Adventures in Twine

I’ve been playing around with Twine for a few weeks now, intrigued at the potentials it offers for exploring interactive narratives. I think the best description of it that I can give is that it’s the digital evolution of those ‘turn to page 42’ books that used to be ferociously popular. (Was it just me who used to skip and find the pages where you sorted everything out without dying?).

I think it’s the democratization of these tools that appeals to me the most; the way that anybody now has the chance to tell a big and complex story in a way that was probably both impossible and unavailable beforehand. Twine itself is a very user friendly tool and I’m literally only just scratching the surface with it at this point.

Twine has also made me think a lot about the idea of narrative creativity. I attended a really interesting talk on this the other day which pointed out that however creative a narrative might seem (the context here was video games) you read the text according to preset rules. You, as a player, have limited agency – you are playing “by the rules of interactivity”. And that’s what Twine makes me very conscious of; that for all the freedom and non-linearity it offers, as a reader, you’re still playing a game set by others rules. But then, can we cultivate narrative creativity? Narrative freedom? Questions for another time, I suspect. For now, here’s the story I put together.

Virtual reality and children’s literature

Samsung sees virtual reality as playing a huge part in the future of children’s literature; arguing that the technology brings together the child and the parent for a joint bedtime story experience regardless of where the parent may be at that point in time. Whilst the users clearly won’t be able to ‘see’ each other, they will be able to interact with each other in a story experience. There’s a video below that gives a better idea of this:

WeareAR offers a really interesting look at some of the other developments in the sector, noticeably emphasising that much of the virtual reality technology isn’t directly suitable for children. There is, however, a juvenile version of a VR headset available which, as the writer reflects, plays a similar function to the role of the TV as he grew up.

I was lucky enough to have my first experience with virtual reality recently. We were testing a game for a friend, and as we chatted about the experience one of the other members of the group commented about how there was always a disconnect between virtual reality and reality for her. The virtual reality experience could never be wholly immersive because of the consciousness of it being a virtual reality experience.

Something clicked with that comment and it centred around the awareness of virtual reality being virtual and never being wholly able to escape that. There’s obviously something there that can be attributed to the nature of the technology itself and its paraphernalia. I felt, for example, that the design of the equipment from a very particularly gendered / physical context. I wear glasses and also have, you know, hair. It’s not simple equipment to wear and so I suspect there’s an element of consciousness around that. You are aware you are wearing things that you do not normally wear, and so you are conscious.

But I think there’s something more here and it centres on our ability to read the world around us.

We live in a specific plane of existence; we read our world and we know how to understand it, because we understand its signs. Imagine the way you walk through a supermarket and understand the codes that it gives you. You know the frozen things are in the freezers, the eggs are one hundred miles away because they want you to buy other things before you get there, and the fruit and vegetables are pretty much the first thing you see. These are all structures and there’s an analogy here to draw to the idea of a book. We understand how to work a book because we are taught the socially embedded knowledge of how to do this. It’s a process of cultural transference; you learn how to drive a car, to boil an egg, to read a book, because somebody before you and somebody before them all figured it out.

So to bring that back to the idea of reality. Let’s say we exist in point A. We understand point A and we know there is nothing else but point A.

But if we existed in point A and point B; if we were able to move from one reality to another, let’s say like something like the Matrix, or the DC Multiverse, and accept that both point A and point B are realities, then that starts to throw something interesting into the mix. It allows us to read point A and point B as real spaces, and to compare and contrast them as another.

But we clearly don’t have that ability to step between or recognise other realities, at least not yet, and so we can’t achieve a parity of reality. We cannot understand something other than our own reality because there is nothing there to understand. We don’t know how to read an alternative reality because there is no alternative reality.

I think what I’m reaching for is the idea that a virtual space will always remain consciously virtual and never 100% immersive, unless we gain the ability to read that space not as one of difference but one of similiarity. One of parity. Are we attempting to understand an alternative world without wholly grasping what the rules of interpretation are?

This has led me back towards Saussure and in particular his point that, “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.” I think, perhaps, for me to fully understand virtual reality and be able to tie it coherently towards children’s literature, I need to be able to understand what we’re asking the participant to be. Is is that we’re asking for people to think of themselves in the wrong way when it comes to virtual reality? Maybe instead of asking for adults and children to act as players and participants we should be instead asking them to be authors and makers.

