[new model for narrative: electric literature]

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days. 

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers — Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

[...]


As for Mr. Moody, he said he came up with the idea of Twitter fiction after he fell in love with the new form. “It’s like trying to write in haiku continuously,” he said in an e-mail message.
“I like that E.L. seems as though it will try just about anything, and I think it’s important for literature that it’s always pushing the envelope, colliding with other forms, trying to find new envelopes for its message, and generally renewing itself,” Mr. Moody’s message continued. He called it a method that was partly pioneered by magazines like McSweeny’s and Ninth Letter.
Stephen O’Connor, whose story “Love” is in the second Electric Literature issue, said, “They approached me after a story came out in The New Yorker.” At about 12,000 words, he added, “Love” is a bit long for a conventional literary magazine.
“I’m hoping it will be a younger audience, all those kids like my students at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence who are always on Facebook and iPhone,” Mr. O’Connor said.

[...]


“We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism,” Mr. Hunter said. “As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you acquiesce to, it’s something you create.”




From the NY Times. 

Image from Electric Literature. Follow Electric Literature on Twitter.

[phd training session: digital literacy & creativity]

A full-day for the AHRC funded CEDAR (Collaborative Digital Research in the Humanities), organised by the Universities of Bangor (Dr Astrid Ensslin) and Aberystwyth (Dr Will Slocombe).

As I've noted before, I'll be talking about academic blogging and the digital literacy (a favourite topic of mine).

For the students participating, feel free to add comments as directed in the presentation.



Please comment on the idea of reading and writing as “an invisible skill” (see Sue Thomas's video, 16:00) and whether you find the Stroop test challenging or not and why.


Literacy + Technology + Creativity = Digital Literacy in the 21st Century

Important that these elements are seen as interdependent


Read The Whale Hunt here: http://thewhalehunt.org


UPDATE: Keno Buss and Sascha Westendorf have joined us for a bit about their project and some hands-on experience with the De Montfort Creativity Assistant.

[digital arts and culture conference: cfp]

The biannual Digital Arts & Culture conference takes place in California in December 2009 (http://dac09.uci.edu)

The abstract submission deadline = May 1st

This time the conference is organised around themes, here is a very interesting one:

"Theme: The Present and Future of Humanist Inquiry in the Digital Field
What contributions may literary, poetic, and aesthetic idioms of humanist inquiry -- traditionally associated with problems of lyrical expression, narrativity, linguistic subjectivity, and authorial and readerly agencies -- continue to offer to the analysis of medial practices and systems in the era of mobile, distributed, and social media? The crux of this question, we
propose, lies in the specifically historical purchase of humanist method: its ability to (re)situate new symbolic practices in complex and nuanced relation to prior traditions and atavisms of expressive language and action -- in contrast to the reductively progressivist, de-historicizing impulses of much of contemporary digitalism.

This theme welcomes exemplary close readings (literary-theoretical, formalist, narratological, ludological, etc.) of electronic literature and poetry, single- and multiple-player computer games, social media, and hard and soft medial apparatuses of the digital field. Especially encouraged are such close readings which also make general claims regarding the significance of humanist investigations of digital arts and cultures."





More info at:
http://dac09.uci.edu/call.html

[storytelling 2.0]

It's children's stories which are pushing the boundaries of *traditional* publishing and going multimodal and mobile. Read the article on a few recent projects here (there's a snippet below) which are interesting but...I don't agree with gaming elements as synonymous with "boy friendly" (paragraph 6)! ARG! There are girl gamers out there and look at how Inanimate Alice weaves gaming alongside story development...and I know girls read that story too.

"In late January Lev Grossman, writing about the future of the book in Time, said the novel is on the verge of evolving “into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.” Although Grossman wasn't speaking to what is happening in children's publishing per se, there seems to be something in his description that taps into this brave new world.

It's clear that children's publishing is embracing the spirit of the book while finding more and more ways to tell a story outside the book. The challenge, as almost all who commented for this story said, will be figuring out how to create these non-book books cheaper, faster and better. As Katz put it,“This isn't landing in the new world, this is on the road to the new world.”

[narrative and social evolution]

"Why does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.

