[writing and publishing panel session]

Chaired by Kate Pullinger, speakers include Sara Lloyd, Michael Bhaskar and Chris Meade.


Chris Meade: "How new media writers do, could and will make their way in the world"

• How to earn money? No business model.
  
• Andy Campbell says: "The ratio of research/theory documents to actual quality work in the field is embarassing."
• consulting, teaching, writing
• "Presentation skills can be really useful" - Tim Wright
• need to be amplified individuals (i think this is from andrea saveri)
• there are all kinds of webby businesses that new media writers could get into - blogging, args, projects, e-learning
  
• think of project i mentioned this morning by the hon brothers, 21 steps geo taagging project and others. dan hon says "there's still a stigma attached to writing for the online world"
• how to collaborate - showcases, clusters, events, making the case together, spindlers are doing it for themselves
• Christine Wilks has uplifting quote: "you may find your source/s of income are around the edges of your main area of creative interest. It's an experimental field, so be flexible and inventive, and be prepared to learn, learn, learn - never stop learning."

Sara Lloyd

• talks about the manifesto she wrote on publishing in the 21st century
• publishers won't be needed in the future unless they get their act together
• did this to stir lethargic publishers, start a debate
• lesson in new media publishing, the journal that officially published the manifesto, allowed sara to publish it independently on her site
• means there's a value to sharing content

Michael on how Pan MacMillan's the digitalist blog interacts with the world

• the digitalist blog began as an internal newsletter
• place to try ideas
• converse with readers
• access knowledge of the readers by following links, this is engaging in conversation and enabling a level of transparency
• "we're not just giving the pan macmillan line on things....using it to sell more books...actually we're trying to make an argument...not a standard bs corporate blog"

[african writing and new media]

(live blogged)

2 presentations on african new media writing

first up - Nur Yaryare of the Sommali Afro European Media Project

• SAEMP an online community TV station based in Leicester
• currently piloting the broadcasting of a number of prerecorded channels
• programmes that are presented range in social health, education, faith, local events, news etc...
• see www.saemp.org.uk
• tackles image of arabs are terrorists with the online site and the paper newsletter
• see www.saemp.org.uk/videos.php for videos and podcasts

2nd up - Anieti Isong, current phd student with Prof. Sue Thomas as supervisor. He is a novelist and his first book is to be published this year

• see youtube video on kenya - big differences since the use of mobile phones (see kenya's mobile revolution - part 1)
  
• huge technological leaps happening in kenya including paying for items using mobile 'phones - "using phones as wallets"
• what is african writing -goes back to Chinua Achebe who published Things Fall Apart in 1958, father of modern african literature
• there was the Heinemann African Writers series started in 1962
• then wole soyinka awarded nobel prize in 1986
• emerging african writers liks helon habila, chimamanda, helen oyeyemi, pettina gappah, mary watson, toly ogunlesi, brian chikwava, afolabi, binyavanga wainaina, monica nyeko, chika unigwe
• these writers are willing to experiment: homosexuality, crime, take risks
• some journals - eclectica, open wide, author-me, story south, g21, in posse review
• but now african online journals - african writing online, farafina, african writers, new gong, kwani, sentinel, chimurenga
• key issues: how has the internet influed writing and what do the readers make of this?
• the reach for online stories is global - everywhere there is an internet connection
• see great video poem about nigerian going back home after studying in england - cifeozo, "homecoming"
• blogs as form of storytelling - Diary of a Randy Man: "I woke up in the middle of the night to discover the duvet on the floor. she was lying on her side facing me, her nightie had opened..."
• Confusednaijagirl - deals with child abuse
  

[reader 2.0]

Here is some info from my presentation on how I see readers who engage with born digital works.

Links to the web works I mentioned in my presentation:

http://twitter.com/manyvoices
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynetter/2099009488/in/set-72057594139269787/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/hughgarry/videos/12/97.564/
http://emersoninbeijing.com
http://www.wetellstories.co.uk
http://thewhalehunt.org
http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/dynamo/index.html

Screen shots and the presentation to follow.

[creative writing & new media masters campus week seminars]

Following yesterday's slog, the students get a bit of a break today when they can sit back and listen to a few presentations including one by me on reading multimodal narratives, a panel on african digital literature and Peter Howard on digital poetry.

From the programme:

10.00-11.00 Meet your Reader Dr Jess Laccetti presents a reader�s eye view of new media writing.

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 African Writing and New Media
Chair: Professor Sue Thomas
IOCT PhD student and novelist Anietie Isong introduces his research into African Writers and the Internet, and Nur Yaryare of the Somali Afro European Media Project presents his plan for a new media African heritage project in Leicester.