 

 

47 things I have learnt about research

1. Playing Mario Kart does not count
2. Research is terrifying
3. Research is brilliant
4. You will get better at it
5. You need to be organised.
6. People who you reference are real people
7. Seeing people who you reference is terrifying
8. Talk to a lot of people
9. Even when you are terrified
10. You will learn how to spell phenomenological
11. PhD comics will make sense
12. You will take one step forward and eleven steps back
13. Sometimes everything will click
14. Sometimes everything will not
15. Celebrate the small things
16. Don’t judge yourself against other people
17. You’re doing this from choice
18. You are as important as your research
19. Cake is imporant.
20. Friends are also important.
21. Conferences are exhausting
22. But also incredible
23. But mainly exhausting
24. Have fun where you can
25. Be honest
26. Be realistic
27. Take up the opportunities when you’re offered them
28. Find the comfy seats in the library
29. Restrain from taping off the comfy seats in the library
30. Talk about your research
31. Submit papers
32. Ask questions
33. Present your research formally or informally
34. Talk about what you do
35. You will learn to love a subheading
36. You will become super argumentative
37. People will say “You’ve changed”
38. You will start to have answers to questions
39. You will also perfect the panicked state
40. You will also perfect the art of writing things down so you don’t have to answer
41. You will question all your life choices
42. You will be suddenly, unbearably happy
43. Nobody will have a clue what you do
44. Librarians are your best friends
45. Social media is a lifeline.
46. You will hate your subject
47. You will love it

Talking Mobile Fictions, Digital Storytelling and Hairy Maclary with Alastair Horne

I’m privileged to be able to share something special with you today. This is an interview I did with Alastair Horne about his PhD research. Alastair is looking at the role of digital devices in fiction and how they’re affecting the relationships between author, text and reader. His topic really struck home for me because children’s literature has a relatively uneasy relationship with the digital device. It’s a relationship that I’m not sure should be as uneasy as it is but it is uneasy nevertheless. You only have to look at the fairly regular headlines that talk about children being addicted to screens to see the sort of dialogue that I’m referring too. 

That’s what drove me to get in touch with Alastair, alongside a general intrigue for his research topic, and I’m immensely grateful to him both for saying yes and also giving me some incredibly thoughtful answers. I find all of the below fascinating and I hope you do too whether you’re a writer, reader or an author trying to figure out social media. You can find Alastair online here and on Twitter here. I urge you to do so!

Could you sum up your research in a few sentences?

My work explores how mobile phones and tablets are changing the relationship between author, text, and reader. There are three parts: in the first, I’m looking at ‘mobile fictions’, stories written specifically for smartphones and tablets, which make use of the opportunities such devices create for new kinds of storytelling. The second part explores how the social media platforms people use on mobile – particularly Twitter – allow authors and readers to interact in sustained and intense ways. And the final part is a creative project: a short mobile audio fiction that’s designed to be experienced during a ten-minute walk through Brompton Cemetery.

Your work touches on fiction that’s been written specifically for smartphones and tablets – ‘mobile fictions’. Do you have any particular favourites you’d recommend for somebody wishing to see what these are?

Probably my favourite of the last few years is 80 Days, published by Inkle. It’s a remarkable reworking of the Jules Verne story into an interactive fiction which allows the reader to choose their own route around an imaginary Victorian steampunk world. It’s only really using a few of the opportunities created by mobile devices – interactivity, audio and images, essentially – but it uses them so well, creating a wonderfully vivid world by expanding and updating Verne’s original to a phenomenal extent: there are 150 cities to visit, and the whole story includes 750,000 words of narrative, more than ten times that of the original novel.

Another publisher doing interesting things is Oolipo, who’ve just launched their first set of stories written specifically for smartphones: Kate Pullinger, who’s one of my PhD supervisors, has written a piece for them about a young woman who starts getting text messages from a friend of hers who died three years ago; you can download the first part for free now, and the rest will be available soon.

