[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.

[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.

[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).

[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...

[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."

[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.

[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.

[digital literacy and innovative educators]

The latest Innovative Teaching Newsletter has a list of Top Online Educators for 2008! Among the amazing teachers is Matthew Needleman of Creating Lifelong Learners fame. Congrats to Matthew. Thanks too to Matthew for including a couple of my posts in his Digital Storytelling Carnival (#3). He's asking for submissions for the next carnival so send your blog posts here.

[learning on screen - york 2008]

Yay the National Science Learning Centre in York has wifi...and it's working!

I'll be blogging throughout the two-day conference when things of interest arise.

---

Simon Campbell-Jones, former Editor Horizon
BBC Horizon - History of a Science Television Programme

• importance of beginnings
• how do you fill 50minutes of lecture...without being boring when science is basically *boring* (at least in the mid 60s)
• "medicine is not a science"
• showed an early clip from Horizon dealing with "continental drift" (for all you geologists out there) - this programme led to further programmes on plate techtonics
  
• interestingly, Simon says he had to first understand the geology before being able to make a film about it, conceptual learning
• Horizon did the first test-tube baby film, first "Whisper from Space," first film on absetosis, first programme on hot-blooded dinosaurs and first film on aids but these were not just educational films but these were dramatic and visual
• need to challenge ideas
• question on why people *hate* maths - because it's taught like *gospel,* about abstract ideas because "2 and 3 make 5." Interesting clip of video of a teacher asking a little girl (looks about 6) to add 63 plus 7 and she writes it out and adds it up, correctly. But, when asked why the number 7 is placed under the number 3 and not under the number 6, the little girl, after some thought, explained "that's how my teacher does it."
• "explanation, interpretation, application, implication...."
• every observation is like a detective story, science (and learning in general) should be exciting
  

[parts of a story]

The train's hynotic rumbling took me too far. I was past my stop and in new unexpected surroundings. The weathered platform slick with recent dewy drops. I gazed out the window. "If leaving the train here mind the step down to the platform." The beginnings of my reverie interrupted. I gathered my worn bag which loyally hugged the shiny laptop inside. There was no need to rush, people were still slowly and tentatively making the jump from train to slippery platform. I edged down the carriage, running my hands over the smooth velour interior, raising my eyes to meet his gaze.

[harpercollins publishing online]

HarperCollins Publishers recently announced a variety of online promotions to allow consumers exclusive sampling of its books. The “Full Access” program will feature a select number of titles that can be seen in their entirety for a month: current freebies include Paulo Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello*, Mark Halperin’s The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President, and Erin Hunter's Warriors: Into the Wild.
The “Sneak Peek” Program will enable readers to view 20% of many new titles two weeks before they're on sale. The remaining titles in the digital warehouse are now available for 20% viewing after the release date in the “Browse Inside” program.

* Coelho has actually been encouraging his readers to download pirated versions of his books since 2005 ;-)

from trendwatching.

[web 2.0 + storytelling = education]

Creating Lifelong Learners has an interesting post on a "Digital Storytelling Blog Carnival" featuring links to everything educators might like to know about digital storytelling. A link from his (Matthew Needleman's) post leads to an EduCause Connect conversation featuring Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) and Gail Matthews-DeNatale, Associate Director for Academic Technology at Simmons College.

A blurb about the discussion:

"Digital storytelling merges leading-edge technology with age-old storytelling processes. Digital stories are typically in video format but can also include Web pages, digital maps, and other emerging technology mashups. With the addition of a Web 2.0 focus, audience also becomes co-author. How do these concepts apply to pedagogy and how can instructors evaluate and assess the process and final product?"

The discussion begins with the question: "What is Web 2.0 storytelling and how is it different from multi-media?" Bryn responds: "Web 2.0 storytelling is the combination of web 2.0 platforms and practises with storytelling, the desire to tell a story and narrative structure." He also add that web 2.0 is based on the social and micro content, both these ideas have a big impact on how students can use the web.

Gail: "With the 2.0 experience there is a much lower barrier to use..."

Bryn also makes the point that educators shouldn't try to stop students from using wikipedia or googling for answers but should encourage students how to "search more broadly."

"How do you access digital story telling production?"

Gail: "I'm a very big fan of the process...the power of story as this kind of conversational iterative process is the power of assessment (formative assessment)...I give them a rubric and they give feedback according to the rubric."