12.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-15.00 Writing and Publishing New Media
Chair: Kate Pullinger
Sara Lloyd and Michael Bhaskar, digital editors at Pan Macmillan, discuss Sara�s Book Publisher�s Manifesto for the 21st century, and Chris Meade, former CWNM student and Director of if:book London, presents Digital Livings, a report commissioned by CWNM to assess the potential of new media as a career path for writers.
Preparatory Reading for this session:
Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st century by Sara Lloyd
Digital Livings by Chris Meade

15.00-15.30 Break

15.30-16.30 E-Poetry
This year CWNM offers an E-Poetry workshop for the first time. Tutor Peter Howard presents an introduction to E-Poetry including a selection of his own work.

Read more at the ioct blog.

[creative writing and new media campus week]

This week, four weeks into the Online Masters in New Media and Creative Writing, is an opportunity for all the students to get together and meet each other in real life. Yesterday was their first day, a chance for all to catch an English breath and today they're all hard at work giving presentations. I've had the lucky chance to participate as a second marker on the presentations which have been incredible. As we break for lunch, I'm able to grab a moment of thought to ruminate on the presentations and then after lunch we'll finish with the final two presentations.

This morning I've learned about writers. Not writers in general, but writers, dreams and creators who are very specific entities. Thinking about the presentations is making me reconsider my previous thinking that I might be able to group "writers" and "readers" and individual groups (though of course some may blend between both groups). Based on the the writers/creators this morning, there is no such thing as "writers" but rather "a writer" in a singular and sense unique to each creator. Everyone today has been influenced by different people, occasions, thoughts and feelings. Poignant, for Barrington Salmon, is the role his mother (mother, worker, creator, chef, inspiration) in his poetry and stories. Leo, instead, finds creativity in the work of Rollo May, Daniel Pink, Banksy, Ken Robinson and more.

Melodie Daniels spoke about not liking The Old Man and the Sea, but interestingly she doesn't like it precisely because of Hemingway's gift with language. She, like me, doesn't want to be stuck out on the boat with the old man who was "thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck" (http://www.scribd.com/doc/21616/The-Old-Man-and-the-Sea). Even though Hemingway's language, at least in this story, is "spare and compact," everything is so vivid. Hemingway's language makes the reader feel there, in the boat with Santiago.

"The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of the way they made their living, were born, educated, bore children etc. ...I have tried to do something else....I have tried to eliminate everything necessary to conveying the experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened."

nb. the image on the right of this post is a scanned in version of Melodie's first poem.

Sukai Bojang is also interested in language but she's focusing more on the oracular version. Recovering folk talks and translating them into English, Sukai is hoping to not only reach a different set of readers, but also to pass on cultural artifacts and help literacy rates in The Gambia. One of her inspirations is Chinua Achebe.

Still to present are Tia Azulay and Jaka Železnikar. I'm looking forward to hearing how and if South Africa has had an impact on Tia and her writing. I'm thinking of Andre Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote and and and...

[new media writing and publishing, 22 Oct 2008, ioct]

Every autumn, First Year CWNM students spend a week on campus at DMU. This year Campus Week includes a day of discussion open to DMU students, staff, and the general public. It takes place on Wednesday 22 October 2008 at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester. Admission is free and booking not required, but space is limited so arrive early to secure a seat.

10.00-11.00 Meet your Reader Dr Jess Laccetti presents a reader’s eye view of new media writing.

11.00-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 African Writing and New Media
Chair: Professor Sue Thomas
IOCT PhD student and novelist Anietie Isong introduces his research into African Writers and the Internet, and Nur Yaryare of the Somali Afro European Media Project presents his plan for a new media African heritage project in Leicester.

12.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-15.00 Writing and Publishing New Media
Chair: Kate Pullinger
Sara Lloyd and Michael Bhaskar, digital editors at Pan Macmillan, discuss Sara’s Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st century, and Chris Meade, former CWNM student and Director of if:book London, presents Digital Livings, a report commissioned by CWNM to assess the potential of new media as a career path for writers.
Preparatory Reading for this session:
Book Publisher's Manifesto for the 21st century by Sara Lloyd
Digital Livings by Chris Meade

15.00-15.30 Break

15.30-16.30 E-Poetry
This year CWNM offers an E-Poetry workshop for the first time. Tutor Peter Howard presents an introduction to E-Poetry including a selection of his own work.