So far as apps for children are concerned, Nosy Crow are the obvious leaders in this field – you need only look at the number of prizes they’ve won to realise that – and their work is brilliant, but the most wonderful children’s book app I ever saw is one that’s sadly no longer available. Oliver Jeffers’s The Heart and the Bottle is a beautiful story about coping with grief, and the app version was, I think, even better, augmenting the story with lots of small but compelling interactions – at one point, readers could draw a picture using coloured crayons, and then a few screens later, that picture would quietly appear, framed on a wall in another scene. But it clearly didn’t make enough money, as it’s been withdrawn from the app store, and if you already own a copy, it’s a rather sad experience trying to read it now, as it’s horribly broken – screens run into each other as if someone’s torn a page in half and you can see half of one page and half the page below.

This is a real problem for anyone studying mobile fictions: some of the most interesting examples are no longer available because they didn’t make enough money for their publishers to justify the cost of updating them to work on new versions of mobile operating systems. Some have disappeared entirely: if you search for the app version of Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, for instance, all you’ll find are a few reviews and a promotional website with download links that no longer work – the app was withdrawn years ago. The forthcoming update to the Apple operating system is only going to make things worse, as it will break several apps that currently just about work, like Faber’s Malcolm Tucker app.

And, building on that, do you see any difference in approach between adult or children’s mobile fictions? Is there any difference?

I’m still in the early stages of my research, but the children’s mobile fictions I know best are mostly conventional linear narratives that add moments of joy to the story through small interactions: moving characters and objects around the screen, for instance. That seems quite different to the adult fictions I’m studying which, when they use interactivity, tend to make a more sustained use of it, in the form of narratives that take different paths depending on the reader’s choices.

There are other differences too. So far, for instance, it’s only really children’s mobile fictions I’ve seen making use of the iPad’s gyroscope, allowing things to happen when the screen is tilted in different directions: on the opening screen of The Heart and the Bottle, for instance, if you angle your iPad a little, you can discover someone hiding behind a tree. Adult fictions are generally more often interested in geolocation – where the device is, and what you can do with a story if the device you’re reading it on knows where you are – rather than how it’s angled.

The other part of your research moves towards interaction between authors and readers on social media. Do you have any ideas on how authors can best manage the pressures of this?

My thoughts on this are, to be honest, informed more by my own experience on Twitter, and by my time as Social Media and Communities Manager at Cambridge University Press, than by my research in this area, which is still at a very early stage. But to start with, I’d advise authors only to use social media if they have a genuine enthusiasm for doing so, and enough free time to spend on it: Twitter’s no place for a reluctant author who’s only there because he’s been told by his publisher to build a platform, and who checks in for a few minutes each day feeling slightly resentful.

I think the best examples of authors on Twitter – Ian Rankin, for instance – are just being themselves, giving readers glimpses into their lives and interests, with barely any attempt at promoting their books (though admittedly that’s a luxury you have as a routinely best-selling author).  Rankin engages with people who ask about his books, thanking readers who’ve taken the time to post praise, and answering plenty of questions, albeit sometimes fairly briefly – he can often reply to twenty or more tweets from readers in a day.

If you’re finding Twitter stressful as an author, I think you need to find yourself a network of friends who’ll make you want to check in not to see if you’ve any messages to answer, but to see what your friends have been getting up to. Follow the people – particularly authors – you’d like to be friends with, and get chatting to them. Going back to the example of Ian Rankin, he spends a lot of his time on Twitter just chatting away to other crime novelists, and to people who share his tastes in music. I very much doubt that he sees Twitter as a chore.

I love the sound of your creative project! How did you choose your location for this? And has the location influenced the type of story you hope to tell?

It was all rather random. I’ve been interested in cemeteries for some time, after making an unexpected discovery several years ago in Paris’s Montparnasse Cemetery that gave me the seed of an idea for a novel that I’ve been determinedly not writing ever since. That led me to take an interest in London’s ‘magnificent seven’ cemeteries, so when I attended a workshop last year on writing using the interactive fiction tool Twine, I decided to create a tour guide for Brompton Cemetery, finding a list online of the fifty most interesting people buried there. One of them turned out to be a ‘mysterious society woman’ by the name of Hannah Courtoy, whose tomb is genuinely believed by some to house a time machine, and that seemed an absolute gift for a story.

