Landing Gear - API
The digital development team at Random House Canada has created an API from an extract of my new novel, Landing Gear. Find it here: randomhouse.ca/landinggearapi
We offered the API (application programming interface) at Books in Browser’s first ever HackDay in San Francisco on Saturday 26 October. I’d very much like to offer the API to other developers who might want to engage with it, play with it, hack it, and see what happens. I’d very much also like to be involved with further hackdays for developers interesting in engaging with my novel via the API.
Here’s a report on the San Francisco Hackday from Quill & Quire:
At the San Francisco conference Books in Browsers this past weekend, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Kate Pullinger and her publisher, Doubleday Canada, launched an experimental digital project. An excerpt of Pullinger’s forthcoming novel, Landing Gear, became raw material for the e-publishing event’s first “hackathon.”
In advance of the conference, Random House of Canada’s digital development team created an API (application programming interface) for an excerpt of the novel, which essentially means creating manipulable tags for its characters, locations, events, and timelines. “[The API] makes the text searchable and re-mixable, which opens it up to other developers coming in with ideas about new ways of interrogating the text other than simply reading it,” explains Pullinger.
Pullinger and Random House of Canada digital projects manager Meghan MacDonald were on hand at the conference to help with the experimental applications. One developer created a Twitter bot that could interact with one of the characters by tweeting his dialogue and collecting responses. Another invention, which MacDonald refers to as an “art project,” featured an iPad “mini-app” that animated a portion of Pullinger’s handwritten text.
Once the projects are complete, they will be posted at www.randomhouse.ca/LandingGearAPI, where the API will remain available for use.
Pullinger, who has been involved with digital storytelling for more than a decade, says, “This is the first time I’ve done anything that looks at the potential for the novel online, as opposed to a book or an ebook format.… I’ve never succeeded in interesting my book publishers in my digital work until now, so that’s tremendously exciting for me that Random House was willing to experiment.”
For her part, MacDonald says the Random House of Canada digital team has approached the online endeavour as research and development. “I don’t know what this project is going to look like in the future, but I think it’s important that we as [a] publisher are experimenting and trying new things.”
We offered the API (application programming interface) at Books in Browser’s first ever HackDay in San Francisco on Saturday 26 October. I’d very much like to offer the API to other developers who might want to engage with it, play with it, hack it, and see what happens. I’d very much also like to be involved with further hackdays for developers interesting in engaging with my novel via the API.
Here’s a report on the San Francisco Hackday from Quill & Quire:
At the San Francisco conference Books in Browsers this past weekend, Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author Kate Pullinger and her publisher, Doubleday Canada, launched an experimental digital project. An excerpt of Pullinger’s forthcoming novel, Landing Gear, became raw material for the e-publishing event’s first “hackathon.”
In advance of the conference, Random House of Canada’s digital development team created an API (application programming interface) for an excerpt of the novel, which essentially means creating manipulable tags for its characters, locations, events, and timelines. “[The API] makes the text searchable and re-mixable, which opens it up to other developers coming in with ideas about new ways of interrogating the text other than simply reading it,” explains Pullinger.
Pullinger and Random House of Canada digital projects manager Meghan MacDonald were on hand at the conference to help with the experimental applications. One developer created a Twitter bot that could interact with one of the characters by tweeting his dialogue and collecting responses. Another invention, which MacDonald refers to as an “art project,” featured an iPad “mini-app” that animated a portion of Pullinger’s handwritten text.
Once the projects are complete, they will be posted at www.randomhouse.ca/LandingGearAPI, where the API will remain available for use.
Pullinger, who has been involved with digital storytelling for more than a decade, says, “This is the first time I’ve done anything that looks at the potential for the novel online, as opposed to a book or an ebook format.… I’ve never succeeded in interesting my book publishers in my digital work until now, so that’s tremendously exciting for me that Random House was willing to experiment.”
For her part, MacDonald says the Random House of Canada digital team has approached the online endeavour as research and development. “I don’t know what this project is going to look like in the future, but I think it’s important that we as [a] publisher are experimenting and trying new things.”
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