virtual space

The pandemic has enhanced awareness and reliance on digital platforms. Brick and mortar museums and libraries that are having difficulties pivoting to such platforms are presently unable to share works with the public for safety reasons. Consequently, special attention is being paid to platforms that produce, protect, and promote electronic literature, such as Electronic Literature Organization’s Repository. Housing 30 collections of 2500 digital-born works, the site must be maintained, the works thoroughly and accurately described, and digital art preserved and shared with scholars, artists, and the public. In light of the pandemic, it was realized that the Repository could fill more roles than storing digital artwork and the accompanying information. It had the untapped potential of becoming a space where digital art could be studied, experienced, preserved, and shared from anywhere. In short, it would become the next generation museum, library, and preservation site for born digital literature collected by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), the site now known as The NEXT. This panel showcases the newly designed Repository implemented by 39 students at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). 

In 2021, ELO in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) partnered with students at WSUV to implement this new vision for The NEXT. The new site makes digital artwork easily accessible to the public from a single digital space, enhanced by SEO and ADA compliance. From here, visitors have the ability to download permitted works and view any associated media, including images, videos, visualizations, and recorded interviews with the donor. They have also developed a search function for easily finding records. To further increase accessibility, students conducted usability testing on pages within the site, which includes an About page, Donations page, documentation regarding metadata schema, and more. With these components, The NEXT has transformed from an informational space into a multimedial site that is participatory, interactive, and experiential.

The architecture of the site is built to be scalable, allowing it to grow as new donations are offered to ELO. The NEXT sets a precedent for future museums and databases to follow. Blending information with human interaction stimulates The NEXT’s use as a virtual interactive museum and library, while increasing awareness of artists and their artwork. The site will continue to be maintained by ELL for ELO, and sustained by donations to ELO and ELL. Scholars volunteering their time and labor will further refine the metadata.

The NEXT will be presented at the conference by five of the 39 students involved in the implementation stage of the project. Kathleen Zoller will act as moderator, discussing the aim of the project and the components that made it come together; Katya Farinsky will share her process regarding copyediting; Betsy Hanrahan and Sarah West will demonstrate the site’s architecture and layout; Mallory Hobson will share design decisions made for The NEXT; Preston Reed will discuss the filming and interview process.

Abstract Designing interactive narrative for children requires awareness of the cognitive abilities of young readers. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from two example interactive narrative systems, Baby Duck Takes a Bath and A Little Quiz for the Little Hare. Baby Duck is a multi-sequential narrative where the user can explore how a duckling can become dirty or clean by interacting with its habitat. The agency of the characters (including a mother duck and duck friends) result from manipulating elements within the small story world. The narrative changes according to the user's interactions, allowing for change in perspective, agency and attitude in real-time. The Little Quiz system aims to teach young children the concepts of measurement and comparison through the conversation between two characters. It explores the design space of enhancing interactive narrative using a commonsense knowledge database to understand players' intention and generate relevant narration. Both works target children from 1st to 3rd grade in the early stage of learning story construction. Our approach to designing children’s interactive narrative is based on considering how children can manipulate interactive content. The basic principles of this approach are to provide:

1) a small interactive world that involves simple spatial relationships and story elements. A small story world eases the cognitive load of navigating a virtual space. Instead of building multiple story spaces to explore, we propose that having one or few spaces populated with interactive elements (such as actors and objects) supports children's cognitive understanding and learning through real-time interaction, rather than focusing on memory and spatial skills;

2) Contextual interactive content allows players to communicate by means of short questions and answers. To engage children in the interrogative process, our systems prompt content for children to interact with using simple dialogue. The systems raise contextappropriate questions and show supportive information to both arouse children's interests and further assist them in thinking logically to achieve a task.

3) Simple flexible inputs allow freedom of exploration on the content level. Real-time reactions to a wide array of inputs create a supportive environment for exploration. For example, multisequential opportunities for interaction and suggesting a variety of commands encourage exploration by the user. In our systems, even when the input is out of the boundary of author’s story model, we use commonsense computing or graceful error handling to fill the gap between the authors’ story model and players’ model. Our research aims to make interactive narrative more accessible to young children by supporting learning, creativity and logical development. We provide a brief review of children's cognitive psychology research supporting the proposed design principles. Our principles demonstrate how a children's interactive narrative can allow for creative play and avoid frustration. Furthermore, our interaction design strategy is aimed to reduce memory load and focus on story understanding rather than puzzle solving. By using simple and encouraging discourse through short interactive prompts, electronic fiction can be used to craft delightful and interesting literature for children.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)

In John Muir's first published article, "Yosemite's Glacier," the eminent nature writer compares Yosemite Valley to a worn book, suggesting that to understand the physical geography of the valley a visitor must employ a reading practice similar to the study of literature. Over the century since, nature writers and ecocritics have continued to call for a more critical engagement with our natural world through literature and other media. However, as 21st century readers who are perhaps more likely to experience Yosemite Valley via Google Earth than in Muir's prose--much less as a physical space--we must begin to ask how or in what ways can we continue to "read" natural spaces as that are increasingly mediated through digital tools such as Google Earth and Second Life. To address this question I argue that we must learn to apply the same ecocritical reading practices that give subjectivity to the natural world to the digitally mediated geographies that increasingly define the spaces we inhabit.

To demonstrate these reading practices, I take as a model Muir's writings and contend that his meticulous description of distance, height, and geological features forms a prototypical "virtual space" for his reader to inhabit as he walks them through the natural spaces of Yosemite Valley. This process of virtualization has evolved over time and been adopted by other media such as photography and film. Yosemite Valley's most current form of virtualization is that of Google Earth where a viewer can not only view the valley rendered in three dimensions, but also "fly through" it as if in an airplane. Google Earth also hypermediates Yosemite by allowing visitors to view and upload images and videos of the valley. I will argue that the digital mediation of natural spaces such as Yosemite give 21st century readers a case study of sorts in how to continue reading natural spaces in a digital world.

While Muir helps us understand the need to read critically the physical world in all its mediations, the question remains if the same reading practices can be applied to "virtual geographies" that do not attempt to remediate the natural world. In using the term "virtual geographies" I am drawing on and extending McKenzie Wark's 1994 usage and applying the term to the earth, sea, sky, walls and objects that surround us in digital 3D environments. I contend and will demonstrate in my presentation that virtual geographies offer rich sites of reading in their own right through my reading of "Immersiva" and "Two Fish," both of which are sims in Second Life.

Implicit in the question "where is electronic literature?" is the importance of spaces of reading. Through first extending the critical reading practices of ecocritics to digitized natural spaces and then applying those reading practices of the virtual geographies of Second Life, I hope to foreground the ways in which spaces have been, and can continue to be, rich texts in and of themselves.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)