Textopia: designing a locative literary reader

Abstract

This article presents a design experiment attempting to create a locative literary system, which allows users in an urban environment to listen to literary texts which talk about the very places they find themselves in, and to write and share their own place-bound texts through the system. The methodological approach is an attempted implementation of the proposed scholarly category of humanist interventions, answering a need to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between humanistic scholarship and digital design. Following an analysis of the potential benefits of providing a system which enables active exploration of the relationship between literary texts and the places they talk about, the practical process of designing a prototype for this system is explained. The outcomes of initial user experiences indicate that the system has a high potential to work as a creative tool for interested users; however, flaws in the system also prevent this potential from having been fully realised so far. These observations point at two challenges for further development: although the wiki format has a history of success in soliciting user contributions, it seems ill fitted for applications, such as this, where individual creativity is central; and flexible ways of managing granularity of content is important for the locative experience of literary texts.

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