Digital Review 3: Soho Stories

I’m standing outside the entrance of a nondescript building in London W1D. The exterior is whitish grey with black trim and wooden doors. A voice in my ear beckons me to look for a small golden plaque on one of the doors—I walk further up the pavement, see the sign, and read it: “The Groucho Club London Ltd.” The voice goes on to tell me stories of the sordid happenings within the club: people “Hoovering” lines of cocaine, Damien Hirst "getting his willy out," and Courtney Love and Alex James of Blur hooking up.

The voice in my ear is courtesy of Soho Stories, a mobile app for Android and iPhone released in 2012 and developed as part of a multi-agency partnership. Its description in the App Store promises “60 years of Bohemian Soho brought vividly to life,” and the app largely delivers.

The creation of Soho Stories depended on the cooperation of three different agencies: the National Trust, imagineear, and Flint. The National Trust is a UK charity organisation that “protects and opens to the public” historic houses, gardens, monuments, forests, castles, and more. It was founded in 1895 in order to preserve the nation’s heritage and open spaces for everyone to enjoy. While the organization tends to focus on more rural attractions, preserving the stories and culture of Soho does not fall outside the National Trust's remit. Understanding this importance on preservation explains why Soho Stories includes so many anecdotes and interviews with people instrumental in Soho’s past.

The National Trust enlisted the help of imagineear to develop Soho Stories. Imagineear is a London-based tech company that offers advising and content creation services. The company also specialises in proprietary hand-held audio and multimedia equipment, which explains why they were well-suited to develop this app for the National Trust.

Flint, a public relations company, helped to publicise the launch of the app.  Its outreach efforts included clubs, a festival, and theatres, and culminated in a week-long programme of “live Soho Stories” in Soho Square. Flint also secured features in ten national newspapers about the release of the app, in addition to promotion on “broadcast and media platforms.” Overall, an estimated total of 400 million people were exposed to Soho Stories.

Despite this massive promotion, the app only has one written review in the Apple App Store, and a message where the star count is normally displayed reads, “We have not received enough ratings to display an average for this app.” This is unfortunate because Soho Stories does a fantastic job of giving users a glimpse into the sordid history of the area.

To use the app, all one needs to do is have it open while he or she walks around Soho. I started my experience outside of the Oxford Circus tube station, and headed South along Regent Street. Almost immediately, a voice started in my ear, welcoming me to the app and telling me how to use it. The app displays the user's location on a map filled with pink circles, with each circle representing a different audio experience. Some of these were simply narration, while others were interviews, excerpts from novels, or songs. The difference in content kept the experience engaging.

One of the first spots I happened upon was the Palladium. I began hearing audio about the venue, and was at first frustrated because I could not see it. As I continued walking, the sign came into view and I greatly appreciated the GPS capabilities of the app. There were other times when this did not work as well; the app would be describing something that I figured was nearby, but was unable to see. Fortunately, this only happened a handful of times, and usually I was able to see what the app was describing. I especially liked when the audio gave the address of the building it was describing, as it was fun to comb up and down the street looking for it. This was helpful in finding The Groucho Club, a building with an extraordinary history but an extremely ordinary façade. Hearing the tales of debauchery within as passerbys walked past the plain building made me feel like I was in on some sort of secret.

Another interaction that stood out was when I started walking from the East end of Soho up towards Oxford Street and a song about Soho started in my ear. I appreciated the song but wondered why it started at this particular spot. As I continued listening, I passed a Tesco and the singer sang, “The landlord says your lease is up/the council says you are corrupt/either way you got to go/to make way for a new Tesco.” Eerie.

There were other situations with less perfect timing. I passed an extremely crowded area with loud music, and the app started describing a quiet early morning scene following a night of revelry.

I walked through loud crowds, street performers, and live music as the app described a peaceful early morning scene.