Bryan: "This is the problem with the audio, you can't tell if I'm agreeing or disagreeing...it's important to recognise that we've been composing in multimedia for a long time...it's hard for us to recognise the history of technology, we tend to define tech. as the most recent thing. We can draw on how people were asssessing hypertext in the 80s and how people were assessing web pages in the 90s. You have to select evidence and materials and assess them and that process (of selection) can be assessed."

Gail: "I would add to this that there is a context, what I'd have a first year, first semester student do would be very different for a final year communication student...Sometimes it's useful to have two rubrics, one for the subject matter and one for the media literacies."

I like Gail's idea of having two rubrics...that would certainly make it clear to students exactly how their work was being assessed...but, for transliteracy or digital literacy or new media literacy etc...should we be working towards rubrics (and other strategies) that can more fully *intertwingle* form (process) and content?

Listen to the entire podcast here but I've tried to embed it below:

This discussion took place at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas where Gail Matthews-DeNatale presented a session at ELI 2008 called "Digital Story Making: Understanding the Learner's Perspective" and Bryan Alexander presented a workship at ELI 2008 on "Web 2.0 Storytelling".

[andy campbell @ the ioct: videos]

[andy campbell @ the ioct]

• "Since the 1990’s Andy Campbell has experimented with the possibilities of writing fiction for the computer screen and, although most people still consider fiction something they’d read from a book, an explosion of blogs, online journals, text-based “web art” projects and the introduction of electronic portable reading devices has generated a new wave of mashed up narrative experiments and intrigued (often confused) audiences.
  
  Andy Campbell’s website Dreaming Methods combines fictional narratives with other media such as film, photography, animation and music. The results are highly challenging but compelling reading experiences that explore dream inspired states, the subconscious and the deterioration of memory. Projects are often visually haunting and atmospherically immersive where the text itself floats, mutates and gets entangled with motion graphics creating powerful ‘scenes’ throughout the ‘story’."
  
  (live blogged)
  
  Background on Andy:
  Co-director on One to One Productions with Judy Alston create films, do web design, regeneration, public space, charities etc...
  Current Project: archiving and digitising Tibetan literature
  would swap computer games with friends, on disks, "you were posh if you had a hard drive."
  
  interested in the possiblity of merging writing stories (on the Amiga) with game design
  
  
  Review of "Dark Portal" from CU Amiga in 1994: "The quality of the writing is very good and the stories themselves are fun to read and none too obvious in the outcome."
  
  "The Amiga is dead" when Doom came out...so Andy shifted to the pc but it was Photoshop that convinced him of the merits of the pc.
  
  The limitations of print and the creative desire to create something other, something you couldn't print out, writing designed for the screen as though it was a liquid paper with boundaries different form print, more intriguing that things could move (maybe even the writing) rather than user interaction.
  
  Saw the potential with Flash where text can be treated as an object, you can do anything with it...visually.
  
  
  Creating Fractured "felt like shoving everything into a food mixer." But then began to think about how someone might approach it...but did it even need to be read *properly*?
  
  "Inside" (2002) first collaborative project (the first to use streaming video over writing). Based on *real* dreams, it was coming from a subconscious source, a recorded reality.
  
  Decided that enough experimentation, to look to personal experiences (memory and dreams) the first project was "The Flat", based on a series of photos that Andy's brother took. Text wouldn't be the focus, it would be transient and not *in your face*.
  
  Andy believes that these kinds of stories are best experienced on a one-to-one basis rather than on a big screen.
  
  Stories usually start with one scene and then grow, in a prickly way, into folders ad folders of images and sounds which are then woven into a sequence, dream-like with lots of different angles. The writing itself is done in the flash actionscript window, having the object attached to the language. Andy says he finds himself stripping down language, honing it down, and thinking about how it interacts with what's around it. Qite like memories themselves, how they get honed down, how they disappear or reappear in different places and times.
  
  
  Capped (2006) the narrative logic parallels dream logic where users have to finish a *task* in order to proceed.
  
  Dim O'Gauble (2007) inspired by Andy's grandmother who loved colour and patterns. She would blue tack wrapping paper to the walls if she liked the colour. With Dim O'Gauble tries to capture those feelings (Andy was also reading about hynogogia).
  