Literature "could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way", says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

Gottschall and co-author Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri, St Louis, study how Darwin's theories of evolution apply to literature. Along with John Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in DuBois, the researchers asked 500 people to fill in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, and then to describe their personality and motives, such as whether they were conscientious or power-hungry.

The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker's Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance."

Read the rest of the article at New Scientist.

[conference: language in the (new) media]

Language in the (New) Media: Technologies and Ideologies

Thursday, September 3 to Sunday, September 6, 2009
University of Washington
Seattle, WA, USA

Download a PDF version of this call for papers

Keynote speakers

• Naomi Baron, American University, USA
• Sally Johnson, University of Leeds, England
• Jannis Androutsopoulos, Kings College London, England
• Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Background
This is the third in a series of conferences organized around the role of the media in relation to the representation, construction and/or production of language. The first two conferences were held at Leeds University, England: in 2005, Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies, and, in 2007, Language Ideologies and Media Discourse: Texts, Practices, Policies. In 2009, the conference will be leaving Leeds and coming to Seattle.

Conference theme
We invite you to submit abstracts for papers which explore the representation, construction and/or production of language through the technologies and ideologies of new media - the digital discourse of blogs, wikis, texting, instant messaging, internet art, video games, virtual worlds, websites, emails, podcasting, hypertext fiction, graphical user interfaces, and so on. Of equal interest are the ways that new media language is metalinguistically represented, constructed and/or produced in print and broadcast media such as newspapers and television (see below).
With this new media theme in mind, the 2009 conference will continue to prioritize papers which address the scope of the AILA Research Network on Language in the Media by examining the following types of contexts/issues:

• standard languages and language standards;
• literacy policy and literacy practices;
• language acquisition;
• multilingualism and cross-/inter-cultural communication;
• language and communication in professional contexts;
• language and class, dis/ability, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality and age;
• media representations of speech, thought and writing;
• language and education;
• political discourse;
• language, commerce and global capitalism.

Abstract submission
Please submit abstracts for papers (20 minutes plus 10 for discussion) by email to lim2009@u.washington.edu no later than Thursday 26 February 2009. Abstracts should include a title, your contact details (name, mailing address, email) and a description of your paper (250 -350 words). The conference committee will begin reviewing abstract submissions immediately after the deadline; notification of acceptance will be Thursday 19 March. (Please send your abstract as a Word document or in the body of your email.)

Program and registration
In order to help your early planning for the conference, we have already finalized the basic program structure for the conference a copy of which can be downloaded here (as a PDF). This outline shows the start and finish times of the conference, the main social events (reception, BBQ and conference dinner), as well as lunches and coffee breaks. The conference planning committee is also arranging an optional program of tours and activities for Sunday 06 September. A business meeting for the AILA Network will also be scheduled for the Sunday morning.

Official conference registration will begin on Thursday 19 March, with early registration ending Thursday 21 May. The final deadline for presenter registration will be Thursday 23 July in order to be included in the final program. Registrations after 23 July will be charged an additional late registration fee of $25.00.

Conference registration
Early registration – until 21 May	$350
Early registration (full-time students)	$300
Registration – until 23 July	$380
Registration (full-time students)	$330
Day rate registration (accepted until 20 August)	$150

[elements of digital storytelling]

Check out this amazing project over at the University of Minnesota. The School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Institute for New Media Studies and The Media Center - Nora Paul and Christina Fiebich - address questions like:

What is unique about the digitial environment? How do users respond to it? How
can its potential be maximized? The Institute for New Media Studies and New
Directions for News are investigating these questions.

The Elements of Digital Storytelling site provides a:

• Taxonomy of digital storytelling


• Analysis of current practices


• Clearinghouse of effects research


• Showcase of innovative story forms


• Forum for discussion

[digital storytelling project: students & elderly]

The Charlestown Digital Story Project teams UMBC students with residents of Charlestown Retirement Community to create digital stories. Drawn from the life experiences of the residents, the stories combine narration, animation, photos and music in short movies to be shared with others. Residents work closely with student partners, acting as author and creative director of their individual story. Each student brings their own style and talents to the project, helping to create some unique examples of intergenerational storytelling.

Over thirty stories have been produced to date. In 2007, the project was recognized with a

Bronze Telly Award.

The project is organized by the New Media Studio with funding from Retirement Living TV.

See a video about the project here.

