Not yet reviewed

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint. 

c ya laterrr  garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. 

This poster presentation discusses a forthcoming critical making project (part of The Digital Review's special issue on "Critical Making, Critical Design") at the intersections of electronic literature and asynchronous online pedagogy. In this research-creative project, I explore the role of “teacher” as creative maker, designer, and crafter of epistemological experiences. Building on the work of artist-scholar-teachers such as Lynda Barry (2014, 2019), Jody Shipka (2011), Kate Hanzalik (2021), and Hanzalik and Virgintino (2019), I investigate what it means to be a digital designer who cultivates aesthetic learning experiences for my students, with all the wonder, uncertainty, and risk this process entails. 

In the poster session lightning talk, I introduce the pedagogical webcomic (described below) and the theory and design practices behind it. I then compare the affordances and constraints for “instructor as maker” between two pedagogical platforms: a designer-controlled platform created via the “infinite canvas” (McCloud, 2009) of a website in HTML/CSS; and D2L Brightspace, the content management system used at my university. Overall, I ask audience members to consider how we can bring our work as makers and scholars of electronic literature to explore new horizons for engaging, experiential course delivery methods via online platforms. 

“Botanicals” is an interactive webcomic that reimagines an online platform for an asynchronous professional writing course informed by e-literary design. By breaking away from the temporal logics of a course content management system, a webcomic designed from scratch instead allows instructors to use the logics of the “infinite canvas” to craft spaces that foster exploration according to a student’s own pace, sequence, and learning goals. Inspired by interactive webcomics such as Emily Carroll’s “Margot’s Room” (2011) and “Grave of the Lizard Queen” (2013), “Botanicals: An Interactive Pedagogical Webcomic” is built from HTML/CSS with embedded hyperlinked illustrations and other media. Designed around the visual metaphors of a greenhouse and a garden path, the comic offers two interwoven “tracks.” One track addresses students “wandering through” the comic in pursuit of a pedagogical experience, and another track addresses scholarly readers and fellow designer-teachers with “framed reflections” on the pedagogical-aesthetic decisions informing the webcomic’s design process. 

This project emerges from my ongoing work as digital scholarship designer and independent comics creator, in an attempt to bring this critical-creative practice into closer conversation with my teaching practices. Recent global shifts to online learning have offered increased opportunities to design media for students in online environments, via a range of teaching modalities. Responding to these exigencies, I strive to create pedagogical webcomics that are beautiful, engaging, and aesthetically pleasing for their own sake, as works (like Barry’s Syllabus [2014] and Making Comics [2019]) at the intersections of “pedagogical delivery tool” and “aesthetic object.” These interactive comics facilitate pedagogical user experiences (Borgman and McArdle, 2019; Borgman and McArdle, 2021) that invite students into inventive exploration, that will help them design their own learning experiences, and that encourage instructor-designers to bring their critical making imaginations to bear upon teaching as a way of creating knowledge together with students through interactive design.

The interdisciplinary Science Data Center for Literature (SDC4Lit) reflects on the demands that net literature and born-digital archival material place on archiving, research and reading. The main goal is to implement appropriate solutions for a sustainable data lifecycle for the archive and for research purposes, which include introductory uses at university and school level. The focus is on the establishment of distributed long-term repositories for net literature and born-digital archival material and the development of a research platform. The repositories will be regularly expanded by the project and its cooperation partners and will form a hub for harvesting various forms of net literature in the future operation of SDC4Lit. The research platform will offer the possibility of computer-assisted work with the archived material. Since such a repository structure, which integrates collecting, archiving, and analysis, can only be accomplished through interdisciplinary collaboration, the project brings together partners with expertise in the subfields of archives, supercomputing, natural language processing, and digital humanities: The German Literature Archive (Deutsches Literaturarchiv) with a focus on archiving and preservation; the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) with a focus on computing; the Institute for Natural Language Processing and the Institute for Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart with a focus on NLP, cultural and literary history and digital humanities. 

An important task of the project is the modeling of net literature and born-digital literature, which will initially be carried out in an example-oriented manner in dealing with an already existing corpus of net literature and exampes from the large born-digital collection at DLA. Underlying research on both technical and poetological challenges of digital, non-digital, and post-digital literature, e.g. on questions of genre or on computational approaches towards net literature and literary blogs as digital and networked objects. 

In addition to digital objects and corresponding metadata, the accruing research data are also stored in a sustainable manner. Research data includes, first, research data generated in the course of the project's work, especially data used by regular services on the platform such as named entity recognition trained with data from the archived material. Secondly, the repository should offer the possibility to store research data generated by users of the research platform in a structured way and to make it available for further research. The connection of archival repository, research platform and research data repository follows standard research data management practices (FAIR principles) and works toward the goal to support a sustainable research data lifecycle for archivists and researchers working with electronic literature (on the web) and born-digital literature archived at the DLA archive and potential future cooperating institutions.