story app

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.

Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).

(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)

The presentation will explore narrative, intertextual and ideological aspects of The Numberlys iPad/iPhone app (http://www.numberlys.com/). The app, produced by Moonbot Studios and released in 2012, received an American Annie award for excellence in the field of animation in 2013.
The Numberlys is a fanciful tale about the origin of the alphabet. In a world where ways of organization and communication are based on numbers and nobody has a name, only a number, five friends decide to build the alphabet by transforming numbers into letters. By inventing the alphabet the five protagonists let the inhabitants acquire a personal name. Thus the app raises existential questions concerning the construction of identity and our needs for recognition.
The story is set in a futuristic cityscape inspired by the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis. Other intertextual references include ABC books, German expressionism, popular early fantasy epics like King Kong, Flash Gordon and Superman, the Macintosh tv-commercial 1984 and more. Thus The Numberlys seems to address both children and adults.
By referring to the sci-fi universe of Metropolis, the depiction of an urban dystopia, The Numberlys may be understood as a critical commentary of a contemporary metanarrative: technology as a manifestation and a result of progress. Consequently traditional notions of history and nature are questioned in an unusual way.
The tale is worked out as a hybrid of a sequential film and an interactive game. Constructing a media rich mixture of linear storytelling and nonlinear, user driven components, the app challenges conceptions of narration, game activity and reader response.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)