The HSE Living Pages project includes three new novels. Mobile application "Live Pages"
On November 10, 2015, the Samsung Live Pages application, specially released in the Year of Literature in Russia, was awarded the Runet Prize 2015 in a new, special nomination, Mobile Runet. The project was launched in June of this year and immediately found a positive response after its presentation to a wide audience.
The editor-in-chief of 365, Yana Kharina, asked a couple of questions to the journalist Fekla Tolstaya, who presented Living Pages in the summer, and found out why the novel by Leo Tolstoy, and not Fyodor Dostoevsky or Dickens, was chosen as the first work for the application, and why you need to read classics.
Fekla, how long did it take from the concept of "Live Pages" to its full implementation?
Six months have passed. However large-scale work started even earlier thanks to the volunteer project “All Tolstoy in One Click”. With the help of ABBYY, their technologies and three thousand volunteers, we have digitized, translated into electronic text, and not just into scanned pictures, all of Tolstoy's legacy published to date. For linguists, this will be of great benefit. Imagine that you have digitized all the materials created during the life of Lev Nikolayevich. This means that we can look and trace on what specific day Tolstoy wrote one of the episodes of the novel or a letter to a friend, which he indicated in his diary; we can even find out how much his wife wrote that day. Moreover, there is a chance to say exactly what Tolstoy ate for lunch that day and what the Tula newspapers wrote, if we are talking, for example, about the date.
This is also an excellent opportunity to find out with whom Lev Nikolayevich was friends and what he talked about, what books he read when he wrote War and Peace. With the help of electronic technology, it is easy to correlate this with what is in the text. The machine will fish it out much faster than a person. The prospects here are incredible, and scientists have seen them. Of course, not six months ago, but earlier, but the mobile application "Live Pages" is the first product for the consumer, which is based on a unique scientific work with text.
Why was the epic novel "War and Peace" chosen as the first work for the application?
It's just the sum of the circumstances: Yasnaya Polyana and Samsung have a long friendly, partnership relationship, so, of course, Lev Nikolaevich was considered first of all, and not, for example, Dostoevsky.
“We can look and trace on what specific day Tolstoy wrote one of the episodes of the novel or a letter to a friend, what he indicated in his diary ... what Tolstoy ate that day for lunch and what the Tula newspapers wrote”
And, probably, due to the scale of the work, you can show all the possibilities of this application.
Exactly! You directly answered your own question.
Is there any fear that this application will be especially popular with lazy schoolchildren or students? Walking through the electronic pages with hints and explanations is easier than mastering all four volumes of the work.
Which work will be next in the Living Pages?
I don't know, we need to work on it now, because it was very ambitious to start with War and Peace, and what you see now is far from the full functionality that we would like this application to have. Besides, it is not an easy task to fit Tolstoy's text on a small screen. Tablets will have more options.
Does this app only work on smartphones?
Yes, it's for smartphones...
Only on Android?
Well, Samsung is on Android. It's true. But I think that if the app is successful, then some developers will want to invest in reformatting it for IOS.
Will they be translated foreign works, which also influence not only Russian literature, but also the world?
You know, the strategy that Samsung will develop, I don't know, they didn't ask my advice. Here you can encounter copyright. It is always very convenient with Lev Nikolaevich: he renounced his copyright during his lifetime, and it is written on each book that distribution and reprinting are allowed free of charge throughout the world. I would like Tolstoy to be read in all languages. On the example of "War and Peace" we show new technologies. You can do the same with foreign literature I don't know who you want...
Dickens, for example.
Dickens is very suitable! Just understand, "War and Peace" is the whole world sorry for the tautology. This is very similar to games, for example, that now exist in tablets or smartphones. You understand that whole world. We wanted to live with the novel, plunge into this world, where there is the most important thing for us: in this world, correct, healthy and very serious, very unbanal relationships between people, emotions. People show their human qualities. We would like young people, playing this, plunging into it, to understand what is good and what is bad. These things are always ambiguous, and you will never learn them from any laws passed in the State Duma. In Tolstoy there is not a single hero that is unambiguously black or unambiguously white, as in life. It just seems to me that you need to read the classics in order to understand how to live.
