Now there’s a new version, using cards, stickers and an A3 sheet for you to play with the story. It’s backed up with a new set of web pages at 1794story.wordpress.com.

It’s an unashamedly personal, partial and unfinished history, an experiment in stripping the book down to its barest essentials then adding some of the flexibility and remixability of the web. I’ve written more of the “why” of the project in the about page.

Also, I’m looking for a few people to play with the story. “Beta test” would be an overstatement, but I am interested in honest feedback. There is no right way to read this story, only what you do with it. Let me know if you’re interested.

In parallel with preparing my talk, I used the slides as the starting point for some printed material. My experimental recipe is as follows:

First, catch your story. The idea of 1794 as a focal point struck me while reading, for different reasons, about Joseph Priestley, Camille Desmoulins, John Thelwall and Matthew Murray. Desmoulins led me to the war in France, and Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle and Claude Chappe. Antoine Lavoisier formed a further link between Priestley and Coutelle. Soon I had a map spelling out the connections.

Excite the attentions of the ingenious.^TM I’d been wondering how to break the all-male line-up of heroes when I saw this tweet:

Turns out Roberta Wedge has been engaging on Twitter on behalf of the mother of feminism for several months now. Thanks to her intervention, Mary Wollstonecraft was in.

Tell the story in 20 slides. The Ignite format demands concentration on the essence and pacing of a story. Since the slides advance automatically every 15 seconds, each slide needs to stand for no more than two or three connected points. To their credit, none of my fellow Ignite London speakers lost it under the time pressure. I’m not sure if it would be worse to stand gaping waiting for the next slide, or to watch powerless as a presentation runs away with itself.

Talk links, not nodes. One strategy I found to deal with the rigid timing was to make slides that represent the links in the story, not the nodes. For example, if I have a slide about Desmoulins and a slide about Lavoisier, I must speak for 15 seconds on each, and have to hit the slide change dead on. But If I have a slide that says both were executed, I have the flexibility to switch from Desmoulins to Lavoisier at any time in the 15 seconds…

This approach, born out of practicality, made me wonder if focusing on the links as much as the nodes could be a good model for lots of storytelling in the age of the web. After all, much of the static content of the nodes is well covered in my sources, both offline and online. The new value I bring is linking them together into a new narrative. Jeff Jarvis says “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest”. But maybe what you do best is links, not to, but between great pieces of content.

Go to press. It seemed a shame to leave those slides unrealised. My tangible object could have been a standard book, with binding and everything, but I liked the idea that my slides should be as easy to remix on paper as they are in the slide sorter mode of my presentation software.  I chose Moo business cards. For v0.1 of the prototype, I’ve cheated a bit, using stickers to hold the text on the reverse of the cards.

Smooth on the inside, crunchy on the outside. (Armadillos!) Without a binding it was a lot easier to reshuffle my story, but it still needed some kind of container to hold it together and give a more satisfying permanence than the cards alone. A business card holder seemed the obvious thing. Just a few pounds bought an engraved one.

(This was the second card holder I received. The first was an ENGRAVING FAIL) Altogether the kit looks like this…

Make it mobile. I set up a separate page for each slide, and printed its URL on the back of the corresponding card. Thanks to WordPress.com’s mobile template, this means there’s an instant small-screen, hyper-linked up, comment-ready version of every page.

Rinse and repeat. This is v0.1, and there will probably be a 0.2, once I’ve had a chance to play with the story and its tangible form a bit more. One bit that’s not quite there yet is the link between physical and virtual. I toyed with using QR codes to make the link between paper and phone, and may still do so. The trouble was that making the QR code big enough to be readable by a phone made it too obtrusive, and I really want these cards to be made for people to use, not machines. I guess the ideal would be an app with image recognition so that just pointing the camera at each card is enough to bring up the relevant links and comment box. Unless you have a better idea.

A strange cast of people have occupied my reading in recent months – English and French, writers and scientists, aristocrats and hackers. Now, like a Heroes season finale, I find them converging on a single year.

To keep track of the people and places I scribbled a map. On the right, my six-year-old son has added, with relish, a depiction of the Battle of Fleurus. More on that further on.

The story goes like this.

On February 22, Joseph Priestley, radical preacher and discoverer of oxygen, resigns his nonconformist ministry in Hackney, London, shortly to leave Britain for America.

After the destruction of his Birmingham home and laboratory by a loyalist mob in 1791 Priestley considered a move to France. But three years on, the revolution is devouring its children. Camille Desmoulins, the journalist whose cry “to arms!” sparked the storming of the Bastille, goes to the guillotine in Paris on 5 April, along with his political mentor Georges Danton and 13 others. Their crime – arguing for restraint against Maximilien Robespierre’s violent faction.

On 8 April, Priestley and his family board the Samson to sail from Gravesend. Six days later, the radical London Corresponding Society holds a mass meeting at Chalk Farm, with the writer and orator John Thelwall as master of ceremonies. As Robespierre’s terror grows in Paris, William Pitt’s British government begins a clampdown of its own.

Throughout the summer the panic spreads. We find advertised in the  Leeds Intelligencer of 12 May: ‘Just published, price sixpence, a concise sketch of the intended revolution in England with a few hints on the obvious methods to avert it.’

Is Priestley, mid-Atlantic, completely incommunicado during May? How soon after his arrival in New York on 4 June does he hear of the arrest of  Thelwall and other LCS leaders, and of the execution in Paris of Antoine Lavoisier, the aristocratic chemist who named the gas that Priestley had isolated? Are Priestley’s American hosts aware of Lavoisier’s role in improving the quality of the gunpowder which they used just a few years earlier to win independence from the British?

On 26 June, France’s revolutionary army takes Fleurus after the hot air balloon l’Entrprenant provides vital reconnaissance, the world’s first decisive use of aircraft in warfare. Imagine being among the first in human history to see the world from above.

On 28 July Robespierre himself goes to the guillotine, but the war goes on.

On 15 August Claude Chappe ushers in the age of communication at the speed of light, by sending a semafore message over a series of towers from Lille to Paris reporting on the capture of Le Quesnoy from Prussian and Austrian forces. The invention is called the “telegraph”.

Somewhere in hiding, having been on the losing side in the siege of Lyon a year earlier, is the impoverished weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard. Soon he will switch sides and gain the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte with his machine for weaving complex patterns in silk using programs stored on punched cards.

Back in Britain’s rapidly industrialising north, rival start-ups are forming to exploit the new energy technology of steam.

In Leeds, where Priestley first isolated the component parts of air, Matthew Murray and David Wood are planning the construction of the Round Foundry, the world’s first purpose-built engineering works.

In Birmingham, home of Priestley patrons the Lunar Club, Matthew Boulton and James Watt are founding the business that will carry their names around the world. Later, they will send spies to Leeds and buy up the land adjacent to the Round Foundry to stop Murray and Wood expanding.

How did it feel for Murray to leave Marshall’s Mill, of which he was the chief engineer, to set up his own business doing something no one had ever done before? Was it all the more intimidating to do so in a time of war, with the threat of revolution in the air?

On 28 October Thelwall and the other LCS leaders go on trial at the Old Baileycharged with high treason. In essence, the prosecution argued that they sought ot overthrow the Crown and institute a Jacobin terror in Britain

But on 5 December – 10 months to the day after his counterpart Desmoulins lost his life – Thelwall is acquitted, saying he sought change “by peaceable means, by reason alone”. Thelwall goes on the be a thorn in the side of an increasingly repressive government, a champion of democratic government, and a critical commentator on the living conditions of the industrial cities.

1794, so much to answer for. I feel an e-book coming on.