This is an intro to my panel next week at SXSW, exploring the Future of Context w/ Jay Rosen, Staci D. Kramer, and Matt Thompson. I’m writing this to share some early thoughts and get you involved in the conversation, so pls leave your feedback in the comments and come Monday the 16th!

This is how I think of the word context.

Context is information that informs your understanding of the world, literally allowing you to derive more meaning from an experience. In the case of the painting above, it deepens the meaning of your experience in the Met by increasing the # of features, patterns and ideas you’re aware of in each painting. Even though the rectangle of colored brush strokes is the same as the one you saw before the NYU professor told you all about it, you actually see the painting in a different way after you have context.

Context in web-based news and storytelling:

So how does this relate to my panel next week on the Future of Context in publishing?

If you think about it, the way we read news on the web is much like walking down the hall of the Met without having context. Much that we read relates to big topical issues we probably don’t fully understand: the Health Care debate, the standoff between Iran and the United States, the Financial Crisis. We know we should pay attention to these topics, yet we’re massively under-equipped to understand their nuances and complexity of the issue, especially since it comes to us in a daily flood of headlines (e.g. “UN weapons inspectors are visiting Iran today…”). Articles like this are about as helpful as the little “yellow notecards” are giving basic information about each painting in the Met.

Re-inventing publishing around Context

As Jay Rosen put it, the word “context” itself implies something that information that is secondary or supplemental to the “main” text. But you can see from the examples above that that’s wrong.  Context is primary. You actually need context before you can make much sense of what’s in front of you.

The exciting thing is, the web is most incredible tool we’ve ever had to solve this problem. We’re at the point where there is always something out on the web – a video, a background story, a Wikipedia article, a set of photographs, or an idea in someone’s head – that could provide a greater context and understanding for the topic. Go ahead, think of any topic in the world, and there’s something out there.

A new approach to context

At our panel we’re going to explore a new context-oriented approach to publishing and user experience. As I see it, the problem breaks down into a few distinct challenges:

• Repeatable & leveraged work: how do we provide context in a scalable way?
  • How can organizations leverage existing work and not re-invent the wheel each time they want to explain something or provide context? It bugs me that when NYTimes or BBC creates a fantastic infographic explaining how subduction plates cause earthquakes, they don’t re-use that infographic the next time an article runs about the next big earthquake or tsunami.
  • Coming from an engineering background & culture, you learn that you should never do work you can’t modularize and re-use.  This was the whole revolution of object-oriented programming in the 1980s. But journalism doesn’t follow this practice at all. Articles are written from scratch every time, never truly re-using or building upon previous writing to save time and money. What news needs is object-oriented journalism in which context is a basic building block upon which to create articles.
• Personalization
  • When walking in the Met, maybe some of us know a lot about 17th century Italian painters, but a lot of us don’t know anything about it. Context needs to be personalized to the audience so we don’t waste time repeating information to those who already know a lot, while still giving fresh audiences a good entry point into the topic. Like Malcolm Gladwell once paraphrased at TED, the answer for creating the best experience isn’t about finding the best article for everyone, it’s about finding the best articles for each customer of the news story that serves their needs.
• Sources of context
  • What sources can we leverage to provide context, and with what guarantees of authority?  What about all the information harnessed in the vaulted archives of media organizations (all previous articles, photographs, videos, or interactive infographics)?
• Brevity and hairstring attention spans
  • Suppose we were to invent the perfect way for people to be provided with context, as humans we are bound by the physics of shortening attention spans.
  • People have less and less patience for articles that cause the scrollbar in our browser to shrink to a tiny little nib, and we have less and less time to invest in learning something new.
  • How do we design context around the attention-strapped psychology of our minds?
• Structure & Design
  • What is the ideal structure to communicate context? Many news organizations today attempt to solve this problem by providing a “topic page” with links to further materials… but everybody knows a page full of links is overwhelming and too web 1.0. Who has the time for more links to more pages, and inevitably more tabs? We need a content-oriented context architecture, one that aims in the shortest amount of time to give people the information they need, without leaving the page (sounds familiar, probably)
• Business model and web economics
  • Changing how articles are written & published will inevitably affect how publishers generate revenue from advertising, and how it impacts things the ecosystem of link-love and SEO. We can’t re-invent news around context without respecting the business models that allow publishing on the web to thrive.
  • What we’ve found so far though, is that today’s most popular sources of context (Wikipedia, NYTimes Topic pages, fascinating blog posts smothered in link love) are largely rewarded by Google in SEO. If you Google for just about any conceptual topic, how likely is it that Wikipedia is in the top three results? This speaks good things to publishers if they could succeed in re-orienting their content around SEO-rich evergreen context with persistent URLs.

