Bite-Size Edits. The name says so much, and yet, so little. The online editing program that a contributor to the New Yorker called “as close to a video game as this copy-editor is going to get” turns editing, an often tedious task, into a democratic, collaborative, and, let’s face it, fun process.
Developed by Hugh McGuire and his team at Book Oven, Bite-Size Edits takes your text and spits it out in micro-chunks for aspiring editors to copy-edit. It’s not meant to replace the traditional editor, copy-editor, and proof-reader. Instead, Bite-Size Edits offers an unprecedented level of interactivity between writers and readers (and writers and writers, and writers and editors, and students and teachers…). Plus, the more you edit, the more points you get. The more points you get, the more free books you win! And who doesn’t like free books?
Hugh chatted with Books@Torontoist about this new project.
Torontoist: Where did the inspiration for Bite-Size Edits come from?
Hugh McGuire: It’s one of those ideas that just popped out of a brainstorming session. We were thinking about the pain points of getting a book from raw manuscript to finished product, and we decided that proof-reading is something that fits the bill. It’s essential for making a good book, but it’s time consuming, and hard to do well, especially if you are proofreading your own work. So we had this idea: what if you broke the text up into little pieces and served them randomly? That would make it easier to proofread your own stuff. But it would also be a really interesting way to get other people to help you out. Catching typos is the kind of thing that is satisfying, and if we distributed the work among many, we thought it might make for a productive way to spend a few minutes here and there on the web. Useful procrastination. That was the hypothesis, though we underestimated the complexity of the process!
TO: How did Bite-Size Edits evolve from concept to completion?
HM: It started out as part of another site, BookOven.com, which is our in-progress, full-service digital, collaborative book-creation site. Bite-Size Edits was actually one of the first things we built. After a while we realized that if people were using Bite-Size Edits they were spending lots of time on the site, and then we started to see all this really interesting gamish behaviour and interactions between writers and editors. Writers were surprised to find very rich kinds of feedback coming from editors; editors found that they became deeply engaged with writing even if they were only seeing random sentences from a work. And it seemed to us that there was something fascinating there. So we decided to split Bite-Size Edits off of Book Oven, and launch a stand-alone site.
TO: What challenges or surprises did you face in its development?
HM: The biggest problem, one we continue to have, is how complex it is to process text. There are two main problems there: the first is that deciding when a sentence starts and stops turns out to be very complicated. We’ve ended up building a whole algorithm, one we tweak and modify constantly, that checks a text and breaks it into sentences. But you get problems with irregular punctuation, with dialogue and quotation marks, for instance, things like parentheses. The second major problem is that moving text from one program to another turns up to be difficult, especially if you have formatting. Different programs, for instance, define paragraphs differently: some of them just have line breaks, some of them have paragraph tags, some of them do both. So it gets pretty messy to try to adapt for text coming from one place (say, MS Word), versus another (say, copied from a web site). Further, when we put our texts back together, after all edits are reviewed and processed, formatting appeared to be causing some funny things, with sentences winding up in the wrong places. So for now, we strip out formatting, and work best with text copied from Word. We continue to tweak all this!
TO: What are some interesting ways people are using Bite-Size Edits?
HM: It’s funny, one of the problems with something like Bite-Size Edits is that it is so odd that people can’t quite figure out what to make of it. Personally, I like using it on my own texts. I put a text in, and do all the Bite-Size Edits myself. A couple of writers have done this with long fiction and been thrilled with the results. It’s a great way for a person to proofread or copyedit their own text. You’re really forced to consider each sentence on its own merits, and cut out a lot of fat. But it’s difficult to try to make something strange like Bite-Size Edits, and make it at once clear enough about what it does, and open enough that people start to find interesting ways to use it. Though the site has been live in various incarnations since the end of December, I only consider us to have been properly live, with social features that work the way they should, since the beginning of March, so users are still experimenting and figuring out what makes sense. One writer uploaded an experimental text that had gone through multiple machine translations, and has invited editors to make a kind of literary experiment with it. Other projects include translation (doesn’t work very well), updating of an old translation (jury is still out), as well as poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
The key in all of this, I think, is more about connecting writers with readers and editors than it is about the editing, though I believe the editing and feedback can be of great value as well. This is why we’ve been focusing on using Bite-Size Edits to help publishers connect with readers in a unique and exciting kind of way.
TO: What has the response been like from users and the book community at large?
HM: So far we’ve been thrilled by how much engagement we’ve had from users who register in Bite-Size Edits. People spend a lot of time on the site. So we’re on the right track, but we do want to see just how popular it can become. Publishers and authors have been much more open to it than I expected. I think everyone is trying to figure out new and creative ways for writers to connect to readers, and Bite-Size Edits is a strange but wonderful way to do it. Reactions from editorial professionals come in two shapes: “This is fun and addictive” or “This is evil and the end of civilization.” Our feeling is that it’s the former, not the latter.
TO: How do you see Bite-Size Edits being incorporated into the traditional writing and publishing process?
HM: We’re trying to walk a line between making something that is fun and engaging, and something that is useful. So in some sense we’re watching closely how it gets used. We’re doing weekly giveaways, where published authors upload a text, and top editors on that text get free books. It’s a great sort of engagement game, and from a professional publishing view, I think this is how it should be seen: not so much an editorial tool, as a marketing tool. For editorial addicts, well, some people just cannot stop once they get started! So I would caution them to stay away!
TO: What does the future of Bite-Size Edits look like?
HM: We have a little bit more work to try to make the feedback loops between editors and writers a bit stronger, but we have a fairly short development horizon, because this is the kind of thing that could go in many directions. We have an embryonic API, that is not open yet, but the idea would be to let other applications use the engine so that other people could think of smart ways to use it. For instance, it would be great to have a WordPress plugin, and a Wiki plugin. And Bite-Size Edits could easily evolve towards a more full-service publishing platform. That is, you start with Bite-Size, gain a community around your work, publish the results, do another round of editing, and then publish a finished version. But you could also imagine Bite-Size Edits being an effective way to do more mundane editing, say on certain kinds of technical document, for instance, stuff that was translated (poorly) from one language to another. And finally the idea remains that editing a beloved author’s work would be an exciting thing to do, so we want to keep working on ways to use Bite-Size Edits to help readers connect with the writers they love.
Screenshot from BiteSizeEdits.com
