Week 12: Guest Lecture

This week I have the great pleasure of introducing Kate Pullinger.

Here is Professor Sue Thomas (left), Kate Pullinger (next to Sue) and moi. We were being very transliterate with our Nintendo DS game playing.

A bit about Kate:

Kate Pullinger’s most recent book, The Mistress of Nothing, won the 2009 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes, and was long-listed for the Giller Prize. Her digital fiction project Inanimate Alice has also won numerous prizes, reaching online audiences around the world. She is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University where she co-founded TRG, the Transliteracy Research Group, and she also offers private 1-1 mentoring for emerging writers in both print and new media.
Kate Pullinger is currently working on a new novel that builds on themes developed in her collaborative digital fiction project, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel. You can also read Kate on My Secret Blog.

Read more on Kate's site: http://www.katepullinger.com/

Kate's Guest Lecture:


‘Inanimate Alice’ and Her Other Lives: a mini-case study


Kate Pullinger


I came across this a couple of weeks ago and was amazed by it: it's a fictional

podcast in the style of a radio interview. In it, Alice, the character we created for our online episodic multimedia digital novel (gasp) 'Inanimate Alice',
is interviewed by the host of a show called 'The Daily Dose' about a 'giga pet' she's created, 'the Brad Bud'.


It's just over three minutes long but I'm amazed by it on many levels, but mainly on the level of 'wow'. These students have taken the Alice stories far beyond what exists online, developed Alice's character into young adulthood, created a business for Alice that includes a piece of tech kit that Alice has designed herself, the ‘Brad bud’. Then they've gone one step further and created a talk show for Alice to appear in, with its own host, and they've recorded the talk show interview, and broadcast it, along with the transcript, online.


There's very little information on the podcast webpage itself, but I can see from the url that it comes out of 'pitt.edu' which is the University of Pittsburgh in the US. A few tweets later, I'd figured out that these students are working with Jamie Skye Bianco, who is Professor of Digital Media at Pittsburgh (also known online as @spikenlilli). Jamie teaches both 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths' to students on her 'Narrative & Technology' class; her students wrote a series of interesting blogposts about Alice and FP earlier this year.


It's been nearly two years since new episodes of Inanimate Alice, created by readers, first started appearing online, and these new episodes continue to proliferate. The pedagogical community around the project continues to grow; if you are interested in having a look at it, a good place to start is the Facebook Inanimate Alice group page. Recent developments include a Scottish teacher, Hilery Williams, who has written a series of wonderful blog posts about using 'Inanimate Alice' with dyslexic teenaged readers; the post linked to here is number four in a series on Alice.


As well as that, another Scottish teacher, Kenny Pieper, has been using Alice in his secondary school classroom and, again, blogging about it in a way that I've found both useful and inspiring. Both groups of students are working on their own episodes of Alice, and Mr Pieper’s class has started posting these online at the class ‘Inanimate Alice’ blog - https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/sl/InanimateAliceBlog/


For writers who work in the genre of science fiction, this kind of reader-story interaction is fairly commonplace via 'fanfic', or fan fiction. But for a writer like me, working in both the genre of literary fiction, and with new forms of digital fiction, having readers talk back to my story in this way is an extraordinary experience. Every time I see a new episode, or a new blog post from people working with 'Inanimate Alice' I feel absolutely amazed. To me it seems a very meaningful form of interactivity and I'm thrilled that these stories are being used by students and teachers around the world to find new ways of talking and thinking about storytelling in the 21st Century.


I was interviewed recently for an article called 'Are Midlist Authors An Endangered Species?' that appeared in the Globe & Mail newspaper yesterday - somehow I've become one of the go-to-girls for journalists who want to talk about the future of the book and the future of stories. My conversation with the journalist was, of course, vastly reduced in the context of the article, and I ended up being quoted in the final paragraph, given this as a not-very-bright-sounding last word: “Writers will make a living in a lot of different ways, only some of which are writing,” Uh-huh. I was described in the article as a writer who "publishes both conventionally and online, where she posts fiction for free." While, strictly speaking, when it comes to 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Flight Paths', this is true - these works are available online for free - to see the vast interactive community project that Alice in particular has become reduced to 'fiction for free' is infuriating. This is not to fault the journalist; my point here is that at the moment the argument about the future of publishing seems to be focussing on self-publishers vs real publishers, on 'free' versus 'paid' content. To me this feels like I'm watching a couple of mice argue over a tiny piece of cheese while around the corner a big fat cat (representing the vast potential for multimedia, interactivity, mobile delivery, etc etc etc that digital platforms offer to writers) sits calmly licking her paw.


I’d be interested to hear from you all about what you think about this kind of thing. What are your thoughts about how writing and publishing are changing? Have any of you been in touch with writers you admire via social media? Would you feel able or inclined to contact a writer you like through their website, or their twitter feed or facebook page, for example?

