data narrative

Private reading practices and public spaces collide at the mobile browser, and this interactive installation imagines a browser that amplifies the intimate co-presence of its readers. In an ambient immersive environment, it asks if an interface could become more expressive of our influence on each other, and it embodies how language slips from one screen to another in an always shifting hybrid of reading-writing. Users join a public reading area equipped with a row of iPads, each opened to an experimental web browser. The darkened gallery combines the interstitial nature of the public waiting room with the intimacy of a bedroom, and the illumination from each screen invites digital eavesdropping and attention to fellow users. Upon browsing, each reader witnesses other readers' touch behaviors layered in colorful, ephemeral trails on their own screen as they browse. Fragments of text tapped by their neighbors float over their own reading choices, interceding in their chosen narratives, both as alteration of the reading experience and also as reminder that their reading behaviors are written elsewhere. In addition to the in-app display, the program collects these text fragments from all readers into an accumulating archive and conceptual poem, written collaboratively and programmatically. This shared composition is made publicly available on site, as the performance of digital reading becomes an act of writing in an era when every action becomes data. Language has always been about that spark gap of transmission from one mind to another. This work explores how digital reading negotiates the gap between readers as we share anonymous physical proximity but diffuse digital intimacy, plumbing the tensions alive in the intersections of reading–writing, physical–digital, self–other. The work directly engages ELO conference themes including "mobile technologies' effect on writing and reading habits" as well as considerations of screens and presence. The paper draws on interdisciplinary scholarship from media studies and classics, cognitive science and design research, to explore cultural and historical contexts for digital reading practices that ground the considerations of the installation. It argues that digital reading environments contribute to a more fragmented experience of subjectivity, one that reflects an existing social ecology which technology should be used to emphasize.

Conference presentation proposal for ELO 2014 “Hold the Light”

Unprecedented access to real-time social data is changing the way we tell stories about ourselves. Social data is being utilised within a wide variety of electronic literature and media art from Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Room to the recent explosion in Twitter bots which remix digital text. These practices have been designated under the rubric “environmentally interactive” digital writing (Wardrip-Fruin 2010, p. 41). Such writing often takes the form of a data stream (Manovich 2012), representing content as a chronological flow of units of information, with the newest information being most salient.

In this presentation, we propose to examine an opposing tendency which narrativizes data rather than representing it as a stream. Such work mounts a challenge to the claim by Manovich (2000) that narrative is being displaced as a symbolic form in new media objects. Examples range from the 2013 generative novel-writing competition NaNoGenMo, which featured a number of long-form works produced via data remixing, to older projects such as the Impermanence Agent by Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al. We will share excerpts from our own work which has narrativized social data, including Enquire Within Upon Everybody, a public art project presented at the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2013; and the art installation Everything Is Going To Be OK :).

The split between data stream and narrative reinscribes the famous formalist distinction between raw story elements or fabula, and plot or syuzhet (Shklovsky 1965). Works representing data as a stream typically present a time-ordered fabula; they are closely aligned with the conceptual poetry tradition, which emphasises verbatim transcription. By contrast, narrativized works freely reorder data to suit the purposes of plot construction and often interpolate fictive text. The two types of work also sharply diverge in how they are consumed. The former tend to invite audiences to browse, skim or adopt a distant reading posture (Moretti 2013); some purely conceptual works are not even intended to be read at all (Goldsmith 2011). The latter often invite readers to engage closely and thoroughly.

We will also draw attention to two other formal qualities of data-driven storytelling: polyphony, the deployment of multiple characters’ perspectives alongside that of the author (Bakhtin 1984), and heteroglossia, the use of multiple patterns of speech and discourse to express authorial intentions (Bakhtin 1981). Originally identified in the context of the 19th century novel, these emerge in far more radical forms in data-driven digital works, which often mediate the voices of living human subjects. We will show how polyphony and heteroglossia are enabling a unique interplay between authorial voice and the voices of real-life characters.

We contend that long-form, data-driven narrative holds exciting promise and merits further exploration. It allows readers to engage with data not in a distant or discontinuous way, but to experience it as an immersive story. It also enables authors to offer novel insights into the interrelationships between data; to explicitly critique dominant discourses and not merely recontextualise them; and to construct metanarratives which help us make sense of the stories around us.

(Source: Author's introduction)