Book (Ph.D. dissertation)

The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing insofar as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces, both points of departure and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. "Writing Coastlines" navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. "Writing Coastlines" will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory. (Source: Author's Abstract)

In Hipermedismo, narrativa para la virtualidad (Hypermediadism, a Narrative for Virtuality), the contend is divided into three chapters, that cover from the historical process that permits the existence of new recourses applied to narrative to keys of this literary genre that does not enjoy, not even a universal name. The first part, La gestación de un género narrativo, (the Gestation of a Narrative Genre), summarizes how the use of technology has had an impact on the way of writing and publishing. The second part, Del papel a la pantalla. Hipermedismo literario (From Paper to Screen. Literary Hypermediadism), tries to organize the narrative keys that demands the storage medium: the conciseness that demands the space the screen offers; the communion of arts not only textual, a conviviality in which each one has a different narrative level and explores the possibilities in which literature manages without the text; the use of the hypertext, that allows folds contents; the ludic feature and the interaction of the reader, it challenges the convention of the lineal discourse imposed from the antiquity. In the third chapter, Las condiciones del hipermedio (The Conditions of Hypermedia), that presents a vision of creators and challenges that present the works exposed to readers.

“Between Floors: The Ups and Downs of Mediated Narrative” and the accompanying creative remediation project, “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” meld theory and practice of print with electronic literature and installation art. I argue that as the medium changes, the narrative is transformed. The narrative can be reconstructed and pieced together as the reader or viewer becomes increasingly involved, even embodied within the work. This embodiment is what Nathaniel Stern calls “Moving and thinking and feeling” (1) and can result in a more direct emotional experience. The form, structure, and medium (sjužet) rely on authorial intention, yet as a narrative becomes more interactive and experiential the feedback loop shifts, placing meaning, message, and construction of narrative (fabula) between media and reader/viewer. This necessarily complicates the notion of authorship, yet within an embodied space, such as the installations included in this analysis, there is a potential for greater emotional understanding between author/artist and reader/viewer. In the print story “Between Floors: Love and Other Blood Related Diseases,” the protagonist, June, visits her father in a hospital after a tragedy and ends up spending the rest of her life there. The metaphor of an elevator throughout the print, electronic, and installation versions furthers the trapped, claustrophobic feeling of the narrative as well as the ups and downs of relationships and grief. Pieces of the narrative remain recognizable through the electronic literature and installation, yet as the reader/viewer is increasingly immersed in the narrative, it becomes his or her own—a more subjective and overwhelming emotional experience. The elevator metaphor extends through the analysis—an emblem of traditional linear narratives and the narrative arc and technological immersion. The analysis explores theories of language, medium, authorship, nonlinearity, interactivity, and embodiment through existing narrative, new media, and installation theorists such as Peter Brooks, Marshall McLuhan, and Nathaniel Stern. This dissertation and to an extent, experiment, uses theory and practice to illuminate narrative using a recombination of existing theory and an original remediation in three distinct forms, to further the understanding of the nature of narratives, media, authors, and readers, while blurring boundaries between disciplines.

This dissertation aims at positioning adventure games in game studies, by describing their formal aspects and how they have integrated game design with stories. The adventure game genre includes text adventures (also known as interactive fiction), graphical text adventures, and graphic adventures, also referred to as point-and-click adventure games. Adventure games have been the first videogames to evidence the difficulty of reconciling games and stories, an already controversial topic in game studies. An adventure game is a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation becomes a performance space for the player. The simulation establishes how the player can interact with the world of the game. The simulated world integrates a series of concatenated puzzles, which structure the performance of the player. Solving the puzzles thus means advancing in the story of the game. The integration of the story with the simulation is done through the performance of the player. The game design establishes a specific set of actions necessary to complete both the game and the story, and this set of actions constitutes a behavior that must be restored through performance. The player can also explore the world and its workings, which is necessary to solve the puzzles. By solving the puzzles, the player restores this pre-set behavior. The simulation in adventure games may not be evident because of a historical shift in the level of abstraction, which determines how the world is implemented in the game mechanics. Adventure games have increasingly curbed the agency of the player in the world, in order to facilitate completing the story of the game. This move to a less fine-grained interaction has affected different aspects of game design, from reducing the number of possible actions to limiting the interactivity of non-player characters. The dissertation discusses how adventure games have integrated story with the performance in the simulated world of the game. This integration is further evidenced by how they apply to the four basic elements that bridge story and game design: space, player character, non-player character and time. The qualities of these elements help us understand how the player performs in the simulation, and how that performance is designed. Analyzing the properties of the simulation in adventure games helps draw comparisons with other videogame genres. The rich history of adventure games can inform the game design of other videogames, particularly in relation to the creation of fictional worlds, strategies to script the interactor, and design of non-player characters. Department: Literature, Communication, and Culture

