Ripping text into Hypertext

I’ve spent the day engaged in a first-pass edit of a proposed guidebook text into HypeDyn. The text is the 10,000 word draft by Sue Kirkland of a guide to the River Wey and Godalming Navigations. Though this is National Trust site, its not an official project, I’m doing it as a “real-world” exercise in using HypeDyn.

So far I’ve cut the text up into about seventy “nodes”, most of which are associated with actual places along the river. There are also eight that are pure “story” elements, and a few others are are about things or people. A few “transistions” have also become apparent. The text as it stood envisaged a twenty mile walk from the Thames to Godalming – so so I thought, for most of the day. This puzzled me, as the Navigations are a favourite place for my family to walk, but we’ve never considered walking it all in one. (Well, my wife probably has, but the rest of us a far more fairweather.) And even if we were, I thought, why would we start at the Thames? Surely it would be more pleasant to walk downstream?

The “one way” nature of of the proposed text was the reason why I’d thought it might be fun to turn into Hypertext in the first place. If I managed no more that making it readable in two directions, that would be a useful enough thing to do in any case. So while I was editing I was thinking about the walks my family had taken, some upstream some down, and I still couldn’t work out why the original author had chosen to start at the Thames. It only dawned on me as I neared the end – the navigations aren’t only for walkers, obviously. Lots of pleasure-boat owners and hirers use the waterway too. Many are local with their boats moored somewhere along the river, but most visiting craft would have come via the Thames. Doh!

So, when i start my next task, turning it into a context based Hypertext, I won’t just have to think about walks starting at (for the sake of my sanity) the four sites with the best car parking, but also boats coming form the Thames (that should be easy of course because that’s how the original was written) the two points where other waterways join the Navigations. Actually its one other point right now – the Wey and Arun canal is not yet fully restored.

So at either end, there is only one direction of travel, but at the other three (or four) points, the visitor will have a choice to go up or downstream, and the language of the text will have to change to cope with the choices the visitor makes. I also want the text to tell most of the “story” elements to the visitor, even if they have the shortest, four mile, walk.

That’s all for another day though.

I took a phone call today from a friend of a friend who is possibly being offered a high-powered job with a global cultural heritage brand. We talked about that company and its competitors, and where the future might go. And for the first time I used the words “Ambient Interpretation.” I know exactly where I got the word Ambient from, but I’m not telling you, not yet. And not tomorrow, but next week.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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