16.30-17.00 Plenary

17.00 End

[digital stitchings: my interview with rachel beth egenhoefer ]

I recently did an interview with digital/textile artist/creator Rachel Beth Egenhoefer for Furtherfield:

Jess: What are the main differences (pros and/or cons) of creating a work that is to be experienced digitally, and that which is contained within physical material borders (sweets, fabric etc...)? - this is very much a question to you as a *creator*

Rachel Beth: In some ways I feel like this is a hard question for me to answer because my work is very much about bridging these two experiences and pointing out that they aren't that different.

There's lots of clich'e answers like the digital being accessible anywhere on the web and that the material has the traditional sense of making and 'aura', but my work really sits between them and is about bringing the two together. Making the digital tactile, and the tangible coded.

Jess: What aspects of the digital would you like to be able to bring into your future work?

Rachel Beth: My most recent work, and the work I did during my residency in the UK uses motion and acceleration tracking. I'd like to continue using ideas around mapping motion and interaction. I'm not so interested in data visualization but rather how mapping actions and systems can make for new interactions or parallels. I've also begun to work with hacking the Nintendo Wii that has just kind of opened a whole slew of ideas. So I can see myself working more with that.


Jess: How would you define a literate reader/experiencer of your work? (I'm thinking especially of the lovely melting sweets...how do you want your IDEAL audience to participate?)

Rachel Beth: I don't really have an ideal audience. I strive to have multiple entry points in my work. I've had computer scientists view my work who know much more about code than I do but never knew that a knitting pattern looks exactly the same, or ludites who hate technology but suddenly realize there are simple, beautiful concepts in computing. Some people see my work and don't realize it's even a piece, some people spend hours coming back and looking at it. I'm okay with either of these extremes. It's my hope that people find something to grab on to or relate to. Leaving a door partly open allows other people to add their own perspective as well. It's always rewarding (well most of the time rewarding) when people discover things in your work you didn?t see before.


Read more over at Furtherfield.

[how to write fiction]

This morning's Guardian has arrived. After briefly skimming the front page and a lengthy read of the Money section (100 questions about the current *financial* climate answered!) I happily found Kate Pullinger's tutorial on "How to Write Fiction." Working with Sue Thomas, Kate runs DMU's Online Masters in Creative Writing and New Media (and is author of Inanimate Alice with Chris Joseph) and thus is the perfect person to write this user-friendly guide. I'm definitely going to memorise these tips including the suggestion to "turn off your word count."

This guide book doesn't tell you where to buy your ideas: "Asda for chick-lite, perhaps, Waitrose for literary fiction," but it certainly includes loads of opportunities for laughter (not something I would expect from any guide). Kate tells us that writing is about "graft" rather than just a great ideas and that the act of writing is the important thing:

"But really, the best way to start writing is to start writing. Get the words down onto the page. For many writers the most productive technique is to push on, regardless of what crap they are spewing. Bad writing can be imprved upon, can be polished and cut and shaped and revices. A blank page is just that, and the only thing it is good for is driving you crazy."

Besides the instructions concerning genre, character, setting etc and the wide reference to other writers, there is a checklist:

1. Is the beginning too slow?
2. Have I "killed my darlings"?
3. Have I checked my grammar and punctuation?
4. Have I laid out my dialogue properly?
5. After my compelling beginning, amd I keeping my reader interested?
6. Is it finished?

If you don't have the Guardian hardcopy, each of the eight steps included in the guide are available as separate articles on the Guardian site.

[Future of Creative Technologies - new IOCT journal]

The Future of Creative Technologies is a new journal just launched by the IOCT at DMU. In the first 18 months of the IOCT's lifespan (yup, it's only been 18 months) the IOCT has benefited from a wide range of significant and fruitful partnerships. This first issue of the journal reflects on those relationships and includes "thought pieces" and articles from each of the keynote speakers. Authors include Howard Rheingold, Claudia Eckert, Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, Wendy Keay-Bright, Pauline Oliveros and Martin Rieser. All the pieces are extremely interesting and as they've been pulled together into this publication you can really see how transdisciplinary the IOCT is.

In the opening editorial director of the IOCT, Prof. Andrew Hugill says:

"The diversity of the content is deliberate, and is intended to stimulate readers not only from the range of disciplines represented herein, but also as a way of exploring further a discussion which lies at the heart of the IOCT: what does it mean to be transdisciplinary? how can we foster good practice in transdisciplinary research? and, what outcomes might we expect from such research?"

These are similar questions which will be taken up in an academic context in the conference I'll be organising (provisionally slated for 2010) and out of which will grow an academic publication.