There are also links to the stories on the above link.

[multimodal narratives :: nonfiction]

Enjoying some downtime over the holidays and catching up on fun reading. While doing so I came across a variety of new media narratives. This one, Storm Stories, uses photos and videos with a focus on user-generated content.

Also have a look at the Wisconsin State Journal's Down to a Whisper on the loss of Native languages. There are images, video and the most interesting bit is the option to listen to Native languages; choose paragraphs, sayings or even just vowel sounds.


Time's person of the year, Barack Obama. Are you connected?

[haptics and hypertext]

"Reading is a multi-sensory activity, entailing perceptual, cognitive and motor interactions with whatever is being read."

Anne Mangen at the National Centre for Reading Education and Research, University of Stavanger published a paper in October on haptics and immersion in hypertexts such as M.D. Coverley's Califia (2000), C. Guyer and M. Joyce's Lasting Image (2000) and there is reference to afternoon.

Mangen's article is interesting in it's approach, taking a phenomenological one. She explains: "If we take the main purpose and motivation for our reading to be that of becoming immersed in a fictional world, then the text will have to provide the necessary setting for such a phenomenological sense of presence – by way of whatever modality telling the story."

Though people do seem to equate turning the pages of print books with clicking a mouse Mangen notes that these two activities are quite different: there is an "ontological" difference.

"The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions – clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens or scrolling with keys or on touch pads – take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book or the mobile phone."

Mangen goes on to explain that the demand to click/interact in certain hypertext stories actually undoes any possible sense of immersion (a la Marie-Laure Ryan).

"The links in a hypertext fiction present themselves as an experiential potential, a latently accessible actualisation of something currently unavailable, which becomes readily accessible with the click of a mouse. The sensory–motor affordances of the computer make it very easy to rekindle our attention, getting access to something beyond our present experience. As such, text or icons that yield (i.e., hot spots) afford haptic interaction with the computer. We experience these as links to be clicked on, and such
affordance is necessarily incompatible with phenomenological immersion."

Though I agree with a large part of what Mangen and others argue, I do wonder whether there is a different kind of reader, perhaps emerging in line with this turned-on, 21st century, tech world, a reader who actually becomes more immersed the more physical the demand of reading becomes? I know reading some narratives like Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood (mentioned in this blog before) which requires a greater degree of haptics (compared with afternoon et al), I found myself more "in" the story, actually moving my own way around. Perhaps gamer-readers won't find this cross-modal situation distracting, though Mangen notes that as a "psychobiological rule" we tend to allow motor senses to overpower cognitive ones.


Read the full article here (if you have access):
Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion, by Anne Mangen in the Journal of Research in Reading, Volume 31, Issue 4 (p 404-419).

See also this article that is freely available: Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, According to Expert in ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008).

[reading flabuert's a simple heart]

A little while ago I mentioned that Andy had let me raid his office library (such fun!) and one of the many books that I nabbed was Flaubert's Three Tales.

"A Simple Heart" focuses on Félicité, a "maidservant" who "did all the cooking and the housework, the sewing, the washing, and the ironing. She could bridle a horse, fatten poultry, and churn butter, and she remained faithful toher mistress, who was by no means an easy person to get on with." I am immediately sad for Félicité. On the third page we learn that her father dies when she was young and then her mother died leaving her sisters to look after her. When they followed their own paths (suggesting none of them were concerned or even really aware of Félicité), they left a farmer to take Félicité in. This new life meant perpetual cold - physical and emotional. After this awful experience, Félicité finds a job at a different farm where her new employers are kind to her even if the other help aren't. At this time she meets a man, falls in love, and then has her heart broken. Needing a change, Félicité finds a position with Madame Aubain where she gets "installed" like furniture in the house and also finds herself taking care of Paul and Virginie. When those around her leave or die, Félicité turns to religion (or rather, her interpretation of religion) as a panacea for her pain. The narrative begins by suggesting an unfolding future: "for half a century the women of Pont-l'Évêque envided Mme Aubain her maidservant Félicité." This is interesting because the way that Félicité is described, she is not "becoming," she is a woman already "installed" and "fixed." So dedicated and loyal, she seems complete in the same way that she ensures all her tasks are. Throughout the story there seem to be opportunities where we might begin to see a blossoming Félicité. She would "keep on kissing" the two children (present continuous) until Madame told her to stop. Emotion also seems to be a barrier to becoming, Félicité is "eaten up inside" and that prevents her from taking up hobbies or work that might otherwise involve her thoughts. Emotion is also detrimental to Virginie who originally becomes quite ill because of a fright. Later on she must refrain from playing the pain because "the slightest emotion upset her." At the end of the narrative, Félicité, who we have come to know as a loyal, selfless and hard working but "wooden" and who on her death bed remains finicky about tidiness, nonetheless experiences a deeply multimodal passing. Dying of pneumonia, Félicité smells the "mystical" scent of incense. We see her closer her eyes, we hear her slowing heart, we feel the fountain drying. Finally in death she can be loyal to herself and immerse herself in sensory perception.