Week 12: Writers and Writing

This week we have a guest lecture from Kate Pullinger (please see the seperate post).

Here are this week's discussion questions:

Week 12: Writers and Publishing

Q1. ““If you’re trying to persuade people to do 

something, to buy something, it seems to me you 

should use their language, the language they 

use every day, the language in which they 

think.”

~David Ogilvy. Think about Ogilvy’s quote in 

relation to creating and publishing in the 

transliterate world. What is the 

people’s language now?

Q2. Media companies are 

experimenting with “user-generated 

content” and comment-enabled 

content is now ubiquitous, but most media 

companies treat those “users” as an 

undifferentiated mass (as the distasteful term 

“user” implies) and the content they “generate” 

as one big bucket of “stuff.” However, The 

Huffington Post has a different system. Top 

commenters can become featured bloggers...so, 

really, those who have published the most, now 

become recognised as writers. (Read about it 

here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paulberry/huffposts-new-commentsys_b_60766.html). How does having the 

community serve as a credibility/value filter alter 

traditional roles of writing and publishing? Do 

you see similar examples of this kind of “wisdom 

of the crowds” in your daily life?

Q3. Even with the iPad, e-books (not the apps) 

are fairly conventional. We download them, and 

then turn pages and bookmark interesting 

excerpts. What are your five top ways that we 

can expand the social reach of e-books?

Week 10: Writers and Writing

Note: Image from 180/360/720.

Week 10: Writers and Writing
This week we’ll explore contemporary new media writing and examine how it might be different from
*traditional* print-only works. As Andy Campbell notes of his works: “textual narratives are approached by Dreaming Methods as a key part of the multimedia mix rather than as the absolute central backbone – purposely open-ended, ambiguous, short, fragmentary – and are often additionally considered to be a powerful visual element: blurred, obscured, transient, animated, mouse-responsive.”


Key ideas for this week:
• Ways to write and read rich media documents in a networked environment.
• Read the example books made with Sophie: http://sophieproject.cntv.usc.edu/demobooks
• “The interactive nature of the process makes it possible for individual memories to be linked in a creative shared experience; it fosters the development of on-line sound-driven narratives.”


Guest Lecture:
Ximena Alarcon will share with us her ideas on creating and disseminating born digital work.

This week's seed questions:

Q1. Ronni Bennett says that “in the end, it is all storytelling ...all communication is storytelling.” What are some examples in the online environment that support Bennett’s thinking?

Q2. In “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide,” Henry Jenkins writes that transmedia storytelling works best when each medium is used to tell the part of the story that it’s most suited for and that each piece of this story. Find two examples of transmedia storytelling and explain why each platform and story part works best together (think of Radiohead and Heros as examples).

Q3. In the print world, page layout is largely the job of the publisher. That is, neither the reader nor the writer has much choice about how the text (images/sound/video) appear on the “page.” With digital writing, most writers (and readers) have deep input on how text (etc...) appears.  What is significant about this shift? What dialogues are opened up?
 

Guest Lecture: Chris Joseph

Chris Joseph is going to be sharing with us some *classified* information about his work. Please access the private post containing his lecture notes here. A password is required which has been e-mailed to you.

Chris will be answering questions about his lecture which you can post here so the class discussion remains in this centralised area.

Week 5: Web 2.0

Some key terms we will discuss during this session:
hypertext
hypermedia
web 2.0
network as platform

Required Readings: Tim O'Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?” Michael Wesch, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,”




Q1. How have new media technologies resulted in a more participatory media culture? Give examples of
audience participation and contrast with other theories of the role of the audience. You may refer with examples from your experience at work and at home as you respond to this question.
Q2. How does the shortened character usage (140) of Twitter affect narrative?
Q3. Can Facebook status updates be considered a new form of narrative? Why? Examples?
Q4. What would you say is the greatest impact of web 2.0 technologies on publishing?
Q5. Web 2.0 denotes a shift from “passive use” to “active participation.” If web 2.0 does away with roles of the producer, consumer and end user, where is the text? What is the product? Who is the author?

Week 3: History of the Book

It’s not just about the printing press! The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable communications revolution. The historical record allows us to examine the whole of a vast socio-cultural, political, and economic change over a period of some three to five hundred years (depending on whose perspective you prefer). By following the developments in manuscript and print book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in social organization, politics and economics. 

“Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?”

Some key ideas to consider:

• the history of the book
• the end of books (!?)
• the net_reading/writing_condition
• What are some current views about the emergence and diffusion of media?

Was There a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?

Professor Robert Gross explores the history and historiography of book history and reading in pre Civil War America. This lecture was originally given at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008.