"Interactive fiction" has been used to describe many of today's multimedia products. In reality, there is not a universal understanding of what interactive fiction is or what it should entail. The meaning of "interactive" is often interpreted in different ways. Many stories are considered to be interactive because they are placed on the computer. Meanwhile, such stories may lack most of the essential qualities for good literature. Interaction fiction should be upheld to the same standards as traditional texts. Following this belief, this research covers the underlying theories of interactive fiction, examples of misleading "interactive fiction" studies, and guidelines for design pulled from the fields of writing, children's literature and instructional technology. I have used these guidelines to develop a prototype of interactive fiction, which was be tested and revised in several cycles. First, I revised the prototype based upon reviews by several groups of experts from the areas of instructional technology and childhood education. The prototype was then pilot-tested by two participants from the target market. Based upon the pilot-test results, I revised the prototype. Finally, several participants read the prototype. In this final stage, I observed the participants and conducted interviews with open-ended questions. Using the prototype that was developed according to proposed standards, I was able to gain insight into the target market's perception of interaction fiction. All details of the design and development of the prototype are included in effort to provide guidelines for building future interactive fiction. Additionally, several themes emerged when participants from the target market were observed and interviewed. Among the most prominent were the themes of storybook characters and identifying with those characters. Children in this study were able to identity themselves as the protagonist, making the main character's decisions throughout the story. Further, participants added their own elaborations of the story. In the end, the evidence of this research showed that participants were able to go beyond reading the story. The submersion into to story can be rooted in several existing literacy theories, which are discussed. Lastly, this research provides suggestions for future research, development and implementation of interactive fiction.

This critical introduction to Calypsis: A Hypertext Fiction argues that university creative writing programs should make full use of the institutional space, time, and resources available to them by introducing students to different types of writing projects and engage students in critical discussions about creative production, activities that they are unlikely to find outside the university's walls. These activities includes experimenting with digital tools, creating multimedia compositions, and producing collaborative work, as well as situating creative writing as an embodied act within specific historical, political, and material conditions. Herein I forward my theory of incremental storytelling, which is informed by both creative writing pedagogy and gaming theory, as one strategy for achieving these goals. Using this methodology, students learn the craft of fiction writing in smaller, discrete bits that, in aggregate, create something much greater than their constituent parts. This progressive approach puts students in immediate contact with each others' writing throughout the entire creative process and opens space for critical discussions about the fictional characters and the shared world they create. I go on to describe a course I designed using incremental storytelling entitled "Gaming, World Building, and Narrative," where students used a wiki and a Google map to collaboratively create a sprawling post-apocalyptic world that they then explored via a tabletop role-playing game. Students responded enthusiastically to the course, as shown in their responses to a survey asking them to reflect on this experimental method. I then connect the theory of incremental storytelling and narratives derived from role-playing games to my creative dissertation, Calypsis: A Hypertext Fiction, and how it might serve as inspiration for others to experiment with creating a collaboratively built world.

Throughout the ages, literature has been a cultural element related to textuality and its technological devices in a slowly, but deep, way. All the devices turned media (voice, papyr, bulky bindings, paperbacks, electronic books or tablets) changed not only how one reads but mainly one's relationship with knowledge and the world.

(Source: Short and free translation from the original abstract)

My dissertation "The Rematerialization of Poetry: Space, Time and the Body from the Bookbound to the Digital" is a deep-reaching account of what digital poetry is, what it does; it presents the reader with a historically and theoretically-based model for reading digital poetry within a limited scope of twentieth and twenty-first century science, media theory, and American/Canadian poetry. In this much-needed account of digital poetry, I first draw from media theorists ranging from Vannevar Bush to George Landow and Mark Poster as well as contemporary critics of electronic literature (such as N. Katherine Hayles, Marjorie Perloff, and Jerome McGann) in order to broadly contextualize the genesis of digital poetry and its relationship to the larger field of electronic literature. I then explore, in a section titled "My Digital Dickinson," the methodological possibilities and limits of using our understanding of the digital to inform our readings of bookbound poetry and vice-versa. In Chapter 2, I then discuss Ezra Pound's Vorticism and William Carlos Williams's variable foot; interwoven between these two sections are three paratactic interludes—close readings of what bookbound and digital texts whose underlying spatial structure is both an analog to and a distinct departure from what Pound and Williams attempted to embody in their bookbound texts. My intention is to create a formal and thematic conversation, as both Pound and Williams do in their own work, between bookbound and digital works whose impetus arises from and departs from the same dedication to translating scientific and mathematical principles of space into the poetic realm. Despite what can often appear as an unbridgeable gap between digital and bookbound poetry, surely we can now say, looking at Williams through our present moment of electronic literature, that his work stands as a bookbound example of what we now recognize as an emergent, flexible poetics? The third chapter is dedicated solely to providing the framework for much-needed close-readings of digital poetry; here I focus on one of the most influential digital poets, John Cayley. In the final chapter, I turn explicitly to the pressing question of what a poem is, of how the computer challenges our conceptions of how to read and write poetry, by considering the relationship between human and machine in computer-generated, bookbound poetry by Erin Mouré and computer-mediated poetry by Kenneth Goldsmith. Source: Author's Abstract