The BBC Radio Labs team have been up to some very interesting stuff, as often they are. This time they’ve taken a novel approach to The Archers, a long running daily radio drama broadcast on Radio 4. Now while I’m not a fan of The Archers, in fact I never listen to it, I’m familiar enough with the format. It’s short and there are a number of scenes seperated by silence. What the Radio Labs folks have done is parse the structure of each episode into scenes with attached information on characters, location, weather, which storyline, and other tags. It means locating a scene is easy, reconfiguring them as segments is easy, concentrating only on one story line is simple etc. The effort is to create metadata for the development of a new dynamic page for the show. So you could click into a page about a character or storyline or relationship, and be presented with the scenes and info on other related facets. Very clever.
What I found really curious is the graphics. It’s really interesting to see a storyline mapped like that, or the different facets graphically entangled. Now if each segment was tagged with plot devices and mapped against audience or some other measure of audience response it would be like reading a sort of blueprint. For instance, if on the 21st of December some plot device such as a pregnancy led to a lot of time being devoted to poor audience response it would be demonstrable as a graphic. That said that’s the sort of thing that isn’t too hard for writers and producers to figure out themselves. A very structuralist look at radio drama no?
[...] – Parsing the Radio Drama saved by kdillin2008-10-11 – Popping the radio saved by maesk2008-10-06 – Radio Labs saved by [...]
Websites tagged "radiolabs" on Postsaver
12 Oct 08 at 9:17 am