[enactive cinema with pia tikka @ the ioct]

From the IOCT blog:

"PIA TIKKA

Enactive Cinema
The Future of Creative Technologies
IOCT Lab
24th October 2008, 4.30pm

***

A New Concept in Cinema

The Enactive Cinema project introduces a novel kind of interactive cinema genre, which is described as enactive cinema:

How the narrative unfolds, and how rhythm and soundscape emerge, depend on how the spectator experiences the emotional dynamics between the characters. Enactive cinema emphasizes unconscious interaction between the cinema spectator and the cinema. Instead of the spectator directly manipulating the narrative, its unfolding is affected by the spectator’s emotional participation. The project suggests that unconscious and conscious experience interact in an inseparable and complex manner. The cinema experience is more than seeing and hearing. It is about sensing and re-living of one's own experience in what happens to the 'others'. This is, ENACTIVE CINEMA.

• Wanted to reinterpret Eisenstein's dynamic organic film theory of montage
• how to capture the dynamic nature of his theories in today's new media
• so used parachronic reading which is outside of time, recurise: linearity of historical time as put into brackets, or substituted by recursive dynamics of experience, a nowness involving events in a spiral manner.
  
• biomechanics: early Eisenstein and montage of attractions (1923)
• ecstasy : holistic experience auditory and visual
• She jumps over the other people important to Eisenstein - hegel, darwinism, karl marx, vygotsky, alexander bogdanov (political rival of Lenin, retired himself from political scen and in 1928 he died but founded "techtology"

"unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tektology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of Tektology which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in 1970s."

• Pia's theoretical background - emotion dynamics, cognitive ecologism (Ulric Neisser), recent neroscientific views of the human mind (Gallese), emmbodied simulation (Gallese), emotions as cognition (Antonio Damasio), homeostasis theory of cinema viewing (Torben Grodal)
• gallese draws on merleau-ponty: the body is...that strange object...
• Gallese and george lakoff collabor5ations on embodies role of experience, semantic studies and neuroscience (see this excellent article that i read the other day)
• toolbox for authoring and describing intersubjective cinematic understanding derived from Theory of Metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)
• a way to get a hold of the cinematic experience via the tracking of sensorimotor aspects and spatial dynamics
• gap between phenomenology and how we describe the experience or gap between the phenomenological and the neurological - how to build a bridge between these
• embodied metaphors
• "My goal is to shed light and define novel perspectives especially on the categorization and attribution of emotions within the cinematic narrative. The artistic and scientific outcome is an “intelligent” cinematic system that anticipates and makes inferences about emotional narrative paths suggested by the spectator-participants' bodily actions. "
• enactive cinema - how the narrative unfolds depends on how the spectator experiences emotional dynamics between the characters
  

• dynamic emotion ecology refers to the dynamic interactinon between spectator and psychophysiological states
• emphasises unconscious interaction between narrative and emotional participation, the invitation to enact is very gentle. 5 chairs invite the spectator to sit down, there are also other biofeedback sensors measuring emotional level etc...

Listening to Pia Tikka's talk i'm wondering what happens with spectators who don't have high or normal functioning mirror neurons (perhaps as has been suggested in the case of autism? And what about gender issues. Some cognitive/neuroscience studies suggest there are gender differences with mirror neurons, deepening the stereotype that women are more empathetic because women's mirror neurons showed signs of stronger stimulation (for one example, see this article - "Gender differences in the human mirror system: a magnetoencephalography study")


Data that was monitored - heart rate, breathing rate, activity monitoring, non-body contact - all of this information can go into a toolbox for authors on how to create a narrative.