I’ve been fascinated by the role of context in our lives for more than four years and can’t wait to discuss them with you and several leading thinkers in this area next Monday.

What do you think? What else should we address in our panel?

Watch Tom Wujec, Information designer at Autodesk discuss three key qualities of successful information design to create meaning. It is fascinating:

The video outlines how good Information Design builds meaning in the brain by activating three key areas: the ventral stream of the visual processing pathway, the dorsal stream of the visual processing pathway, and the limbic system to deepen the way people experience information. Tom’s message is identical to how Apture presents content and enhances the way readers experience information on the web.

Five years ago at Stanford University, I took Professor Kalanit Grill-Spector’s classes on the Psychology & Neuroscience of Perception and read certain literature which influenced a lot of how I think about Apture’s user interface.

Here are the three take-aways and similarities I saw:

1. Use images to clarify ideas.

Apture let’s you turn flat phrases of text and flesh them out into visually rich and memorable representations: images, videos, slideshows, etc. For example, you can turn the word sad, into something rich. Turn the word happy into something more colorful.

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that images activate the “what” part of our visual perception pathway, the ventral stream which deepens how those ideas get stored.

2. Interact with images to create engagement.

Apture doesn’t just let you present information, it lets you interact with it. You can open, close, drag and maximize any Apture window and move them around as you see fit. Try one now. We’ve found in user tests that readers frequently drag a window around and feel pleasure in having the control to rearrange them as they read. Interactive Maps are an even cooler example.

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that being able to spatially manipulate images (or Apture windows) activates the “where” part of the visual perception pathway: the dorsal stream and deepens the meaning of our engagement.

3. Augment memory with persistent and evolving views.

When we designed Apture, we chose to include animations so that users had a persistent and evolving view of a content object. As a window spawns or maximizes, it happens smoothly and creates continuity. But there’s another reason too: the right animation can literally cause an emotional response. It can be fun!

How this relates to the brain: Wujec suggests that animation activates the limbic system, which is the part of the brain responsible for feelings & emotions that are very core. If we’re doing our job right, you should say “oh wow, that animation just feels so nice!”

Other thoughts

Certainly there are many more ways to deepen a person’s understanding without depending on your visual senses, specifically. After all, we have four other senses we use to experience the world. But I believe there is something to this idea: that the more senses you can engage in a story, the more deeply you are able to process and experience it.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Introducing the all-new Apture Media Hub. We’ve spent the last five months listening to your feedback and redesigning the Media Hub to be faster, easier, more customizable and give you the fine grain control you asked for. As of today, everyone who has Apture installed can open the Media Hub and begin using the new version automatically. And if you don’t have Apture, you should sign up now.

Here’s a breakdown of all the new features.

Easier Search Navigation

Now you can click along the search categories at the top of the Media Hub to filter by media type. Click Videos to instantly see videos from Apture’s 13+ video sources. Or click Reference to see background materials and reference articles. Find what you want, faster.

Drag & Drop Linking Multiple Media

Now you can link by simply dragging and dropping media into the left-hand Link Bar. You can also use Apture to embed multiple media right into the page so readers can experience the full 360 degrees around a topic without leaving their place.

For example, if I want to link information about the new Star Trek movie, I can aggregate all the interesting information about the movie, the actors, and the interviews just like this:

Customizable Sources

The new Media Hub lets you customize the sources the way you want. You can remove the sources you don’t like, and add the ones you do  – it’s all up to you. Just click on the Customize button to setup the sources in a specific category. Some media categories, like Images for example even let you to add a custom search within a specific domain (e.g. only images from http://graphics8.nytimes.com).

More Sources

We’ve added Google Books and NPR podcasts to the mix of content you can quickly find and link. But it’s even better. You can link to the specific page of any book you find. Think about that for a second – you can reference any page of a book and let your audience experience it in the moment. You can reference famous quotes from Charles Dickens, or just give context to one of your childhood classics:

Fine Grain Control

Title and Caption – Edit the title & caption in Apture windows to control the messaging

Resizing Content – Use the pulldown menu when previewing a media item to change its size. This will determine the size of the media when it is viewed by a reader.

Content-Specific Options

You can link to a specific page of a Google Book or document, to a time offset (mm:ss) in a video, the specific section of a Wikipedia article, or even a point in a map.

When you link to a video time offset with Apture, the video will jump right to that moment when played while still letting the viewer choose to go back or fast forward. Here’s an example, using an interview with Barack Obama.

As always, Apture works with WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, and Blogger. Support for more platforms is coming soon.

We think you’re going to love the new version of Apture, and we’d love to hear your feedback as you gather ideas and see things in the product you wish we could improve. Please send us your thoughts and leave comments on this post!

We can’t wait to hear from you.