Text: Yana Kharina
Three new novels have appeared in the library of the Live Pages mobile application: Dead Souls» Nikolai Gogol, « Captain's daughter» Alexander Pushkin and «12 chairs» by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. The application was developed by the Higher School of Economics together with Samsung and experts from the Tolstoy Digital group.
It is these works that users of the Live Pages most want to read: the developers specifically interviewed those who have already downloaded Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and are waiting for the application to be updated.
For the content of the project - literary portraits, the chronology of events, the intersection of the fates of any two characters, historical comments, the search for prototypes, building the route of the heroes of the novel on the map - as before, the staff and students of the School of Linguistics and the Higher School of Economics answer under the guidance of Associate Professor of the School of Linguistics of the Higher School of Economics Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya.
"Our scripts - comments, cards, word games - have remained the same, but in any case, with each new novel they are interpreted differently, depending on how the work itself dictates," said Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya. For example, "Dead Souls" turned out to be quite difficult to fit into the application format. “When we started working on the novel, consulting with philologists (in particular, with the honored teacher of Russia Lev Sobolev), we realized that this work of Gogol was a little out of our format. All scripts are interactive comment linking the text to something material - historical events, points on a map, a prototype, and "Dead Souls" turned out to be such a "thing in itself," says Associate Professor of the School of Linguistics. “But The Captain’s Daughter and The 12 Chairs are very well attached to all materials.”
For "12 Chairs" it was very interesting for me to compose the "Pass of Time" section, where the events of the novel correlate with the realities or events of that era
According to Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, in terms of its characteristics, The Captain's Daughter turned out to be close to War and Peace: there is a lot of material for historical comments, for the Fate section. "12 Chairs" is similar to "Crime and Punishment": it is not specific historical events that are important in them, but a whole era that needs clarification.
“For the 12 Chairs, it was very interesting for me to compose the section “The Passage of Time”, where the events of the novel correlate with the realities or events of that era,” said Veronika Fainberg, a student at the School of Philology. - It all starts with searches (the invasion of the Stargorod house forced Madame Petukhova to sew up diamonds in the seat of a chair), and ends with a big Crimean earthquake. This novel is woven from contemporary reality - talk about white emigrants, avant-garde theater, futurological fantasies, the Gudok newspaper, in which Ilf and Petrov worked, and much more. The features of this reality were new words (for example, how many of you know who an "armored teenager" is?), crazy abbreviations, old and new songs spinning in everyone's head, political jokes, patterns that are clear to everyone and not always clear to us now ( why does a janitor quarrel with an intellectual fitter? why could beautiful noble chairs burn in the stoves?). Answers to such questions that arise during reading can be obtained immediately by clicking on the highlighted words and phrases. Then a window immediately pops up with a comment, most often written out from the book by Yuri Shcheglov “The novels of Ilf and Petrov. The Reader's Companion.
The number of downloads of the application has already exceeded 100 thousand. At the same time, most of the users are, oddly enough, not schoolchildren, but adults aged 35 to 45 years. The application is free, available on the Android platform.
As the curator of the project from Tolstoy Digital, Fekla Tolstaya, said, when the idea of creating “Live Pages” arose, there were already quite a few book applications in the world with illustrations and access to comments, but a similar technology with interactive maps, a “timeline” of characters, the ability to visualize relations between the characters of the novel at that time did not exist (and even now we can talk, perhaps, only about LotrProject.com, dedicated to JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings). One of the tasks of the application is to overcome the stereotype that the classics are something archaic and frozen, and Newest technologies kill creativity.
Let's start with the fact that reading classical literature from electronic devices will not surprise anyone. Another thing is surprising: why the richest opportunities that the digital space provides are used extremely rarely and do not change the very principle of presenting the text - linear, without active links, with the need to constantly refer to Wikipedia.
The Live Pages application from Samsung is just an experiment in this area, and a very successful one. It's interactive literary encyclopedia, which allows not only to read the work, using all the amenities e-book, but also to immerse yourself in the context, studying the history and culture of the era.