Have a look at the following video for an interpretation of Eisenstein's visual "vocabulary"

[breathing earth]

During my presentation yesterday for the Creative Writing & New Media Online Master's students (who met in Leicester f2f for one week) I referred to some interesting narratives that are merging story with geographic information and/or maps. Two projects I referred to were The 21 Steps and a school trip project by Emerson College. In line with my developing interest on the role of geographic information (and the like) in narratives, the following project fits right in - linking cultural narratives (of co2 emissions, births and deaths) with countries. Thanks to a tweet today by @fromthehip aka Ingrid Kopp, I found The Breathing Earth Simulation:


The countries in red (at the time of this screen capture) - US, China and Saudi Arabia - are "currently emmitting 1000 tonnes of CO2." It's also interesting to see how the birth/death rates compare:
Someone dies/is born every:
China: 3.5 seconds/1.8 seconds
Saudi Arabi: 8 minutes/42.7 seconds
US: 12.8 seconds/7.3 seconds

In Canada: 2.1 minutes/1.5 minutes
In the UK: 51.8 seconds/ 48.9 seconds - so in the UK deaths and births seem to be pretty balanced. While Greenland seems to be the country with the slowest death and birth rates: 20 hours/9.8 hours


The project is created by David Bleja.

[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...

[guest lecture: MEDS 1100 - Media Texts and Representations]

I'm presenting a guest lecture for the Media Texts and Representations module today (Monday, 20 October 2008)!

Welcome to all the students who will be participating.

If you're happy to engage in public, please feel free to address the following questions here on my blog, otherwise we (DMU students) can meet in Blackboard.

[chris joseph and NRG]

Today Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at the IOCT presented his latest project, NRG. A culmination of his two years at the IOCT resulted in an impressive hybrid piece of electronic art that highlights issues pertaining to digital literacy, digital art, art reception, performance, narrative, multimodality, interaction, performance and the environment. Chris is well known for his work on multimodal digital fiction Inanimate Alice (with Kate Pullinger) and his work has frequently been nominated for a variety of prizes. Some examples:

2008:

Finalist (Interactive productions category), Learning on Screen Awards 2008, British Universities Film & Video Council, UK 2007: Selected Finalist, 2008 CULTURAS Intercultural Dialogue Awards, Madrid, Spain [Alicia Inanimada, Episodio 1: China] Selected Finalist, 8th Seoul International Film Festival, Seoul, Korea [The Surveys] IBM New Media Prize, 20th Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany [Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China] Selected Works, 20th Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany [Inanimate Alice, Episode 1: China and Inanimate Alice, Episode 2: Italy]

Today Chris presented NRG at the IOCT. This work is a combination of bicycle, human power, narrative, multimodality and a laptop. Chris notes that he was initially very interested in raising the question of sustainability in electronic art, a question seemingly often overlooked. Spurred on by the success of The Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema, Chris attempted his own pedal-powered system. Players or readers or interactors must cycle to generate the story which appears on a laptop hooked up to the bike. As Chris says:

It's 2010 and you have been appointed to lead the new World Energy Directorate, with the power to control international spending and research on energy sources and production. Your decisions will influence the life of billions of humans, countless species and the Earth as a whole. How will your choices change all our lives during the planet's next forty years of industrial development?

Part environmental game, part multimedia artwork, NRG (short for En-er-gy) is self-sustaining, people-powered installation. No previous knowledge about energy issues is assumed or required, but NRG is intended to stimulate thought and discussion about energy consumption, its links to global warming and the need for the development of lifestyle alternatives.

***

Over the past fifty years electronic art has grown to become an established genre, yet energy – specifically the power required to view a work, as well as create it - is rarely acknowledged. But a electronic writers, artists and musicians must confront the fact that natural resources (converted to electricity) are continually required in order for the work to be experienced by both physical and virtual audiences. So in responding to the IOCT - an institution at the forefront of electronic creation - it seemed natural that my residency work should consider energy, both as a narrative theme and in the practical realisation of the piece.