One of the aspects of mobile fictions that interests me most is the possibility of writing a story that is specific to the place where it’s experienced – a story that knows where you are while you’re reading it, thanks to your phone’s GPS, and adapts accordingly. So, that’s what I’m trying to do with my creative project. Listeners will take a walk through the cemetery, and find themselves overhearing the voices of some of its permanent residents, from Major Archibald Low, a man who – remarkably – invented drones during the first world war, and whom the Germans attempted to kill by means of a cigarette laced with strychnine, to Joseph Bonomi, the Egyptologist responsible for designing Hannah Courtoy’s time machine. They’ll not only learn about the lives of these fascinating people, but also be able to piece together another story for themselves, based on the individual tales that they’ve heard. So, the location is a fundamental influence on the story I’m telling: Brompton Cemetery is the setting not just for the story, but for the experience of listening to it too. (And if anyone would be interested in helping me test out any of the various iterations of this story, please get in touch on Twitter.)

And finally, what’s your favourite children’s book? (I know it’s an impossible question so I’m also happy to accept the last children’s book you read!)

I have vivid memories of reading many of the children’s classics – Treasure Island, Watership Down, and the Narnia stories – plus some that are probably less well respected these days: Willard Price’s Adventure series, and Enid Blyton’s tales of Fatty and the Five Find-Outers. (I was never that bothered about either the Famous Five or the Secret Seven, though.) And as a very small child I loved both the Mister Men, and the Reverend W. Awdry’s Railway Series, long before they became all about the insufferable Thomas the Tank Engine.

I also loved the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, which has perhaps had the biggest influence over me long-term, since it was the starting point of my interest in fictions where the reader takes an active role in the story through making decisions, and therefore a key factor in this PhD!

More recently, I spent a few years a while back babysitting for a friend of mine, and that introduced me to a new generation of children’s picture books: that’s where I first discovered the wonderful Oliver Jeffers, with Lost and Found and The Incredible Book-Eating Boy, and also Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy – I got so much pleasure from reading the Hairy Maclary books aloud, putting on different voices for the sentences about the different dogs, like Schnitzel Von Krumm, with the very low tum.

 

Communication, publicity and accessibility

It’s really interesting to live and research in York. There are two universities here, several specialist colleges, a host of senior schools, primary schools and playgroups. Alongside that are specialist groups, philosophical societies, local history groups, community initiatives and other non-traditional  collectives of people wanting to make a difference. It is a place where things happen, undoubtedly.

But, interestingly enough, it’s often hard to find out about these things.Yesterday afternoon, the Lib Dem leader Tim Farron held a question and answer session about Brexit. A fairly relevant discussion to have, and to participate in (especially the day before the government announces the official date for Article 50) and yet, the first thing I saw about it was a piece of paper pinned up on a door. I found out the other day about a local spoken word event that had been going on for eleven years. Eleven years! I see things by accident on social media, whilst friends come back and ask why there are Vikings wandering around on the street…

I admit that I come from a very particular context. I believe firmly that research involving children’s literature should be accessible. We have an ethical duty to relate it back to the child at the heart of our practice. Without children, no children’s literature. It’s as simple as that. Yet, the wider remit of this is something that affects all researchers. One of the things we practice as researchers is to deliver research with impact. Engagement. Direct practical applications of research in the ‘real’ world. Why does it matter to the man on the street that I do what I do? Why should they care?

I sometimes wonder what would happen if these events were out where the ‘real’ person is located – and if they didn’t require somebody to read an email or glance at a poster beforehand.

I think, essentially, this might be a plea for somebody to plan an impact activity in Morrison’s cafe…

Defying Impostor Syndrome in Academia

It’s something that I never really understood until I came to academia, but impostor syndrome is the worst. It hit me, I think, in those first few weeks where I didn’t quite understand what I was doing and somebody had already gone to Harvard to deliver a lecture, whilst somebody else had cured world hunger in the first fifteen minutes of their working day. Your achievements, of being in the right place at the right time, or simply managing to read a book and make some constructive notes from it, never quite seem to compare. Surely somebody’s going to find you out, surely somebody is going to discover that they made a mistake in letting you in? That’s impostor syndrome, that little edge of doubt that cuts into your thoughts and seals the hole behind it. It doesn’t want to leave and if you try to make it leave, it’s going to do one hell of an exit.

Fun, right? You’re doing something you love, intensely, but you’re doubting it, every step. It can be exhausting. It is exhausting. It’s also impossible to explain because you don’t quite know what it is. I know that I didn’t. I thought it was normal. I thought that coming home from tutorials and collapsing in tears was – normal. I thought it was, somehow, part of the process.