[interrupt festival hosted by john cayley]

eUInterrupt 2008, to be held at Brown University from October 17-19, is a three-day festival of readings, performances, and symposia organized around the theme of “interruption” in digital art and programmable literary practices. Why “Interrupt”? In computing, a hardware interrupt request or IRQ is used to prioritize the execution of certain processes over others. It is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, signaling the need to initiate a new operation.

In the context of contemporary art, the act of interruption is a performance that redirects threads of process and lines of thought into fields of new expression. Interrupts trigger the moment when a process of creation yields a public manifestation. The cycle of ongoing work is paused by a challenge, calling for the attention of a provisional community: just as we read ICQ as “I seek you,” we can read IRQ as “I argue.” In this sense, interrupts articulate critical thresholds at which formal expressions are offered up to (or forced into) new circuits of communication, countering that which came before and making a case for new artistic and political futures.

We ask you to attend and participate.

Artists in Residence:
* Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries *

Confirmed Headliners:
* Alan Sondheim & Foofwa d'Imobilité *
* Laetitia Sonami *
* Eugenio Tisselli *
* Marko Niemi *

Details and arrangements to be confirmed:
* cris cheek *
* Abigail Child *
* Chris Funkhouser *
* Loss Pequeňo Glazier *
* Talan Memmott *
* Bill Seaman and Penny Florence *
* Patricia Tomaszek *

Critics, theorists, artists and students who would like to attend are asked to contact John_Cayley (at) brown.edu. We will be organizing two or more round table sessions during the festival, and we invite brief presentations intended to spark critical discussions relating to the work of interruption within the context of digitally mediated language practices. Participants will also be invited to instigate discussion at these round tables.

If you would like to attend, and particularly if you have institutional backing, we ask you to consider supporting Interrupt with a registration contribution of $50 (checks only please) made out to 'Brown University' and sent to:

Interrupt 2008
Brown University
Literary Arts Program
Box 1923
Providence RI 02912

For letters of invitation, please contact John_Cayley (at) brown.edu. Register now.

To read more about what we mean by Interrupt and for other details about the festival – including the preliminary program, schedule, location, venues, and accommodation information – please refer to our website: http://interrupt2008.net

Organized and hosted at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design by graduates and undergraduates from Literary Arts, Modern Culture and Media, MEME, RISD D+M, and other departments.

Funding and support for Interrupt currently includes the following sources: Brown Creative Arts Council, the Literary Arts program, RISD Digital+Media, MEME, the Brown Graduate School, the Comparative Literature department.

[Creative Writing and New Media MA Showcase]

Another event - 2 in 1 day! - at the IOCT. Following Andrea Saveri's talk on Amplified Individuals we have the Online MA's showcase of the first two years that the course has been running.

Along with the presentations is a pamphlet giving a bit of a context of the first two years of work as well as bios of all the students. Disclosure: I wrote the essay. Tomorrow this will be downloadable from the course website: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com/

From the IOCT Salon blurb:

"The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This first annual CWNM Salon is a unique opportunity to enjoy the best work from the first two years of the course with installations and talks from some of the students."

Note: Check out Chris Meade's "Digital Livings" booklet which takes a look at how to make money as a writer in the new media world. There is a downloadable version which will be available soon.
****
First Up
Chris Meade - "Drumming Becoming: The Role of Percussion"

Chris's presentation with drumming is here.

An excerpt:
"In the 90s in Birmingham libraries we ran a project about Silence.
A brilliant young percussionist
whose name now escapes me
played in the Central Library, built up more and more sound
around the ambient hum
of escalators, footfall,murmurings, phone bells.
How much could he enhance the sounds of a place that's thought of as silent
without rupturing the hush?"


After the presentation on drumming Chris "reads" his song on the future of the book. Although he knows the words by heart and the rhythm is his own, still while reading live and aloud the rhythm is slightly different from the recorded version. So at times we can hear the live version slightly before the recorded one. It's like a long-distance telephone call.

****

Toni Le Busque on "Miffy Johnston's Toenails and Other Stories - a combination of fiction and non fiction 100 word stories using Sophie ( http://www.sophieproject.org ), an open-source platform for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment, created by The Institute for the Future of the Book."

Early on in the MA Toni decided to start writing stories of 100 words. Enough to get her points across but still easily digestible for the web.

Toni's "America" video used free archive.org images. The music is also copyright-free. Check out lebusqe.com for links to all of Toni's work.

Interestingly with Toni's work with flash page-turning software (Sophie from the Future of the Book) a lot of people "had a go at her." Some suggested she was a proponent for the death of the book. Interesting. If anything this kind of tie to print books suggests a respect/awareness of tradition? As a defense to this Toni says she has to pay a lot of attention to design. She is not the "poor man's" novelist.