  Most recent project is Clearance (2008) inspired by a friend who carves stone. The friend decided to *distribute* his stone heads (he left them outside people's gates and on their front steps). He go onto the local news and then the national news and then the international news: "Mystery Stone Heads Appear." Billy fled to Scotland and so couldn't be contacted by interested people and the press. Andy and One to One productions took the brunt of this publicity. The papers thought that the dispersion of stone heads was actually a publicity stunt for their latest creation.
  
  The creations are "between" a lot of things, between photography and film, between reading and writing...hard to categorise, maybe "web art" is the best word. Future projects will rely on the text but provide subtle electronic twists. Using e-pub to allow content to adapt to whatever device it's being viewed on...and hybrid e-books that contain flash animations rather than illustrations. E-books readers and Kindle are starting to poke away at this market but actually writing itself is largely uncharted territory.
  
  Though people read more online is happening but not reading a *book* yet...the phrase: "this might mean we'll see new types of authors" keeps resurfacing. But, "we also need to see new types of readers."
  
  Questions:
  
  Role of sound: spends a great deal of time on sound. Sometimes has a scene with no sound to get an idea of what the ambiance should be and then develops the sound
  
  Teaching: Andy is entirely self-taught.
  
  What Market is Andy aiming for and how do you make money: A) "I'm not aiming for a market and b) I'm not making any money." He has 1000 people on his e-mail list and there is a huge cross-section of people, government, media students etc...
  
  Do you write into the action script?: There's never a script. Sometimes writes notes down but usually ends up scrapping that because you have everything inspiring around you. "I find it hard to write things externally."
  
  The actual text, the fiction, is that mulled over in your head rather than writing down notes...": "I still edit it and revise it then throw it down and come back to it and keep going over it till it sounds right and works with everything else."
  
  "It's definitely not me to do something pink and fluffy."
  
  Do you consider how long it would take to read: "I do think about it and try to design projects as though they could be navigated through without seeing everything." There are quite a lot of links that are quite hidden...but in terms of seeing everything you get how much time you *invest* in it. "The narrative is glimpsing." "There is a lot of symbolism that repeats throughout the pieces." Childhood is "like a mine" to grab from..."there is a que of ideas..."
  
  
  "Writing is a large part of it."
  

"Trying to evoke something that is more than just the writing..."

How do you feel about reader's being frustrated with not finding things...?: "I have aken some notice that people have been frustrated so I offer some tool tips but you still have to search the screen intensely." Doesn't want to be constrained by readers. "I intend to make it more accessible, I think it's important from the writers point of view."

[literacy in transliteracy]

"maintaining heterogenous contradiction is essential"


(Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 189).

While catching up on some reading and sifting through my google reader, my thoughts keep turning to Monday's transliteracy workshop. Again the notion of literacy appeared (initially) to cause some discomfort or at least problematisation. What *exactly* is literacy? Did we mean it in a linguistic book-sense? Should we be employing another term? Although it seemed there was general agreement that literacy points to modes of comprehension that extend beyond letters to mean *codes* in a broader sense, I frequently am asked why we don't just say visual literacy or multi-media literacy etc... For me, transliteracy is very much about a plurality - it isn't *just* visual or oral or linguistic and it isn't just about being media savvy. I think a large part of being transliterate is the ability to carry multiple literacies between media. For me, aspects of the web seem to exemplify this. I'm thinking of Twitter and sending updates via a mobile (txt literacy perhaps) to the web (web literacy) and then someone being notified of those updates on their mobiles, via rss aggregators, IM or just be following along on the web. Amidst these kinds of information exchanges there are also literacies required to navigate across literacy borders, to *read* images and sounds. I'm also thinking of web fictions (Dene Grigar's Fallow Field, Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood, Marjorie Luesebrink's Fibonacci's Daughter etc...) which require readers to be literate in sounds, images, text and interaction and often this literacy requires readers to amalgamate these literacies into the same instant of reading/understanding/interacting/performing. Maybe using the word literacy in transliteracy might also be thought of (in my view) as a Kristevian move; (like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray too suggest); one can challenge traditions (literary and otherwise) from within. So, using the term literacy can suggest a critique of (monomodal?) foundations. A sort of productive mimesis, repetition with a difference?

Iterability is "the logic that ties repetition to alterity"

(Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context," 180).