It’s not. It’s not remotely.

I’m blogging about this on International Women’s Day for a reason because, for me, the defiance of impostor syndrome required scaffolds. Supports. Women. Men. Friends. People who believed in me and who supported me through those moments when everything just seemed incomprehensible. Research is life-affirming. It doesn’t require one life for another; you are equally as important as that which you research. Sometimes it’s hard to see that. Sometimes it’s hard to even ask for support. Impostor syndrome, stress, that closing, narrowing of the light around you, can make the world feel very distant. And acknowledging that can be the hardest thing in the world.

But people will bring you through it, and you are people, so I suppose this blog is to tell you something. That if you are experiencing a darkness of your own in academia, that if you are feeling isolated, reach out. You are not alone, and there are people out there who will help you get through this. And here’s the thing; that’s exactly what makes impostor syndrome wither away and die.

You defy it with people. You write and you work for the people who love you and believe in you. You write for them, and you keep going because your voice is important, and the world needs it, and impostor syndrome is nothing, really.

Doubt won’t keep you silent.

Keep speaking.

#internationalwomensday

Developing, programming, coding – oh my!

It’s been an interesting couple of days as I’ve finally managed to get my teeth into programming. I started this adventure from a very flat playing field; we didn’t do this sort of thing at school, nor could we. It wasn’t that we didn’t have computers (I’m not 100 years old) but rather that coding and the like did not figure as part of the educational pedagogy at that time.

So, programming. Coding. I’m learning C# very (very) slowly, and trying to wrap my head around the shape of it. It’s like learning Spanish in a way, a language that I have a basic idea of, but don’t know the nuances of. I know what I think it should be, but can’t quite figure out the why or the how. 

Yet.

I think that’s one of the greatest things that the research journey has taught me: one should recognise and celebrate the small achievements. And for me, making this small video below where I’ve programmed a wormy thing to travel around the backdrop of a library, is a very big small achievement.

My adventures in (super rudimentary) programming continue and honestly, I'm shrieking with excitement even though it is super rudimentary pic.twitter.com/vS0X7TH7DN

— LH 'Daisy' Johnson (@chaletfan) January 19, 2017

The secret studded streets of York

There’s a secret embedded on the streets of York. Have you figured it out?

All around the centre of the town, opposite cafes and shops and down streets and on bridges, are a series of small coloured studs set into the ground. Some of them are a little worse for wear, filled in with dirt and life, but they’re most definitely there. Greens. Ambers. Odd little flashes of colour against the street. Vibrant flashes of light when the sun catches them.

These are the remnants of the York Breadcrumbs trail, an initiative from 2005 which saw the creation of three custom walking tours located in and around the centre of town. The stories locate themselves in the fabric of the city and see adventures located within the recognisable settings and locations, both above ground and below and, as this reference shows, originally intended to be viewed at the dark with the aid of torches.

I first came across the York Breadcrumbs story whilst in the library, looking for something else. It’s often the way with research: you find the intriguing things when you’re not looking for them. I was instantly intrigued by the catalogue record and hunted the book out. I’ve known York for a long while, and I’d never heard of anything like this. I wasn’t even sure of what the book meant when it referred to a trail and whether what that was would still be visible. Eleven years is a long time. The project had done its work but not, somehow, lasted. Maybe it was too economically friable, or the numbers simply weren’t working or something. What was clear was that these stories had marked the canvas of the city and now, simply, were gone.

 

The more I investigated however, the more I came to realise that this project still marks the city. Above, for example, is a mosaic in Exhibition Square. You can just make out on the left hand side of the picture a link to the Breadcrumbs website (now sadly defunct), and the goose and the fox link to the content of the stories. The mosaic is located right in the middle of the square, next to the fountain, and it’s something that I’d walked past a thousand times and never looked at.

But it’s a memory of story, of what was located here and what, in a way, still is.

Story has a permanence, even in its most ephemeral state, and when linked to place, that permanence becomes fixed. It may fade in and out, be seen or unseen, be known or lost or forgotten, but it is always there and it always will be there. Fixed. Embedded.