****
Kirsty McGill - Discussing her ongoing project to develop a next-generation rich-media tour for the UNESCO World Heritage city of Bath.

Realised that existing virtual tours are pretty bland, mostly text and hardly any narrative, just read the wikipedia definition:

A virtual tour (or panaramic tour) is a simulation of an actually existing location, usually composed of panoramic images, a sequence of hyperlinked still or video images, and/or virtual models of the real location. They also may use other multimedia elements such as sound effects, music, narration, and text. As opposed to actual tourism, a virtual tour is typically accessed on a personal computer or an interactive kiosk.

Rather different from a *real* tour guide is the inability to ask the guide questions. Kirsty has been creating a question-and-answer facility with a chatterbot with pandora: http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/home.

Read Kirsty's blog for updates on her project: Custard Ether.

****
Claudia Cragg
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ccragg/ "If you build it, they will come". To what extent does this apply to Facebook and MySpace sites and, if no one comes, just exactly what can you do about it? Claudia will discuss this and other questions in relation to her Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma) Lab research Participatory Media project: http://108presentsforsuu.googlepages.com/home .

Been a journalist since last '70s and asked to help collect signatures and raise awareness for Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. How to raise awareness? Well the world is suffering from "charity fatigue" so a new media way might be the "sexiest" way to get the word out. First do a vast amount of reading! Second: how do you actually crowd source, how do you get to the crowd?

Note: web 2.0 basically makes the printed word and journalism more "dynamic." Interesting.

If the message isn't enough, need to generate and maintain interest - keep people there more than 10 seconds.

Following Howard Rheingold, it's not enough to just have a website, need to have other ways of sharing info such as Facebook , Twitter and a blog. (link frontline sms as used by Obama).

Background findings - older people won't join Facebook to add their signatures to the petition.
Learnt a number of lessons - thought enthusiasm and demonstrable results would be enough to convince old media journalists - nope, they just don't get it. A blog is absolutely essential. Twitter has been successful but not as successful as Claudia thinks...despite coverage in the Wall Tweet Journal. So telephony based communication is essential for the future of any collaborative projects. Claudia says most of what she has learnt isn't exactly technical but human - she needs a team to create the project.

****
Christine Wilks
http://www.crissxross.net

Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker's daughter -
a memoir in pieces (embroidered)

Cutting through the memories, stitching up the fabrications, pinning down the facts, unpicking the past... An interactive memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.

Christine reads out exerpts but there's a bit where she talks about being bullied for her "softly tailoured outfits" and does this fantastic "northern" accent.

"How we were turned out was more important than how we turned out."

"In her outfits I didn't fit in I stuck out and felt stuck up."

****

Alison Norrington
http://www.alisonnorrington.com Showcasing Staying Single, Alison's first cross-media work of fictional blogging which gave readers a variety of ways to engage, participate with and receive the story, including fragmented chapters emailed to subscribers, SMS alerts through Twitter, mini documentaries of real-life stories, meet-ups in Second Life and Machinima films. She will also offer a sneak-preview of her plans for her second cross-media fiction I love NY.

For Alison's dissertation project she wanted to give her readers ways of interacting with the story (if they wanted to) and "be more immersed."

Realised that although she had 15 chapters ready (for Staying Single) but it wasn't current or "punchy" enough. By writing it every day instead of uploading before hand she was able to pull from current events (Jordan and Peter Andre) and create more bite-size bits.

Offered:

Daily posts on blogger, e-mail to subscribers, podcast chapters, sophiedilemma.com, youtube documentaries, social networking (bebo, myspace, facebook), twitter, second life, forum, micropoll - with hindsight this was way too much to run.

On MySpace was a bit seedy - the people who approached Alison (as Sophie) were all about not staying single...While Facebook attracted more of the mid 30s-40s crowd.

When Alison went on holiday she wasn't sure how that would work with the story. So decided that Sophie would go on holiday too. Alison then asked if readers would like a postcard from her holiday, 85 real people responded so Alison spent a good part of her day sending out real cards.

Participation: asked readers to send in their best and worst chat-up lines which then appeared online. Some hilarious ones that I'm not blogging here....

Three most popular ways to get to the story: youbtube, second life meet ups and e-mails from sophie

New Story: I Love NY

long distance relationship between and American stoke-broker who is quite laddish and society-like and the fiance who is based in London and is more Bohemian. Right now there is a Facebook profile and youtube. But wants to add an interactive sticker project/game, wedding inviations and justin (product launch of "just in case" special bag with sleep-over necessities like toothbrush etc...). Interestingly for Alison, what all these other outlets provide is more of the "background" story.