A Wikipedia for life's meaningful moments

Catherine de Lange, contributor

With his latest project, Cowbird, computer scientist and artist Jonathan Harris hopes to breathe new life into the art of storytelling. New Scientist asked him how it works.

What does Cowbird mean?
The name comes from combining the traits of a cow - slow, contemplative, grounded - and a bird - fast, free, joyful. Twitter and Facebook have been all bird and no cow, while more traditional formats like operas and novels are all cow and no bird. Cowbird combines those extremes to create a space that is deep and contemplative, but also fast and efficient.

So it's a new way to tell stories online?
On the web things have been getting shorter and faster and more and more compressed - from emails to text messages to chats and tweets. I felt like the art of storytelling was coming under attack. We were forgetting how to do it.

So I was interested in creating a kind of sanctuary for storytellers and for people who want to experience real stories. I also had a dream of trying to create a public library of experience, kind of like a Wikipedia for life experience.

How does Cowbird differ from your previous work, like We Feel Fine?

We Feel Fine is more a macro view of humanity whereas Cowbird at the moment is more of a micro view of things - it?s like a really close-up conversation with a single individual. However, my intention is that once the overall volume of stories on Cowbird grows, we can start introducing these more macro-level portraits.

What kind of people is Cowbird designed for?
Storytelling is a funny thing because, in one sense, I think very few people would think of themselves as storytellers. But in another sense I think that everybody is a storyteller; it?s just that they have a difficulty with that particular word. So one of the challenges we have is to find a way to unlock that storytelling capacity that?s hiding inside everybody.

How does this site differ from Pinterest or Facebook timeline?
I think it?s very different from Pinterest, which is really just a way of gathering stuff which you think is cool on the internet - it?s really a clippings service.

As for Facebook timeline, there are a lot of similarities but I think with Cowbird the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher. Cowbird has a much lower volume of stories but the stories are very high quality.

The other big thing is that Cowbird works in this completely interconnected way, so every single story is interwoven with all of the other stories on there using metadata like location and tags. It?s really like working together to create a collective tapestry of our experience of the world. That?s very different to the personal timeline on Facebook, which is just the life of a single person.

What about privacy? A lot of the stories on Cowbird are very personal.
We intentionally did not include any notion of levels of privacy. Either a story is totally public or totally private. We didn?t want to create these weird systems like on Facebook where you are only revealing content to groups of people - I think this introduces the idea that people are uncomfortable with certain parts of their lives.

With Cowbird, if you have something you want to share with the world and you feel like it would have some teachable value, then publish it here and we?ll host it for you for a long time. If you have these things that are too private to share then write them in a private diary, on paper. (That said, an author is always free to delete anything they publish.)

How is the site curated?
Every day a story goes out to the whole community and every two days a collection goes on the home page. Yesterday was ?"violence", today is "found photographs". These are a way of organising a group of stories that share a common theme and showing those prominently to our community.

We also have "sagas", which are much less frequent. The sagas are some combination of observing things that are happening in the world from a news perspective or cultural perspective. If we believe that there?s an important story that?s not being told by the news media, we will create a saga around it and see if Cowbird can offer a more compelling view. That was very much the thinking behind the "occupied" saga.

Do you view Cowbird as the antithesis of microblogging?
It?s for meaningful storytelling. Not just to upload a gallery of all your party photos from the weekend, but to actually search for those things - what I referred to as teachable moments - that each of us encounter in our own lives. A little line of dialogue you overhear or the way sunlight hits a wall at a certain angle and it illuminates this other weird thing - there?s all this stuff that we all see on a daily basis and often we?re the only ones who were there to witness it.

If we can somehow capture those lessons that are hiding in the world around us, communicate them to others and encode them in a way they can outlive us, I think that would be a beautiful thing. The best stories on Cowbird will still resonate 50 years from now or 100 years from now. And that?s different than just uploading a bunch of travel photos.

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