digital storytelling

What Do We Call This?

Between 2019 – 2020 The University of South Wales collaborated with a consortium of creative commercial practitioners dubbed Fictioneers in a UKRI funded, Audience of the Future R&D demonstrator project designed to further develop digital storytelling within the UK Creative Industries. Using the popular Wallace and Gromit IP, the consortium drew upon their combined skills in games production, animation, creative marketing and new technology development to create a location-based experience targeting young audiences entitled Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, designed to propel new and playful identities for a traditional narrative media.

Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up is an ambitious and complex production. Through their research and development efforts, Fictioneers sought to develop a viable production alternative to branching tree, digital story-telling structures which risk combinatorial explosion. Instead, the application delivers a rich tapestry of serialised, short media elements. Linked by a central, enhanced mobile application, the multi-platform media include YouTube videos and comics, as well as augmented reality game-play challenges. The application aims to engage new audiences and provide innovative ways for long term fans to interact with media favourites. Mimicking a variety of social newsfeed items these media elements are variable, chunked and optional to view. They are also pre-determined and closely networked via the central newsfeed. The story-flow is complex nevertheless, incorporating enhanced augmented reality story-telling, multi-platform media and mobile game-play.

The hybridity of this experience posed new challenges regarding the most definitive way to describe the experience on offer, as well as the most helpful frameworks to evaluate it. With few alternative terms on hand to describe this genre, the term experience was often used to describe the sort of hybrid encounter made possible via this complex network of media influences, but experience is still an open-ended concept that can be hard to pin-point. Alternative terms like digital story-telling may also be useful place-holders to help delineate interactive and narrativised experiences from traditional media encounters, nevertheless such terminology is still only useful to an extent. Narrative frameworks such as characterisation, pace and tone are relevant to projects like Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, but they don’t capture all the elements that audiences encounter in real time. Describing the experience as a game can be equally problematic, since it can set up expectations of a very different type of challenge-driven, dramatic experience than this application delivers.

In this paper I explore what additional insights can be gained by also considering the interplay of technology and creativity within the research and development process. Technology is a defining feature of this digital storytelling experience. Augmented reality technologies, for example, offer dynamic, enhanced tracking and visualisation opportunities, whilst also demanding strict file-size constraints, comprehensive audience testing and extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. By evaluating the creative and technical processes shaping the development of this hybrid media identity, I explore the ways in which any effective definition of this new type of distributed genre is likely to be as much about co-ordination, as new experience.

The complexities of archiving digital content, particularly those story forms reliant on multiple platforms, highlights technical, cultural and curatorial issues that remain difficult to reconcile coherently. Seeking to frame the issues within this special Debates section, this essay outlines issues facing the field of digital storytelling; examining narrative form, instantiation and subsequent archival.

Postdigital Storytelling offers a groundbreaking re-evaluation of one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of creativity today: digital storytelling. Central to this reassessment is the emergence of metamodernism as our dominant cultural condition.

This volume argues that metamodernism has brought with it a new kind of creative modality in which the divide between the digital and non-digital is no longer binary and oppositional. Jordan explores the emerging poetics of this inherently transmedial and hybridic postdigital condition through a detailed analysis of hypertextual, locative mobile and collaborative storytelling. With a focus on twenty-first century storytelling, including print-based and nondigital art forms, the book ultimately widens our understanding of the modes and forms of metamodernist creativity.

Postdigital Storytelling is of value to anyone engaged in creative writing within the arts and humanities. This includes scholars, students and practitioners of both physical and digital texts as well as those engaged in interdisciplinary practice-based research in which storytelling remains a primary approach.

(Source: Routledge catalog copy)

Mind the gap between digital journalism and eletronic literature. In the digital age, how to write about the search for love? Using fiction or non fiction? The question is that a new epistolary literature is being written in cell phones, e-mails, apps and dating sites. How different is it in comparison with the old love letters people used to write to their soulmates? In a mix of netnography, journalism and digital storytelling, me and other 25 brazilian researchers infiltrated ourselves into this universe for the last five years. The idea was not to publish a tradicional print work for newspapers or a linear story. We created avatars, made hiperlinked articles describing each site or app we visited and also wrote field journals about our experience. It is an experience of multimedia storytelling whose original question, the search of a soulmate using the internet to extend our chances in the virtual world, work as a metaphor for the journalism chances to find unprecedented paths exploring new narrative strategies in digital media. It also highlingts a change in the reader's position, who doesn't want to wait anymore to watch the development of the stories by the authors and want to find his own path, make new relationships or join new social groups. And, with this, construct new stories.

The Ambient Literature project explores situated digital storytelling as it responds to the presence of a reader. Within an Ambient Literary work, urban space is reconfigured as a paratextual site to be ‘read’ just as we read the form of a book; becoming the site for story.

The foundation of the study are three commissioned works, each exploring an approach to the design and delivery of a digitally-mediated experience of urban space. These works, successively released in 2017 and 2018, comprise a research- by-practice approach to developing forms for digital writing – ‘It Must Have Been Dark by Then’, ‘The Cartographer’s Confession’ and ‘Breathe’ - each employ different approaches to the positioning role of the reader; the manner in which their presence is implicated in the construction of story; and the specific qualities of that presence within (and around) the works.

Drawing on an emerging form and grammar for digital writing in uncontrolled urban space, this paper argues that an Ambient Literature work - and potentially all situated storytelling by extension - induces a change in the nature of place for each reader; invoking an imperceptible hypertrophy of story within an apparently unchanged physical environment. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s conjecture that maps represent a temporal dimension in addition to their spatial representation alongside an examination of the legibility of urban space, the paper will explore how readers are implicated within an Ambient Literature canon, their role shifting toward a performative register, and accordingly shaping conventions for writing and reading in this form of practice.

The current Indian government’s dream of a ‘Digital India’ does not include digital culture or the digital humanities. The country now has its digital library of digitised analog works (mainly printed texts) but it does not have a significant electronic literature. It does have a growing videogames industry that is becoming keener on sophisticated means of non-linear storytelling and also deeper investment in digital storytelling through platforms such as wevideo etc. mainly for the purposes of raising social awareness. Recent videogames such as the indie RPG, Unrest as well as adaptations of Bollywood films such as Ghajini attempt non-linear storytelling. Digital stories, such as ‘We are Angry’, a story about the recent brutalities against women in India, are becoming a popular medium of spreading awareness.

Together with this, the popularity of using the web as a medium for publishing poetry is on the rise. Some of this poetry, often not acceptable to print journals, tends to go viral on the web and on social media. Indeed, songs such as ‘Kolaveri di’ (sung in Tanglish, a mix of Tamil and English) and ‘Hok Kolorob’ became overnight hits on Youtube and other social media sites. While the former gained cult status in the country, the latter inspired a political movement against a corrupt education system. Another example is the digital recording and dissemination of the late-poet Vidrohi who lived by himself in a university campus in Delhi and composed poems in the oral tradition.

Non-linear traditions of storytelling and poetry have existed in India since ancient times and in a variety of forms ranging from the stories in the Katha traditions to the Urdu dastangoi plays. Strangely, though, despite its recent digital commitment, the government has not considered digital counterparts of such nonlinear literature worthy of its attention. Electronic literature, as it is understood in Europe and the U.S.A, does not have a presence in Indian literary and cultural traditions yet. The few Digital Humanities programmes that have developed in the country might be engaging with electronic literature in their curriculum. If so, the beginnings of e-lit are already evident in older cultural traditions and the process of remediation is certainly This article aims to explore the (non)beginnings of electronic literature in India and to think through larger implications of electronic literature in the digital culture and Humanities teaching at large.