[meds1100: media texts & representations lecture]

Following today's lecture on new media here are some questions you might like to address (either here or in blackboard):

[reading images]

An interesting article on the reading (as in interpreting) of images and development of point of view. If the image appears alongside a narrative, people will wait to read the whole story before coming to any conclusions. If, however, the image appears with a list of information (rather than a narrative), people are quicker to form conclusions, basing their opinion more on the image rather than the verbal description. This has pedagogical and new media theory implications (among others).

"As our results indicate, pictures can have directionally opposite eVects on the impact of the verbal information they accompany, depending on whether this information is conveyed in a narrative or a list. These diVerences are largely traceable to the inXuence of pictures on the processes that individuals use to compute a judgment and the representations that are formed. When the information about a person describes a sequence of temporally related events, participants with the goal of forming an impression of the person are unlikely to compute an evaluation of the protagonist until the entire sequence is complete. Pictures provide perceptual symbols that both facilitate the formation of images of the individual events and permit the events to be perceptually linked, thereby leading a more coherent mental representation of the information to be constructed. When the information is conveyed in a list, however, participants attempt to form an evaluation of the protagonist on line by integrating the implications of the individual events as they encounter them, updating their impression as each new event is received. When pictures accompany the event descriptions, however, they appear to interfere with this integration process, resulting in a decrease in the impact of the descriptions. This interference largely occurs when pictures directly accompany the verbal information. Thus, as indicated by the supplementary data obtained in Experiment 2, presenting pictures separately from the verbal event descriptions had similar effects on participants’ evaluations regardless of the format in which the verbal material was presented.

Experiments 3 and 4 provided more direct indications of the processes and representations that underlie the judgments we observed in earlier studies. Experiment 3, for example, indicates that pictures are recognized both more quickly and more accurately when they are conveyed in a narrative than when they are conveyed in a list. Furthermore, verbal descriptions were also identified more accurately in the former condition, whereas the time required to make these identiWcations was longer. This latter effect is consistent with other evidence that when the features of information are represented in memory in a temporally related sequence, people engage in a mental search of the representation in order to identify these features, and the required time to do so is a reflection of this search.

Experiment 4 confrmed these implications and the nature of the representation formed more generally, showing that when event information is presented in a narrative
and, therefore, stored in memory as a temporally related sequence, exposure to one event description increases the speed of identifying the event that immediately follows it in the sequence. This eVect is not evident when the events are simply listed. Further results from this experiment indicate that pictures increased the time to identify statements when they were contained in a list but not when they were conveyed in a narrative. These results further strengthen the assumption that pictures interfered with the processing of the verbal information they accompanied."

"The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 352-364
Rashmi Adaval, Linda M. Isbell and Jr., Robert S. Wyer"

[machinima = storytelling]

After welcomes and introductions to the event, Paul Marino, Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, shared with us his presentation, "commemorating the first ten years of the use of game engines in real-time for the creation of Machinima." For me, this was an excellent presentation as it really gave me a sense of how machinima began and the stages through which it has been evolving. What I found most exciting about Marino's presentation was his recurring statement that machinima is about telling stories (woo hoo go narrative!):



Watching Marino's chronology of machinima not only reflected the development of technology and skill but also the greater expertise or craft of storytelling. (here is a list of his machinima selections) Marino, as well as other speakers on the day, reminded us that *anyone* can create machinima stories but then I wondered if that were true why are so few women (seemingly and please let me know if this is way off) are involved? Judging from the audience not many women are interested in machinima. Judging from the entries DMU received, not many women are making machinima. Judging from the films viewed at the festival, not many women are playing parts in machinima in terms of characters (there were a couple but not exactly positing *contemporary* views of women...) or production. Is this really the case or are women presenting their machinima work in other arenas and following different avenues? (perhaps Sims99.com might be such a place) The seeming lack of women was highlighted for me during an afternoon panel which included Ricard Gras, Xavier Lardy, Friedrich Kirschner and Klaus Neumann. Interesting as it was to hear the speakers' thoughts on distributing and promoting machinima as well as the variety of links Friedrich and Klaus zoomed through, I was left a bit surprised - given the perceived accessibility of machinima - that no women were represented in that session. I wonder if this gender imbalance grows out of the fact that machinima originated with gaming? How many women play Quake and Halo etc...? However, maybe this is changing already with Sims and SL game engines?





Food for thought I think.



~~~~~

"When a guy can show a machinima vid and proudly announce 1996 as the date of origin for that art form, he’s eliding decades of female vidding history. And that’s very, very wrong. (Harvard 2005)"

~~~~~