network narrative

In this paper, I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.(Source: abstract in ACM Digital Library)

I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.

(Source: abstract)

As everyday network communication practices and habits of media consumption adapt to digital media technologies, creators of narrative fictions must meet the emerging expectations of readers and design digital fictions to invite and integrate opportunities for participation. Yet as additive and emergent participation processes are incorporated into digital fictions, it becomes increasingly important to strike a balance between authorial agency and user-generated content, between the core creative vision of cultural creators and the contributions of casual participants. 

In this article I develop a multi-layered analysis of The Silent History, a digital fiction for iOS that successfully incorporates user-generated content within the fictional narrative without compromising the intelligibility, coherence, or stylistic unity of the core narrative. I employ narrative theory, network analysis, and close reading to investigate the media-specific reciprocity between the expression of story as discourse, the interactive architecture, the user interface of the mobile application, the character network of the story, and the participatory cultural production model. Throughout this analysis I draw attention to how the network topologies of the interactive navigation, the character network, and the participatory production model exhibit, in their interrelationships, a distinct complementarity that supports networked participation. 

The Silent Historypresents the reader with a lengthy narrative, and an expansive network of characters. These characters are at times geographically concentrated and then dispersed, during the course of a series of plot developments. As the narrative develops, the network of nodes connecting the first-person testimonials in the interactive architecture grows into a very dense, decentralized network. This network topology is homologous, in some respects, with the character network. Yet the temporal structure of the narrative is highly sequential and makes it easier to track the multitude of characters. The dense, decentralized network of characters and the chronological sequence of the narrative together establish a framework that permits readers to develop their own minor characters in user contributed “field reports” without introducing complicating events or characters into the core narrative. 

I argue that The Silent Historysuccessfully achieves a balance between a compelling, engaging, and deliberate core narrative on the one hand, with meaningful participation by a readership anchored to mobile devices on the other. The variety of network topologies that I describe in this article demonstrate how distinct aspects of the digital fiction mutually support one another to simultaneously realize objectives of immersion and interactivity and to provide readers with both the narrative coherence of a “linear novel” and the additive, participatory experience of emergent texts. Within this strategic interplay of topologies lie broader insights into models of participatory cultural production appropriate for an increasingly networked audience. As such, The Silent History is representative of a still emerging genre of digital fiction that is calibrated to the socially mediated interactions characteristic of contemporary participatory culture. 

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)