The only aspect of the experience that I did not like was the length of each audio story. The stories were usually more than four minutes long, which meant that listening to the full piece required standing still. While I slowed my pace, I did not want to stand completely still, at risk of ending up on this list. I did appreciate that the app designers anticipated this, as moving from one circle to the next on the map caused the current story to quickly fade out as the new audio faded in. It made the app feel very dynamic, and made me realise that the GPS capabilities really put this app a step above a traditional audio tour. The user experience was enhanced by the fact that fully listening to one of the stories caused the circle on the map to change from pink to white, so that I could see which stories I still had left to explore. Lastly, as I made my way back to Oxford Circus, I was extremely happy that the stories I had not finished resumed where I had left the area instead of restarting from the beginning. Imagineear did a very fine job of anticipating how people would actually be using the app on the street.

This photo shows how the pink circles have turned to white

These efforts did not go unnoticed. Soho Stories won Gold in the 2012 Digital Impact Awards in the category of “Best Use of Digital by an NGO, NFP or Charity.” One of the goals of the National Trust in developing this app was to engage the target audience of 18-35 year old Londoners, “a demographic that has traditionally been resistant to National Trust marketing activity.” As someone who fits into this demographic for one more month, I can say that the National Trust met their goal.

Digital Review 2: Digital Me

“If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?” This is the question asked by Digital Me, an online experience developed by Helios Design Labs and launched in October 2015 through BBC Taster. To date, 12,101 people have tried the experience, and 1,494 have shared it on social media. The concept behind Digital Me is that individuals sometimes have online personas that are different from their actual personalities. By pulling information from the user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as determining location based on IP address, an artificial bot pretending to be the digital version of the user has a conversation with the actual user. This is an interesting concept, but technical limitations and some design shortcomings severely stunt the execution’s effectiveness.

The experience starts with the following message:

It’s hard to know which way of meeting me “privately, one on one” makes me most uncomfortable. Certainly sending my face to some anonymous entity through my webcam is disconcerting, but giving it access to my Facebook and Twitter accounts is almost equally intimate. Years ago, I tried an experience called Take This Lollipop, which takes information from your Facebook profile like your photos, locations, and relationships and embeds them in a video in which a creepy, dishevelled man stalks you online. It’s absolutely terrifying.

Despite my flashbacks to Take This Lollipop, I press on. This “digital me” communicates through an instant message-like interface. It goes on to tell me that it knows some things about me, but that I first must turn on my webcam before it tells me. I say yes, and I see myself on the screen. On a second run-through of the experience, I say no. “Digital me” refuses to continue the experience until I turn on my webcam. Having used the webcam on the first run-through of the experience, I was surprised that the webcam is required, as it did not have much of an impact.

The experience then asks me to connect to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I link Twitter first, and it has some difficulties. The Digital Me tells me that his “Best Follower Forever” is Maggie Knight, one of my friends from high school. This designation is given because Maggie has mentioned me in her tweets twenty-four times. This appears significant to Digital Me, but in reality, Maggie just uses many mentions for many people in her tweets. A stronger algorithm would have detected this, and would have been able to identify more important mentions.

Other parts of the experience work better. I especially liked when Digital Me told me that he liked “food, good focus, and London,” as these are things I definitely can see myself having tweeted about. More confusingly, Digital Me told me that Martin O’Malley, Donald Trump, and Netflix & Office (I’m assuming it tried to say “The Office”) make him unhappy. Again, this is the sign of a bad algorithm. I love one of those things, have neutral feelings toward one of them, and am only unhappy about one of the three…it shouldn’t be difficult for my readers to figure out which on their own.

Linking my Facebook account also had issues. Digital Me told me, “I’m really interested in I’m not sure what I talk about,” which, with that garbled syntax, is actually quite believable. He also tells me that he wishes he could visit London, which does not make sense because I have been posting to these social media accounts from London for the past two month, made more damning by the fact that Digital Me is currently tracking my location based on my IP address. Maybe Digital Me wishes he was a physical entity so that he could be in London in this way, but that seems much loftier than what Digital Me is trying to get across.