To turn a book into such an encyclopedia, you need to take it apart brick by brick and connect these bricks with a lot of well-thought-out scenarios. On this moment only the novel "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy was subjected to such a procedure, to the delight of all schoolchildren in the country. Happy schoolchildren and teachers can read "War and Peace" from smartphones and tablets, easily remembering when Andrey and Pierre met last time Where was Napoleon at that time?
Fyokla Tolstaya
When I read "War and Peace" at school, I did a kind of navigation, everything that is now in the application - where this or that meeting took place, in which part, in which volume. Like any schoolchild, I understood that I would have to write an essay. I made such cribs, and they are still stored in my country house.
Of course, a self-made cheat sheet "lays" a lot in your head and, perhaps, it's better than everything ready. But times are changing, and I believe that any path to the text is better than none.
The application was developed by specialists from the Tolstoy Digital group with the support of the School of Linguistics of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. The text is supplemented with translations and literary comments by the philologist, literary critic and honored teacher of Russia - Lev Iosifovich Sobolev. So the pedagogical community could not do without it.
The reader's joy when using the application already begins with discovering how easy it is to watch the translation into Russian of the numerous and verbose lines in French that the novel is full of.
A well-written table of contents makes it easy to navigate. Short description for each chapter is worded in a way that only reminds you of what you read, without becoming something like “The whole of War and Peace in five minutes.”
What used to be devoted to school cheat sheets - the geography of the novel and the chronology of events - are now given the sections "Places" and "The passage of time". The timeline is perhaps one of the most important tools of the encyclopedia: you can match the events of the novel with historical events in "The Course of Time" (for example, read historical background about the "Decree on civil ranks" and find exact location in the novel, where it is reflected), as well as see the intersections of the fates of the characters in the "Fates" section.
An important tool for working with text is a map. You can study the geography of the novel in separate places and along the routes of the characters. Idea for quizzes: guess which character of the novel belongs to the route.
Interestingly, Leo Tolstoy is also singled out as an independent character. The author's reasoning takes its place on the line of fate. But to the word:
If we talk about Lev Nikolaevich, then he was a gadget addict! He had a typewriter, a bicycle, an Edison phonograph, and even a mimeograph, the prototype of the modern photocopier. He was very fond of various technically advanced things! Given this, it seems to us that Leo Tolstoy would have approved and appreciated what has been done to his work today.
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Associate Professor, School of Linguistics, National Research University Higher School of Economics
The main characters of the novel have their own personal pages with written characteristics (given to them by the author and other characters), quotes and a brief biography.
The developers took into account current trends and added a game moment to the reading. "Word games" - a section in which it is proposed to answer a quiz. Topics are varied - "War", "Rare words", "Peace", "Relationships", "Dates", "Speech", "Portrait". The questions in this game are not easy: here the text itself must be remembered, and knowledge about the history needs to be refreshed. Do you remember right away who said: “Happy in love, unhappy in cards”? Or what is Antonov fire? Reading a book + studying events + correct answers + sharing on social networks = your reading experience in the "Personal Account".
And now, in my opinion, about the main thing. Despite the abundance of links and explanatory information, using the application does not turn reading into a kind of Internet surfing. The developers note (and you can check it yourself) that each interactive work scenario is associated with a quote, each additional information refers to the text of the novel. With the help of technology, the user better understands how the text works, and each time he receives a comment, he returns to the work again. And after such an interactive reading, it is very difficult to imagine how to read the novel in a different way, without losing all the meanings.
The application was announced back in the summer, and almost immediately users had a natural question: when will it be possible to see other literary works? When - the developers do not say, but it is already known that the next will be "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
Fyokla Tolstaya
curator of the Live Pages project
Many works can be adapted and sorted. If we do not take the Russian classics, the Forsyte Saga would play with new facets in our application. Ancient Greek myths it would be great to fit in a similar format. And The Odyssey is great, and Dickens! It always seemed to me that the book that had to be sorted up and down was the Bible.
"Live pages" only outwardly "make life easier" for the reader, presenting him with "everything ready". At the inner level, such work with a work, done by sensitive professionals, teaches how to relate to the text, how deep immersion can be, how much interesting can be learned from a paragraph that has set the teeth on edge. school curriculum if you put in some effort.
