Live Pages is an interactive application created by Samsung on the occasion of the Year of Literature in Russia. Users will be able to move in the space of the book, read expert comments and, while playing, test their knowledge of the era.
The creators of the application decided to start with Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. By the way, the team behind the project is impressive, including HSE linguists, Tolstoy Digital experts, and Samsung specialists. All literary comments were prepared by the philologist and honored teacher of Russia Lev Sobolev, and Thekla Tolstaya was the curator.
It turned out unusual — the application allows you to perceive the classics in a different way, helps to study the era of the novel in detail, gives the reader a lot of useful information regarding the characters, storylines, locations, as well as interesting facts from the field of history, geography and even linguistics.
In addition, «Live Pages» help to understand the relationship of individual characters — say, by the end of the second volume, you are a little confused about where and how many times Pierre and Count Bolkonsky met? It’s simple: thanks to a special function, it is enough to select these heroes, and you will see the history of the intersection of their destinies separately from the rest of the text.
In addition to the unusual reading format, the application provides instant translation of all foreign remarks, and for a better understanding of the era described in the novel, a work calendar has been developed, in which the most significant events of the novel are displayed on the timeline along with real historical facts.
The Live Pages app also has entertaining content. For example, Word Game explains the meaning of rare or obsolete words in one click, like in the usual Wikipedia, and participation in entertaining quizzes helps to test knowledge of the work, accumulating points for correct answers.
And in early October, users of the Live Pages got access to a number of new exciting features: the interactive Map of Events will show the places where the main events of the work unfolded, with their detailed description, quotes from the novel and a list of the characters who visited there. The map will cover all of Russia and some European cities.
For the main characters, personal dossiers and routes of their movements have been developed, you just need to select one of the heroes to trace his route — the places he has visited will be displayed on the map with a visual line.
“Our work, our scripts, are a way to discover and reveal the internal connections of a novel, often invisible in the traditional “linear” perception of a text, and thus give the reader the opportunity for a new interactive way of understanding it,” says Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Associate Professor at the School of Linguistics at the Higher School of Economics .
Tolstoy’s «War and Peace» is just the beginning, all fans of classical Russian literature can take part in voting for the next book that will add to the application’s interactive library. Voting is underway .
In addition, the Living Pages project will become part of an unprecedented event — online readings of the novel War and Peace. From December 8 to 11, more than 1300 people around the world will take part in the War and Peace. Reading a novel”, which is organized by the VGTRK holding. The readings will be broadcast live on TV and radio, as well as on the website . Samsung is a technical partner of the project, providing its innovative technologies and unique materials developed for the Living Pages application and for creating an interactive visualization of the novel on the project website using various infographics and illustrations from the archive of the State Historical Museum.
The application is available for free download in the Google Play and Galaxy Apps stores. At the end of October, a version of the application for tablets will be released.