Looking back, the parts of the experience that were most interesting to me had nothing to do with the Digital Me character. Instead, I poured over the parts that compared my online persona with others. I was fascinated by the sentiment analysis of my Twitter stream, which revealed that it is less positive than most people’s. Similarly, I was surprised to learn that I have an “astounding” number of friends compared to other Facebook users. This information was more interesting to me than any of the random, often incoherent pulls from my feed.

The creators of Digital Me stated that the purpose of the project was for people to learn about themselves in an age where “our digital personalities are now as real as our other personalities.” This is an important goal, but the many glitches within the experience made the Digital Me feel less like my digital presence and more like a poorly made chatbot. It reminded me of a mix of social media integration and Oliverbot, a website popular in the early 2000s that used learned behaviour to hold conversations with users.

Further investigation revealed that Sandra Gaudenzi, one of the co-creators of Digital Me, was inspired by Take This Lollipop (the creepy experienced that Digital Me initially remind me of). Her blog post mentions that the team spent six months researching APIs and data mining protocols, which makes it extremely disappointing that these are the elements that detracted most from the experience. I agree with the creators that our digital presence is rapidly becoming as important as who we are in real life, but the many problems with Digital Me only reminded me that real life still has far less glitches. 

The Guardian Decodes the NSA Files: A Shining Example of Multimedia Storytelling

This digital review was submitted for a class called "Digital Britain," which focuses on how technology is used in Britain's news organizations, museums, and cultural institutions.

On November 1, 2013, The Guardian published “NSA Files: Decoded,” an interactive multimedia experience explaining the secret United States surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden. It uses videos, diagrams, interactive infographics, GIFs, raw documents, and traditional journalistic text to tell its story. To date, readers have shared the site over 56,000 times on Facebook. 

According to the tech website Fast Company, the project took three full-time employees (along with input from about twelve specialists) two months to complete. It makes sense for The Guardian to devote so many resources to this story, as it was the first news organisation to break the story of the NSA’s surveillance programs in early June 2013. With the advent of The New York Times’ multimedia piece “Snow Fall” in the winter of 2012, interactive longform journalism has been an area of exploration for all news companies who want to stay on the cutting edge of storytelling.

The polish and detail that The Guardian put into this story is impressive. Throughout the experience, I noticed tiny details that helped immerse me into the content. Scrolling over a composite image of key players in the surveillance debate reveals more about each individual’s position. In this image, people’s shoulders are covered up by the people next to them.

When hovering over an individual, not only is more information revealed about that specific person, but the other people are greyed out and the person’s whole body (including the parts previously obscured by other people) comes forward. This is a very minor detail, but as the first interactive element of the story, it demonstrated to me the care that went into producing this piece. As someone with knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, I recognised the technological accomplishment that went into this small visual detail. 

There were other instances in which I found myself admiring the user interface. For example, one section of the story features a globe illustrating lines of digital communication across countries. Upon clicking and dragging, I was able to spin the globe around to inspect certain parts of it. The mark of excellent user interface is when the product works exactly as the user expects. There was no prompt saying that I could manipulate the view of the globe, but the fact that I was able to move it around when I wanted to is a testament to the user-centric design of this story.

While this technical wizardry is flashy and visually appealing, there are parts of it that contribute to the journalistic intent of the story. In a section about personal information, there is an interactive graphic illustrating what types of data are transmitted over various applications. Initially the graphic only showed information transmitted over Facebook, Google search, and web browsing. I wondered why the other options (Email, Twitter, etc.) were not shown by default, and then I realised that I was currently logged into Facebook and Google on my computer over WiFi. The realisation that this story from The Guardian could detect my current web application usage was a very real reminder that my personal activity and information can be very easily monitored. There is no way that print or broadcast journalism would be able to demonstrate this point as effectively.

