paths of choices an audience may make, but also what is compelling the audience, why they are moving, why will they come back, what is driving them to interact?

Don’t expect the audience to be driven by curiosity alone, nor should you assume your audience want to interact or even that they will. All these things require clear motivation and consequences. Don’t be afraid to light a fire under the arses of your audience and make their journey through your storyworld and the choices they make, the platforms they visit, matter.

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For further reading see Mike’s first three Immersive Writing Guides:

#1 How To Create A Storyworld
#2 Guide to Creating Character
#3 How To Create Plot
#5 Memories, Rituals and Emotional States