NRG resides on a laptop that is not connected to the mains, but instead requires power to be periodically supplied by its ‘players’ through a bicycle generator. To play, simply select which energy sources the world should invest in, choosing as few or as many as you wish. Just as in the real world, the choices made will have significant impacts upon energy supply and use, population, carbon dioxide levels and other planet-wide measurements over the next five decades.

Perhaps the reading/kind of performance required to understand this work is a good example of transliteracy and of transdisciplinarity - various modes and disciplines coming together.

Congratulations Chris and best of luck!

[long live the experimental novel]

Long live the experimental novel with what Suzi Feay declares in her report in Sunday's Independent. Strangely that's also when a rather one-sided view on digital literature appeared. Feay's report on "Who'll be the bestsellers of tomorrow?" makes some interesting predictions including more books on the subject of our failing environment and, wait for it...digital narratives. One example Feay turns to is Chris Meade's In Search of Lost Tim, a magical musical graphical digital fiction "which uses fictitious blogs (hosted at www.insearchoflosttim.net) and YouTube videos to tell the story of a blogger who is contacted by a boy who claims he lives in the 1960s and is communicating via his "Futurizer"). Young Tim is trying to contact his future self, the political activist and secret agent Lord Tim. It's a jeux d'esprit, but also, just possibly, the future of fiction."

nb: note the allusion to Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or...In Search of Lost Time

A Synopsis: "On holiday Jennifer begins writing a personal blog to help her through a recent bereavement. Then she receives mysterious messages from a boy who claims to be communicating through time via his 'Futurizer'. Young Tim has lost contact with his future self, with whom he has been fighting crime across the centuries.

In their 21st Century comic book world, Lord Tim and his glamorous Sidekick are under attack from the evil Mister B.
Should Young Tim save his elder self by tackling Bailey the school bully, or his suspicious neighbour, Barry?
What are 'Futurolusions'? Why is Jennifer caught up in all this? And is Young Tim in peril as he emerges into the dangerous, grown up world?

Starring a glove puppet, cartoon characters and a blogger, featuring words, ukuleles, video, photos and drawings, this is a multimedia novella about what the future means to a group of people living in the past, the present and the pretend."

[sonic and digital literacies]

As I think about the kinds of things I'd like my pilot group to read while enjoying various brain scans (this is an experiement in the works) I find myself trying to make sure I'm not too text-centric. I'm working in the online environment (mostly) and that means there is often recourse to images, sounds, video, text (which in my experience is often quite visual too) and of course there's some kind of haptics. But I find I almost forget about sound...sounds odd saying that because as I write I am listening to myself, how can I *forget* about sound? Is it more likely that I'm so immersed in sound that I just navigate through its presence (as is the case for certain students according to Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks) Cornstock and Hocks ask how might educators engage this kind of sonic sensitivity in their own writing (composition) classrooms. It seems that this might be similar to what Ximena Alarcon is doing with her research into sonic environments and memory. Ximena did her ph.d at DMU (in Music Technology and Innovation.) and now she is working on a Leverhulme Trust - Early Career Fellowship 2007 - 2009. For her ph.d Ximena created an ethnography based artwork. "Twenty-four volunteers participated in the project, sharing their (deep) feelings, spontaneity, curiosity, interest, and passion for discovering how sound is important in their life. Sounds included in this project have been selected by them, after a process of travelling, recording, listening and remembering."

Ximena's current project stretches the sonic environment to Paris and Mexico, this time comparing these results with the London one's which formed the base of the ph.d.

There are blogs devoted to Ximena's field work in Paris and Mexico and on the Mexican blog there's an interesting comment from one of the volunteers. She has just listened to sounds from the London Underground while navigating Ximena's "ethnographic artwork." She notes the sound of the bells (doors opening and closing I presume) and notes that hearing the sound means she visualises the tube" in action" (my translation):

"Lo que llama en particular mi atención son las campanas en la parte del corredor, la combinanción de imágenes y los sonidos hacen realmente imaginarte un mundo en moviemiento"

I wonder if this synesthetic response is something that might be made visible with brain scanning research and is it something we (as educators) can work into our teaching? I suppose this aligns with Ong's thinking that sound "emanate[s] from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity" (qtd in Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks)

I'll look forward to reading what parisienne/parisien commuters think.