The piece also features embedded video interviews with key players (such as Stewart Baker, former NSA general counsel, and Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director) in the NSA surveillance debate. Hearing interviewees’ tones and seeing their body language made these video inserts much more effective than a textual quote. Digital surveillance is a hotly debated topic, and seeing and hearing from leaders on both sides helped to emphasise the gravity of this discourse. The videos effectively integrate into the flow of the story. Most interviews are around thirty seconds in length, which is just enough time for a meaningful soundbite, but not so long that it is jarring to switch between reading the text and watching the interview. Aesthetically, the white background of the video fits with the white background of the webpage, making the clips feel very organic and connected to the text. The makers of “NSA Files: Decoded” spent about a month working on just the first few video interviews. They mention that “the hope is that the interviewee is engaging and well-spoken,” and this is largely true in the finished product. One of the reasons these videos integrate so well into the story is that the subjects speak clearly and with a strong command of the subject they are discussing. This confidence allowed the producers to cut these interviews to their most powerful points for use in the story.

While this piece proves that multimedia storytelling can be an effective form of journalism, it still requires hard journalistic skills. Without the accompanying text, there would be no narrative. The text is used just enough to carry the reader from each digital feature to the next, but in a way that makes these features feel essential to the story as opposed to gimmicky. The text nor the videos, pictures, or infographics would make sense on their own. This is the strongest accomplishment of this piece: it uses the multimedia format in a holistic way, with each feature meant to propel the story in some way. With new technological developments, there is an ever-present risk of being too gimmicky, but The Guardian has not fallen into this pitfall with this story.

Industry response to the piece is varied. Fast Company was impressed with the technical aspects of the site, while others argue that some of the multimedia effects are “superfluous bells and whistles.” Threespot could not handle the amount of content contained in the story, asking its followers, “Did you really read it?” To me, the multimedia aspect of the story is what kept it engaging. Ultimately, I walked away knowing much more about the NSA and its surveillance programs, and this is ultimately the goal of journalism. I look forward to seeing The Guardian’s next big multimedia story.

Differences between the US and the UK

I've been living in London for one month now! I was inspired by a friend in Florence who did something similar to post a list of some of the random things that I've learned about this city in the past four weeks. In no particular order:

[+] The driving on the other side of the road thing is way more disorienting than I thought it would be. Especially when cars are turning, it’s very easy to forget that they’ll be on a side of the road that you’re not used to.
[+] On a related note, cars don’t stop for pedestrians who don’t have the right of way. Like at all. I’ve seen cars actually speed up when there are people in the crosswalk when they shouldn’t be.
[+] The main streets are pretty clean, which is surprising because there are barely any rubbish bins around. The government got rid of them because the IRA would phone in bomb threats saying they’d put a bomb in the trash can. In the tube, there are just giant clear trash bags attached to the walls.
[+] Everyone starts their nights out much earlier here. If you’re outside of Soho, almost all the pubs close by 11:30. Apparently it was a law during WWII that the pubs close early because they didn’t want people being hungover during the war efforts, and they just haven't changed it. Also, the tube closes at midnight.
[+] London feels incredibly diverse, even more so than New York City. Not only are there people from all over the world here, but there are so many different sections of the city, each with hugely different vibes.
[+] To go along with that point, there’s a lot of cool intercultural exchange. I’ve seen so many tiny restaurants that advertise fish and chips, spaghetti, burgers, and falafel on the same menu.
[+] They love neon jackets here. Construction worker? Neon jacket. Bobby? Neon jacket. Club security? Neon jacket. Kid on a field trip? Neon jacket. 
[+] On the whole, British people are fairly quiet and reserved. The tube is usually just shy of dead silent, especially in the morning. People just say less and say it more quietly here, which is actually kind of refreshing.
[+] People here use the word “yeah” at the end of questions. “You want to top-up your Oyster card, yeah?” At first, I thought people were being condescending, but I’ve slowly realised that’s just how they talk.
[+] I was under the impression that there would be a ton of awesome beers here. While I have gone to some pubs that have special local beers, a ton of pubs have the same 8 or so beers on draught. You definitely have to be on the lookout for ale fests and other things that feature speciality beers.
[+] Once someone finds out I’m American, the conversation goes on about another minute before either guns or Donald Trump are brought up. People here love talking about Donald Trump.