Abstract: This sabbatical will examine the evolution of new media as a distinct genre of creative writing. In addition to exploring transmedia storytelling, interactive fictions and iDocumentaries, I will review scholarship on the storytelling potential of augmented/virtual reality, the Internet of Things, and the status of new media in creative writing curricula.
On October 31, 2008, Josh Lewis, Ryan Paul, and Kris Kowal orchestrated a 21st century version of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds scare by coordinating a flood of tweets, posts, and blogs originating from around the world that all purported to describe the pandemonium and often grotesque violence wrought during their fabricated Martian invasion of Earth. #wotw2
This is transmedia storytelling.
In 2010, Ryan and Amy Green created That Dragon, Cancer, a video game based on theirexperiences as parents raising a terminally ill young child. Initially conceived as a game that asked players to immerse themselves in negotiating the uncertainties of pediatric cancer, the couple reworked the game after their son’s death so that the experiencefocused on allowing readers to live the lows, the unexpected highs, and the chaos of the family’s medical journey with a greater level of intimacy than traditional film or books would allow.
This is an interactive autobiographical game.
In 2013, Tim Travers Hawkins created an animated interactive web documentary based on phone calls he had with children locked inside immigration detention centers around the world. Users navigate their way through the work by clicking on prisons, cells and signs to hear the stories of children between the ages of 7 and 16 detained in centers in Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States.
This is an interactive documentary.
New media and digital technologies are pushing storytelling in countless new directions,producing textual experiences that were not possible just a decade or two ago and creating what rhetorician Doug Hesse calls “fenceless neighbors” out of disciplines that were once thought rigidly distinct. In college creative writing departments across the country, digital platforms like blogs, video channels, and interactive web pages have been embraced as publishing opportunities and even tools to enhance a reader’s experience with traditional genres of creative writing, but many are just now beginning to consider whether hypertext and other digital technologies constitute a genre of in its own right.Change of this kind comes slowly. The traditional creative writing curriculum has long included fiction, poetry, and plays—it literally took decades to incorporate the genres ofcreative nonfiction and screenwriting into the curricula. And the truth is that–although instances of creative writing have appeared in and some creative writers have embraceddigital media in the form of online journals, games, and experimental texts—new media is not universally recognized as a distinct genre in creative writing.
This sabbatical will explore whether new media compositions currently constitute a unique genre of creative writing. Genre is a flexible term in literature; broadly, it refers to a body of work that share a common literary technique or structure, but it also refers to works that have similarities in tone, topic, setting, or conventions. Much of the sabbatical will be spent reading discussions of the intersection of creative writing and new media as well as interacting with a wide variety of digital stories and texts, looking for a whether a cohesive description of a new media genre with a unique take on storytelling can be formed at this time.
This sabbatical will also involve extensive reading on those emerging technologies that are just beginning to be incorporated into digital storytelling, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things.
The completed project will include a blog that will be available online, a report to be submitted to the creative writing and curriculum committee of the English department, and support materials for useful digital creation tools that will be made available to colleagues through the English/Journalism technology committee.
In the course of this sabbatical, I will
Broadly speaking, the eight objectives for this sabbatical break out into three major themes—examining the status of digital storytelling in the curricula of other colleges, experimenting with established forms of interactive digital storytelling, and exploring the storytelling potential of emerging technologies.
To complete the research on curriculum, I have developed a partial list of colleges who currently offer new media-based creative writing courses, including Fordham, Rutgers, and MIT, as well as colleges where digital storytelling is a unique discipline like the University of Missouri; the list will expand as I have more opportunity to research the topic. In addition, I have attached a non-exhaustive list of books and new media productions that I will cover—many of which would be reviewed in the weekly blog entries that are part of the proposal.
The sabbatical would result in
|
Prior to sabbatical |
• Supplement and refine a “working bibliography” of readings.
• Compile a deeper list of independent story-rich games and interactive fiction.
|
|
Throughout
January
|
• Maintain a weekly blog; each entry will review either a digital storytelling production or a book on this topic.
• Review literature on creative writing pedagogy with a focus on new media and digital storytelling.
• Collect course information and materials from colleges offering new media-focused creative writing courses.
• Research Pemberley Digital Studios history with transmedia storytelling and their productions.
|
|
February |
• Read literature on transmedia and interactive fiction, with attention to discussions about experimental games, like Depression Quest, which infamously launched gamergate.
• Develop skills using Inform 7, Twine, or whatever engine emerges in the next 18 months.
• Complete one or more MOOCs on transmedia storytelling and interactive fiction.
|
|
March |
• Read literature on interactive documentaries.
• View a wide variety of interactive documentaries and research the engines that run different samples.
• Gather ideas and develop prompts for others to use for writing transmedia, story-rich games/interactive fiction or interactive documentaries.
|
|
April |
• Read literature on storytelling in virtual reality.
• Research topics for original interactive stories.
• Write and develop samples.
|
|
May
June |
• Read literature on storytelling in augmented reality.
• Develop QuickStart guides for software used.
• Continue working on examples
• Compile report based on research on new media and creative writing curricula.
• Read literature on storytelling and the Internet of Things.
• Recruit colleagues to “test” samples.
• Proofread for grammatical errors.
|