[transliteracy, m-learning & africa]

The title is quite a mouthful but still doesn't really get at the enormous potential that Alex Smith's manifesto for African Mobile Literacy suggests. Alex has had the brilliant idea to translate stories into African languages and make them available in formats available for dissemination via mobile (seems to tie in well to the PART group's research into transliteracy). The idea has come about due to the lack of access African young people have to read/hear stories in their home languages. An appalling idea if I imagine not having stories available in English or Italian. So, Alex has created a manifesto and is asking for help. Are there designers translators (perhaps Anietie Isong) and educators (I'm def. going to help out as best I can and draw on my Inanimate Alice Education Pack experience) out there who would like to be involved. If so, comment on Alex's blog post.

Thanks to Karina for the head's up.

More on mobile learning here from Leonard Low.

[ TIR-W Volume 9 no. 2 Instruments and Playable Text ]

From the guest editor Stuart Moulthrop:

"Our work is animated by the desire to evoke from simple rules a plausibly infinite set of expressions. We come at this problem from various perspectives, techniques, and points of the aesthetic compass, and we arrive at happily different results, but a certain resemblance remains.

For Judy Malloy, who was a master composer when I was still learning canon and fugue, the key to invention lies in the artful crossing of pattern and chance, of musical and cybernetic form, in her "Concerto for Narrative Data."

John Cayley, who would be our Che or Tristan Tzara if this were an actual movement, gives us a newly re-engineered version of "riverIsland," an exploration of poetry-as-simulation that continues to define the possibilities of its form.

Next come some younger though no less accomplished talents, beginning with Shawn Rider, a writer, digital designer, and meta-gamer who is represented here with two pieces, "PiTp," a work laid open deliberately to digital intervention, and "So Random," a story that tells itself each time, specially, just for you.

Elizabeth Knipe, another relatively new player, offers "activeReader," an interactive media piece that brings its own interpretation of reader engagement and emergent, open form.

Nick Montfort, equally at ease with aesthetic programming and the long-form palindrome, offers what we might call a minimum instrument, "The Purpling," a maze of recirculating expression built from humble Web pages.

Last in train is my own "Under Language," a sort of talkative poem with consequences, far less credible in its claim to infinity than most of its companions, but still a kind of game, for those who will play."

Read the new issue here.

[wesch & edu]

thanks to timoreilly's tweet I've seen this great post at PILOTed about michael wesch and his views on education:

"50% of students do not like school.

0% of students do not like learning.

Is it that some students just aren’t meant to learn? Or is it that schools just aren’t connecting with half the students?

Should we just dismiss that because it was a small survey (fewer than 200) of college students, or should we take a closer look at the way schools work?

The data come from a 60 minute video by Michael Wesch on The Future of Education. Here are some more gems from the video:

The reality is that practically any student could pull up any of the answers on most class tests by entering a query on his or her mobile phone. Why are we emphasizing this type of information and these types of tests?

The result is that the most meaningful student questions in class are

1. Is this on the test?
2. How long does this paper have to be?
3. How many points is this worth

The most common classroom experience is based on the assumptions that

• Information is scarce
• Good information comes from an authority
• Authorized information is beyond questioning

But Web 2.0 shows that everyone is better than anyone; a large group working together can create information rivaling the content of experts. In fact, where we are moving is

• Ubiquitous networks
• Ubiquitous computing
• Ubiquitous information
• At unlimited speed
• About everything
• Everywhere
• From anywhere
• On all kinds of devices

The goal of education should be to teach students to identify significance and create meaningful connections. It should enable students to understand how things relate to, contrast from, are similar to, and affect other things; and it should help students find out who they are and how they fit in.

Students only read 49% of what they are assigned, and, of what they read, they find only 26% relevant to their lives.

You improve that by giving some sense of meaning to the class beyond the grade

1. constructing a larger narrative around the material, a bigger picture that is significant
2. creating a learning environment that values the students themselves
3. leveraging existing media and the environment, using the Web which is all around us

Ten free ideas to leverage the Web:

1. Set up a class page with headlines from Google news on the topic via an RSS feed
2. Offer a page (Wiki or portal) where students can comment and share videos and articles they find on class topics
3. Have students responsible for posting and editing the lecture notes online from classes
4. Devise an online list of topics that will be on the test and have the students write, and provide links for, the study notes
5. Use a widget that enlarges a student’s picture on the class portal as he/she contributes to the class notes
6. Assign topics to students or groups, and have them responsible for the content on the class website, portal, or wiki
7. Maintain online discussions around relevant, interesting topics
8. Develop online groups or sandboxes for research topics
9. Have students prepare lectures (video or audio with slides) that can be posted online
10. Create a Twitter stream that students can access, follow, and contribute to for the class.

