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Alan Bigelow tells in this interview how he started publishing online works of digital poetry around the year 1999 and where his inspirations for his work come from. Furthermore he explains why he chose to change from working with Flash to working with HTML5 and in which way this decision subsequently changed his way of writing. Then he considers the transition from printed books to digital literature from the point of view of the reader also in regards of the aesthetics of digital born literature. In the end he gives his opinion about the status of electronic literature in the academic field.

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)

With the rise of smartphones and tablet pcs, children’s book apps have emerged as a new type of children’s media. While some of them are based on popular children’s books such as Mo Willems’ Pigeon books or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, others were specifically designed as apps. This paper focuses on examining book apps under the aspects of implied user strategies and narrative structure. Using a narratological framework that also takes into account the unique characteristics of the medium, a terminology for the analysis of book apps will be sketched out. Furthermore, an exemplary analysis of iOS book apps for pre- and grade school children comes to the conclusion that, far from offering the child users room for individual creativity, a large number of apps rather train their users in following prescribed paths of reading.

(Contains references to more creative works than currently registered:

Animal Snapp Farm by Axel Scheffler. Version 1.0.1. # 2012. Nosy Crow Ltd.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Run this App by Mo Willems. Version: 1.0 Seller: Disney Publishing Worldwide Applica- tions # 2011. Disney Enterprises Inc.
Flip Flap Farm by Axel Scheffler. Version 1.0.1 # 2013. Nosy Crow Ltd.
Lil’ Red. Concept by Bart Bloemen & Brian Main, tech: Tom Skidmore, audio: Lukas Hasitschka, grafix: Brian Main www.lilredapp.com Version: 1.03 # Brian Main.
Magic Story Factory by Kathy Rypp, illustrations: Gretchen Wheeler. Version: 1.0 Seller: Christian Larsen # 2011.
The Gift: An interactive storybook. Written by Jos Carlyle, illustrated by Dan Mynard. Version: 1.5. Seller: Persian Cat Press Ltd # 2012. Persian Cat Press.
The Land of Me: Story Time. Version: 0.0.4 Developer: Made in Me Ltd. # Made in Me.
The Original Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Version: 1.0 Seller: Pearson PLC # 2011 by Penguin Group (USA).
Your Adventure by Rianne van Duin (RumDeeDum). Version: 1.1 # ImproVive.)

Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986; Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle's dramatic theory, but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency. This theory both provides design guidance for interactive dramatic experiences that attempt to maximize player agency (answering the question "What should I build?") and technical direction for the AI work necessary to build the system (answering the question "How should I build it?"). In addition to clarifying notions of interactive drama, the model developed in this essay also provides a general framework for analyzing player agency in any interactive experience (e.g., interactive games).

This neo-Aristotelian theory integrates Murray's (1998) proposed aesthetic categories for interactive stories and Aristotle's structural categories for drama. The theory borrows from Laurel's treatment of Aristotle in an interactive context (Laurel 1986, 1991) but extends it by situating Murray's category of agency within the model; the new model provides specific design guidelines for maximizing user agency. First, I present the definition of interactive drama motivating this theory and situate this definition with respect to other notions of interactive story. Next, I present Murray's three categories of immersion, agency, and transformation. Then, I present a model of Aristotle's categories relating them in terms of formal and material causation. Within this model, agency will be situated as two new causal chains inserted at the level of character. Finally, I use the resulting model to clarify conceptual and technical issues involved in building interactive dramatic worlds, and briefly describe a current project informed by this model.

(Source: Author's abstract on ebr)

Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.

How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.

Stretchtext reacts against the perceived incoherence of hypertext narrative, promising stability and context -- free and knowing navigation -- as a defense against the perceived anarchy of exploratory and constructive hypertexts. Rich stretchtext formalisms are now readily supportable through javascript libraries and AJAXian services, but the narratological restrictions that conventional stretchtext imposes on hypertext narrative have not been fully appreciated. This paper describes those limitations and introduces an implemented generalization of stretchtext that matches the expressive and formal capabilities of classical hypertext systems while appearing to be a conventional stretchtext and while running within the confines of a Web browser.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

Hypertext (the non-sequential linking of text(s) and images) was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in its prehistory as an associational, archival storage system suitable for classifying and sorting vast quantities of information. But where library databases, technical manuals and other knowledge-based hypertexts still fulfill this function, literary hypertext overturns this proposed usage, celebrating both information overload and forgetfulness as the desired end of a reading. Promoting disassociation and an awareness of the spatio-temporal dimensions of its environment, hypertext fiction uses the aesthetics of its three-dimensional interface and structure to frustrate memory and to engender a sensory and emotional response in the reader. Focusing on M.D. Coverley's multimedia hypertext Califia, I will investigate how the aesthetics of the hypertext form become an engine of forgetfulness that drives her text through its explorations of lost memories, including the ravages of Alzheimer's, unofficial histories, secrets, missing pieces and the quest for hidden treasure.

An archive is born of forgetfulness (Derrida 11) and Coverley's feminist hypertext is an archival system that embraces contradictions, defining emotional and sensory information as the most important 'knowledge' to be stored. Since hypertext works with association, it is a mnemonic form, but, as an inclusive archival space, it also allows just such a proliferation of contradictions. And being rooted in short term memory as it is, hypertext is therefore by extension also rooted in memory loss. Without a hierarchy, a reader must decide what is important in a text and, working with an associational structure, she is bound to forget details. However, in literary hypertext the real information is encoded, not in the text as such, but in its structure. Dispersing information into the three-dimensional plot architecture, hypertext plays with memory loss as an asset (not a bug) by using a reader's memory against herself, by making the recall of specifics in a text difficult. Through a refusal of traditional plot devices, Coverley's fiction privileges the immersive, sensual experience of reading. Plot still exists, but because it is abstract and spatial--being the very structure and interface of the work--it is difficult to recreate in the mind except as an emotional and sensory response.

Coverley takes literary hypertext's innate associational abilities and incorporates the side effects of information overload into the aesthetics of her fiction, functioning both as plot elements and as the structure of her text. Other authors have used forgetfulness and memory as an aspect of their hypertext works (and I will use Michael Joyce's _Twilight, A Symphony_ as a counterpoint in passing), but never before has the cognitive process of memory loss been transformed into such a joyous sense of exploration as in Califia. This hypertext privileges forgetting and the rediscovery of what has been forgotten, but does not make disconnection or avoidance possible, returning readers to sites of lost memories and old traumas until the text's parameters have been mapped and its treasures recovered.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

During readings of hyperfiction studies I have noticed a peculiar tendency in relation to the study of literature. Most of them focus exclusively on form: complex web-textuality, multilinearity and architecture as well as navigation, inderterminancy and the role of the reader and author. One has to ask: Why do very few of these studies of hyperfiction deal with the content, i.e. the story, the plot? But rather employ these aspects only in relation to form?