For over 15 years, semiotician and author Josh Glenn and journalist Rob Walker have analyzed what objects mean — and how they mean what they mean — through a wide variety of online storytelling experiments. A few days ago, they debuted their first-ever object storytelling project that involves exhibitions in a single city. They chose Kingston.

Glenn, who at the time was an editor and columnist at The Boston Globe , and Walker, who had just published his first book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are , had long admired each other’s work, but they didn’t meet until 2008. Josh had just published Taking Things Seriously , a collection of 75 essays about objects of “unexpected significance,” and Walker registered that Glenn was (as he said in a recent inter

See Full Page