Two other videos from Wesch, each just over 4 minutes:

• The Machine is Us/ing Us which explains and dramatizes Web 2.0
• A Vision of Students Today, which shows how traditional classes disengage students."

[nlab social networks conference - roland harwood]

Roland Harwood: "Are Online Social Networks the New Cities?"

social networks are starting to fulfill some of the interactions upon which cities are traditionally based

two books that have inspired Roland:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and Emergence by Steven Johnson

Manchester - first formed as a settlement in 76 and 1301 there was a town charter and in 1700-1850 because of industrial revolution it grew ten-fold though not formally recognised as a city until 1853.

People who study urban growth talk about the role of technology (field rotation etc...) on the development of cities. "I think the internet is going to have as profound effect on cities but we're only at the beginning."

See Richard Florida Flight of the Creative Class.

Jane Jacobs talks about the essence of cities, especially cites in which you can walk. In a car you are isolated but on foot you overhead conversations, have encounters and even change your behaviour based on those encounters. The characteristics of good cities:

random encounters, information storage and exchange, communities, space to play, economies of scale, trade/sharing, organised complexity, anonymity.

Diversity drives innovation. We need to create more space to cross-fertilise our ideas (this can feed into my IOCT research on transdisciplinarity).

Roland's just mentioned a really interesting idea of "bothies": random shelters that people can use for free?! See here for more info: http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

[nlab social networks conference - steve clayton]

Today is the day for the Social Networking conference hosted by NLab.
First speaker of the day is Steve Clayton: "Social Networking for Small Businesses - Lessons from Microsoft?"

How to establish trust between big business and local consumers?

How do consumers find info? Show of hands - who uses the yellow pages? no one. People use google (and microsoft live search) and blogs. There's a really big difference between a blog and a website for businesses.

Microsoft put a video out for a game Gears of War and instantly it turned into a hugely viral marketing tool. The audience mashed it up and turned the video into a social device, a tool for communication (see here and video mashups here)

Hilarious microsoft ipod video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857

The best bit about the web, finding something unique to say and start conversations with people on the long tail.

To get high on google: either pay to appear high on the right hand side or have lots of people linking to you to appear high on the left-hand side.

Stats:
*70% of small businesses have a website
*2 out of 10 small businesse websites do not have company contact details or product/service info
*info isn't updated

Think of small businesses that blog and then do well - English Cut, Savile Row - 4 years ago there wasn't much demand for a £3000 suit but bumped into Hugh MaCloud who suggested he set up a blog. Rather than try to sell suits the plan was to talk about tailoring, how to buy cloth, how to cut cloth etc... now sells suits to royalty and has more business than he can manage...all because of a blog which engages conversation.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers.

Through constant engagement, linking to others, facilitating conversation Steve moved up in the google listing.

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
Small is the New Big by Seth Godin - means you have something unique, you can be agile. The web and blogs in particular give you the platform to do that in an incredibly powerful way.

Twitter - the new pub, a place where all your friends are.

Need to build up the trust quotient.

If the buzzword bingo is a bit tricky, a jungle of new-fangled terms and ideas, Steve suggests common craft for ideas explained in "plain English."

[wikivision...now twittervision]

xposted at PART:

In January I wrote about how strangely addictive WikipediaVision was (and still is) but now I've come across something that inspires even more obsessive behaviour...at least for me.

I realise TwitterVision (by David Troy) has been around for a while; Nat Torkington blogged about its hynosis-inducing effects back in last March. Although I checked it out then (albeit briefly), it seems much more interesting to me now...perhaps because I'm also hooked on Twitter itself. Its seems this mashup would make a geography lesson or social studies lesson quite fun too...





Follow David Troy on Twitter here.

Other interesting Twitter mashups:

twistori
twitterfeed
twhirl
twitterrific

For more, check out the extensive list (100 examples) at MoMB Labs.

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.