I find York Breadcrumbs fascinating on many levels and much of that centres on the afterlife of the work. I see, often, initiatives that promise great things but rarely seem to recognise the afterwards. There is always an afterwards. Talk about changing the world, about challenging the system, and then enable the afterwards to happen. I wonder what will become of York Breadcrumbs in a few more years; will it sink deeper into the ground and be consumed by the city or will it suddenly flare back into life?

I rather hope for the latter.

Augmented reality; space, and children’s literature

I have been thinking of pyramids.

Pyramids, it seems, sum up best the relationship between the reader and the augmented reality text. Consider yourself now, reading this. There is yourself (the reader) and there are the words (the text) but then there is the other and that is the point between. Much of this is simplified, forgive me, but I suspect the model of the pyramid works well here. A three pointed relationship; a continuum of connection which sees a point locked between these distinct things whilst the creative space in between renders meaning. 

So: the pyramid. A model that renders the reading of the text; let’s call the flat base of this pyramid the text itself, let’s  colour that area yellow, and let that function as a drive towards the apex of meaning. A gathering of disparate influences being refined and shifted into a pointed, precise reading. 

Where the problem and interest and excitement comes with augmented reality is that it pushes into a subspace unable to be inhabited by a text. A book is a flat experience; practically, excuse me for the sweeping simplifications here; the word is printed flat upon the page. It is embodied in a physical frame of remove; the book is the book is the book.

Augmented realities blur that edge. Let’s introduce that to the pyramid; colour it red, call it an introduced something. Maybe it’s a pop up element, or a simple call towards using your phone on this page. This isn’t something new (think of QR codes on text, asking you to log in elsewhere, or even an address asking you to write in), but it’s something different. Something tangible and instant, something that’s wrapped up in a discourse all of its own. 

And rendering it like this makes it immediately fascinating to me because it both obliterates and creates something new. The text is lost, but also transmuted into something else; the AR element cannot exist without a connection towards this base layer but it equally denies its influence and asks for a different mode of reading. A hint of tension is introduced; the two layers demand interest of their own, and indeed a different reading, and such a tension brings with it a pull of focus. It brings with it a potential destruction.

What I suspect, and what we need to do (and what I am indeed attempting to work out) is a way to unpack this tension … a way to have mutual cooperation.  A way to have one’s literary pyramid and eat it. …

Augmented reality and children’s literature

I recently reviewed a book over on my other blog which had an augmented reality element. It’s a book that ties into a lot of my research interests at the moment and, should I be able to secure funding, the next stage of where I want to go.

Augmented reality and virtual reality offer a whole world of potential for children’s literature. It’s an ethically fraught area, dealing as it does with the oft-found tension between technology and the book; a tension that asks the reader to select one or the other without, ever, seeming to acknowledge that the book itself was, is and will continue to be one of the most successful technological inventions we’ve ever made.

I want to position these technologies as fictively driven, as opposed to driven by design. We’ve all seen design driven innovations; that thing that looks cool if we add it onto this thing and it is cool but it is equally impracitable and ultimately rather redundant. I specialise in children’s literature and as an adult within that space, I’m in a space of tension to begin with. My readership is not the same readership as a child, and never can be.  So, in a way, I need to both acknowledge that and disregard it, and centre my interest in augmented reality and virtual reality in the frame of the book itself.

I want to take that frame and extend it.

There’s an app I read about recently, which allows you to view the White House through augmented reality and a dollar bill. This video shows it in action and it’s something rather wonderful:

And now you’ve seen that, I want you to imagine something with the front cover of a book, maybe, where you hold your phone at it and launch the app, and an experience occurs. Maybe it’s a pop up hello from a character, or a prequel scene activated, or a map where the book is set. And this isn’t an experience located away from the book and embedded in the phone, but rather an experiential dialogue between the two. This is the book activated in a way that was always there, but never visible, and it’s the phone as another reader within the process. It’s a dialogue, that’s the key word, and it’s a dialogue which requires the participation of book and reader and technology.

Imagine, maybe, a book that’s set in Buckingham Palace, and the opportunity to explore that, and locate the text within that visualisation. Imagine, maybe, a character who comes to life and talks to the reader, but then returns to the book. Imagine this technology rooted in that book space and driven by the needs of that space.

Imagine an understanding of literacy underpinned by the acknowledgement that reader, book and other can participate within that understanding.

Imagine where you’d like to go.