Rarely our exper­i­ence with a news story is a dir­ect one, there­fore our point of view on a story is driven by habit and con­ven­tions and not cre­ated through a first hand exper­i­ence. To under­stand a such story you have not to only under­stand the ele­ments that com­poses it, but the rela­tion­ship between them. Under­stand­ing means decon­struc­tion and reconstruction.

Design

PLESPER works at two levels: the usual macro level is con­cerned with an art­icle (or any web address­able item) as unit (regarded as a coher­ent point of view), the micro level dis­sects an art­icle into smal­ler seg­ments (ideally at the level of facts).

The macro level nav­ig­a­tion is what we’re cur­rently used with as pass­ive read­ers. The micro level is needed for act­ive read­ing, for ques­tion­ing assump­tions, con­sid­er­ing altern­at­ives, ques­tion­ing the trust­wor­thi­ness of the authors and their sources. An act­ive reader will recon­struct his crit­ical point of view for deeper understanding.

PLESPER is organ­ised around the idea of share­able space, akin to Eth­er­pad, as data and not as live inter­ac­tions, each per­son even when col­lab­or­ates on the same space may have dif­fer­ent views, but the same items.

At macro level PLESPER allows the people shar­ing a space to add items (by URL or a web search), view a thumb­nail rep­res­ent­a­tion of them, fil­ter and sort them by vari­ous dimen­sions (loc­a­tion, names, social tags).

A zoom­able user inter­face (ZUI) allows switch­ing from macro to micro level while keep­ing the nav­ig­a­tion coher­ent.

At micro level each para­graph or pos­sible mean­ing­ful sen­tence can be indi­vidu­ally addressed, selec­ted and related with ones from other art­icles by vari­ous means:

• simple sim­il­ar­ity (from n-​grams to named entities)
• sen­ti­ment analysis
• sim­ilar facts (that answer the same ques­tion)

Addi­tion­ally a selec­ted seg­ment can be pro­moted (quoted) to the macro level in order to be used in con­struct­ing relations.

A quote (for example a tweeted quote with a link) can be related not only to its ori­ginal con­text if provided but for brev­ity sake to the min­imum con­text needed to decrease its ambi­gu­ity.

Once the ini­tial items were sor­ted, filtered and dis­sec­ted; they can be con­nec­ted in a graph to con­vey sequence, rela­tions, etc.

Spaces can be shared fully or read-​only sim­ul­tan­eously (dif­fer­ent cap­ab­il­ity URIs), they can be impor­ted (cloned or synced); allow­ing the con­struc­tion of vari­ous inter­ac­tion processes.

You can test the pro­to­type as shown in the video at PLES​PER​.com (server tem­por­ar­ily offline)

Tech­nical notes

• Item rep­res­ent­a­tion is based on oEmbed pro­tocol when avail­able oth­er­wise a Read­ab­il­ity–like scraper is employed to extract the mean­ing­ful part of a referred page
• Loc­a­tion, names, etc. are extrac­ted via an external ser­vice like Thom­son Reu­ters’ Open­Cal­ais
• Com­ments & annota­tions should be based on exist­ing (semantic) web tech­no­lo­gies and activ­ity streams
• The need for iden­tity & access rights man­age­ment can be del­eg­ated to 3^rd parties through the use of cap­ab­il­ity URIs.
• Source code http://​git​hub​.com/​L​a​u​r​i​a​n​/​P​L​E​S​PER

Brief

PLESPER is a plat­form for col­lab­or­at­ive story­board­ing that does not impose a spe­cific pro­cess. People can cre­ate, re-​use (fork), mix ele­ments from vari­ous story­boards (spaces), share and com­ment on them by using their exit­ing (and future) social net­works. Sev­eral envis­aged uses are:

• col­lab­or­at­ive draft­ing of stor­ies with full or par­tial pub­lic collaboration
• pub­lished along an art­icle to sup­port it and gather feed­back (com­ments, story­board re-​use, etc.)
• evolve art­icles based on the pub­lic inter­ac­tion with the story­board (at the dis­cre­tion of the editor)
• cre­ate mean­ing­ful art­icles’ con­nec­tions with other ones (as they may con­nect at a more abstract/​storyboard level)
• back data visu­al­isa­tions with more in-​depth dis­cus­sions and data­sets (allow­ing the com­munity to cre­ate altern­at­ive visu­al­isa­tions and import addi­tional datasets)

One of the most import­ant fea­ture is that there are no spe­cific require­ments for the exist­ing sites other than be access­ible over the web, PLESPER will work over old pages on the web, it will work with leg­acy and future CMS sys­tems, it will work over Twit­ter, Face­book, G+ and whatever will be inven­ted; because it is based on what the web is made of: links.

Rel­ev­ant blog posts:

1. The Per­plex & Other Stor­ies (the ini­tial idea)
2. News Stor­ies & Inter­ac­tion (where I ini­tially explore some exist­ing news spaces nav­ig­a­tion meta­phors then I intro­duce PLESPER)
3. Col­lab­or­a­tion in PLESPER (a simple playl­ist analogy)