narrative apparitions

Digital children’s literature is a relatively recently established field of research that has been seeking for its theoretical base and defining its position and scope. Its major attention so far has been on the narrative app, a new form of children’s literature displayed on a touchscreen computational device.

The narrative app came into being around 2010, and immediately attracted the attention of the academics. So far, various studies have been conducted to explore its educational potential, but very few have investigated the app for what it is in its own right. To bridge the gap, this study has explored the nature of the narrative app and the essential principles of its narrative strategies.

As the subject of this study concerns a variety of disciplines, this research has been conducted in an extremely interdisciplinary way in order to develop a thorough understanding of the narrative app. In general, it has consulted scholarship in children’s literature (picturebook studies in particular), narratology, computer science, game studies, social semiotics, film studies, media studies, communication studies, electronic literature and game design.

With this interdisciplinary approach, this study has attempted to define the subject of the study, identify some tendencies in its development, and most importantly, develop an original theory of storytelling and a narrative map that may be able to explain the intrinsic methods used in the narrative app storytelling as well as other digital and non-digital storytelling. The findings of this study seem to suggest that the narrative app does not display any essential differences from the codex and other forms of literature in terms of its narrative strategies, but it appears to have great potential to truly innovate storytelling.

It is suggested that this study may provide an effective theoretical scope and methodology for the study of the field of digital children’s literature, which may offer the potential to strengthen this field of research. The theoretical framework constructed by this study may be applicable to some educational approaches to the narrative app, and may also be useful for teaching new literacies.

In December of 2013, I mailed blank journals to thirty poets and asked them to record their dreams for two months and return the journals to me. I asked that they record the dreams themselves rather than their interpretations, relying on language, voice, and syntactical rhythm to emerge as distinctive markers. From the dream journals I compiled the dreams into a spreadsheet database, setting the linear retelling of the dream along the horizontal axis (rows) in chronological order, color-coded by poet. Ciphering the dreams into single cells was the true editorial work of the matrix. Even as poets were creating their own patterns, I was reorganizing dialogue, bisecting idioms, segmenting narrative apparitions. Phrases and snippets of these dreams were now decontextualized into raw form, phrases and words shaken out of their former constellations to become single pure poetic units. After the dream journals had been reorganized into the matrix, they could be used to generate new poetic material.

The purpose of soliciting dreams for this project was in the cognitive dissonance of the language and motif of the dream experience. To record a dream as faithfully as possible is already a blended act: remembering and inventing. The hyperreal poetics of dreaming both undermine and reify the narrative construct of the telling. The filtering of dreams through a collaborative matrix is a social act. Poets have an opportunity to take a solitary – the most profoundly solitary – act and become part of a collective generative functional form. The dreams belong to the poets. The database belongs to the making of poems, to all of us. As soon as the database is finished, it generates poems based on the application of a rule, any rule. For example, to create a title that generates a poem based on the order of its letters (the first S, for example, refers to the numbered row, column S position). By making poems in this way, poets wake into a unified dream. This generative model based on a simple matrix is significant to Poetics as a networked social application of poetic units. If poetry can be said to be made up of poetic units, then those units can make up a larger poetic compilation that is a shared source poem from which other poems can be made. The investment in the project database is therefore in its work as a flexible form that is at once collaborative and generative.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)