The first results have already been summed up:
A large-scale multimedia project of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company has been completed, which has no analogues in the world: “War and Peace. Reading a novel. Within 60 hours - on December 8, 9, 10 and 11 - the work of Leo Tolstoy was read from the first to the last line. The participants are the people different ages and professions - a total of 1300 readers. On the last day of the readings, Dmitry Medvedev, Head of the Russian Government, joined the project.
Also among those who read fragments of the novel in live, - Svetlana Nemolyaeva, Alexander Lazarev, Diana Arbenina, Igor Vernik, Evgeny Steblov, Sergey Garmash, Lyudmila Maksakova, Alisa Grebenshchikova, Oleg Tabakov, Renata Litvinova, Alexei Petrenko, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Alisa Freindlich, Marina Neelova, Larisa Golubkina, Ekaterina Guseva, Igor Zolotovitsky, Alexander Adabashyan, Evgeny Knyazev and many, many other eminent and not only admirers of the great writer.
The director joined the stars of theater and cinema federal agency for Press and Mass Communications Mikhail Seslavinsky and Chairman of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, Advisor to the President of Russia for Culture Vladimir Tolstoy, Minister of Culture of Russia Vladimir Medinsky.
Not only our compatriots took part in the action. Fragments of Tolstoy's novel were read by the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda, the Italian actor Michele Placido, and the American director Michael Hoffman. From Paris, the director of the Comedie Francaise theater, Muriel Mayette, read.
But that's not all. The broadcast was conducted from the International space station. A fragment of the novel "War and Peace" was read by cosmonaut Sergei Volkov.
The cameras were installed in places associated with the novel: the Throne Room of the Hermitage, Borodino Panorama, Historical Museum. In Moscow, the novel was read at the Helikon Opera, the Mayakovsky Theatre, the Moscow Art Theater named after Chekhov, the Yermolova Theater, GUM, in the embassies of Austria, France, and Italy.
The geography of the project is immense - from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, from Franz Josef Land to London and Paris. The marathon was attended by St. Petersburg, Samara, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Astrakhan, Sevastopol, New World, Kislovodsk, Paris, New York, London, Beijing, Vienna, Brussels.
The grandiose literary marathon was the final chord of the Year of Literature in Russia. Four days, four volumes of a great novel. The start of the readings was given on December 8 at 10 am Moscow time. Broadcasts were conducted on the air of the TV channels "Culture", "Russia 24", the radio station "Mayak", on the Internet. There were inclusions from Vladivostok, Omsk, St. Petersburg, Paris and Yasnaya Polyana and many other cities of the world. Readings ended on Friday at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
War and Peace is the most widely read Russian novel on the planet. Withstood a huge number of reprints, translated into dozens of languages, primarily in French, because many of Tolstoy's heroes speak this language. And in this project, the voice of France was the actress Fanny Ardant.
The project is not only literary. This is an opportunity to see today's Russia in all its glory: nature, culture, geography, various climatic zones. By the way, one of the broadcast locations was the museum-estate “ Yasnaya Polyana”, where the writer’s relatives gathered especially for reading the novel. Among them is the great-great-grandson of Leo Nikolayevich, the presidential adviser on culture, Vladimir Tolstoy.
Classical literature has always been a source of creative thought and a chronicle of culture. Russian authors of the Golden Age made an invaluable contribution to the development of both world art and our society as a whole.
With the advent of high technology, our everyday life has changed: it has become faster and richer, and the Internet has become the main source of information. Books - even recognized masterpieces of literature - do not withstand such competition, and are increasingly collecting dust on country shelves. But in the Year of Literature in Russia, Samsung Electronics offers to take a fresh look at the timeless classics and refresh your memory with the new Live Pages application.
Living Pages is not just a reading app. This is an interactive literary encyclopedia filled with a large volume additional information from different areas Keywords: history, linguistics, geography. With Living Pages, reading becomes an in-depth study of an entire era, and the content can be easily analyzed thanks to additional features applications. The first work available in the new format was Leo Tolstoy's immortal novel War and Peace.
Active use of the application allows you to accumulate "reader experience". Follow the news on our website to learn about the possibilities of exchanging "reader experience" for nice prizes and bonuses!
