We were very excited to use WALLPAPER by Judi Alston and Andy Campbell as part of our reader-response research. In this particular study, we are interested in exploring immersion in digital fiction and also the relationship between readers and the fictional world (including the characters). We invited readers from three established reading groups in Sheffield and one pop-up created specifically for the installation to talk about their experiences of WALLPAPER at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield last November. The recordings are being transcribed, ready for Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Jen Smith to analyse them.  We will be presenting the WALLPAPER research at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2016 in Victoria, British Columbia in June.

WALLPAPER is a work by Dreaming Methods at One to One Development Trust funded by the Arts Council England and Sheffield Hallam University’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), with support from Bank Street Arts in Sheffield and Bangor University.

The Reading Digital Fiction project work resumes this month with a series of reader response workshops where we will focus on the WALLPAPER installation currently on show at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield.

WALLPAPER by One-to-One Development Trust’s Dreaming Methods has been developed with funding from Sheffield Hallam University and Arts Council England. It is an ambitious and immersive work of digital fiction that interweaves 19^th and 20^th century history with futuristic technology, satirising social media and advertising. You can watch a trailer of the work below.

PI, Dr Alice Bell, talks in the following video about how we will use WALLPAPER in our research.

There are still places on our Pop-Up Book Club on the 25th November. If you’d like to discuss being involved in our future reading group sessions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Artists Andy Campbel and Judi Alston will talk about the development of WALLPAPER during their talk on 19th November (5.30pm) at Bank Street Arts.

We are very proud to announce the premier of WALLPAPER, a site-specific digital fiction installation running as part of Opening Up the Book at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield, UK. The FREE exhibition will run from 13th November to 5th December 2015 with a FREE launch event on Thursday 12th November at 6.30pm. We are also running an artist’s talk and reading groups. To book  your place on any of the FREE events, please visit the booking page.

You can watch the WALLPAPER trailer here and read about the development process on the project blog.

WALLPAPER is produced by One to One Development Trust’s Dreaming Methods with funding from Arts Council England, Sheffield Hallam University and supported by the Reading Digital Fiction project.

After taking a short pause in the project, we’re gearing up for our return on 26th October 2015!

To mark the re-launch, PI Dr Alice Bell and Co-I Prof Astrid Ensslin will be hosting a series of FREE events as part of the Opening Up the Book programme at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield. These include:

• 12 November: WALLPAPER exhibition launch*
• 13 November – 5 December: WALLPAPER exhibition*, a special commission by One-to-One’s Dreaming Methods
• 19 November: WALLPAPER Artist’s Talk*
• 25 November: Pop-Up Book Club (as part of the Reading Digital Fiction project)

Tickets for all events are FREE but booking is required and can be done here.

We are also keen to organise WALLPAPER reading group sessions for established reading groups as part of our reader-response research. If you are part of a reading group and are interested in being involved, please contact Alice Bell via readingdigitalfiction@gmail.com to discuss possibilities.

* These events are funded by Sheffield Hallam University‘s Higher Education Innovation Fund.

PI, Dr Alice Bell, presented our reader response research on the second person narration as part of the Reader Response Special Interest Group panel at the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference at the University of Kent last week. It was a fantastic conference with very strong papers throughout, not least in the SIG. We received really positive and helpful feedback on our study. Check out #readerSIG on Twitter for comments on the paper and the rest of  the panel. You can find a copy of the presentation here. Watch this space for forthcoming publication news.

Today we facilitated a session with Anne Frost (Sheffield Libraries) as part of the Bookstart and Early Years programme at Sheffield Children’s Library. Anne, who attended our of our library staff workshops in July 2014, was inspired to use digital resources in the Storytime session. Drawing on the ASEL Report into Children’s Digital Needs and Libraries and research expertise on digital fiction from the RDF team, Anne devised a session using child friendly computer hardware and resources from a variety of websites including Bookstart, Storyline Online, and Oxford Owl.

The results of a questionnaire, which parents completed at the session, were written-up by Anne Frost.

RDF PI Alice Bell also got her own certificate!

We were rally pleased to see this blog post by IT staff at Sheffield Hallam University who supported us so well with the ‘The Future of Reading?’ exhibition: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/istnews/2015/02/24/books-to-boot-how-ist-helped-with-an-art-installation/ It was a pleasure to work with them and we’re glad they’ll be supporting us next time around!

We are extremely excited to announce that project investigators Dr Alice Bell and Prof. Astrid Ensslin will be installing a new immersive digital fiction called WALLPAPER, a project by One to One Development Trust‘s Dreaming Methods, at Bank Street Arts in November 2015! The project is funded by Arts Council England and Sheffield Hallam University‘s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) and will form part of Bank Street Arts’ Opening Up the Book project. More information about the installation and supporting events to follow soon!

Impact Report for The Future of Reading Exhibition (December 2014) analyses the impact of ‘The Future of Reading? An Exhibition of Digital Literature’ which was held at Bank Street Arts from 22nd October to 14th November 2014.

Happy new year everyone!

Reading Digital Fiction had a great year in 2014. We held multiple events and made good progress with our research.

In 2015, while we will continue publicising our research and planning future events, we may be a little quieter than we have been. This is because the project is technically ‘paused’ until October 2015 while one of the project team members is away.

Between now and October, we do have some exciting plans up our sleeves however. To begin with, following the success of our 2014 exhibition, we will be organising another exhibition at Bank Street Arts to be held in November 2015. More information to follow…