Due to sudden unforeseen circumstances we will unfortunately have to postpone the Reading and Writing Digital Fiction Workshop.
We are very keen to run the workshop when circumstances permit and will inform you as soon as we know more.
BBC Sheffield Interviews Alice about our Competition
Our own Alice Bell was invited onto Paulette Edward’s show on BBC Sheffield. Listen here: http://bbc.in/2bBa2mw (interview starts at 01:42:00; episode available until 4 Sept 2016).
Enter our Writing Competition!
We have just launched the first ever competition aimed at finding the best new examples of “popular” digital fiction! Our “Opening Up Digital Fiction” aims to discover digital fiction that appeals to mainstream audiences. We are accepting submissions in English and in Welsh and looking for works by all kinds of writers from rookies to veterans. See the Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition for more information on what we are looking for, what you can win, and how to enter.
Readers, Digital Fiction, and Immersion
We’ve had a great summer, presenting our research on immersion at three international conferences: the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Victoria (Canada), the Mind-Media-Narrative conference in Warsaw (Poland), and the Poetics and Linguistics Association conference in Cagliari (Sardinia).
Using empirical methods to explore the way that readers experience Judi Alston and Andy Campbell’s digital fiction WALLPAPER, we’ve found that immersion isn’t as straight-forward as current theories suggest. Rather than immersion being something that is completely totalising or enveloping, we’ve found that it can actually be intermittent with readers’ attention switching between different aspects of the fiction. We thus see immersion as a multidimensional experience in which the reader is pushed and pulled inside and outside a fictional world. We’re planning to publish two articles on this work. Watch this space for details.
PI Alice Bell
Walk-through of WALLPAPER
PI Alice Bell and Researcher Isabelle van der Bom
Alice Bell and Isabelle van der Bom
Photos of Alice Bell and Isabelle van der Bom at the PALA conference, July 2016.
Digital Fiction, according to Alice Bell
Our PI, Dr Alice Bell, was interview by James O’Sullivan for his Cultural Mechanics podcast series.
Alice talks about what brought her to the field of digital fiction, her favourite works, and the Reading Digital Fiction reader response research.
Immersed in WALLPAPER: Three International Conferences!
We are really excited to be presenting the results of our reader response research on immersion in WALLPAPER at three international conferences this summer:
- Electronic Literature Organization conference 2016 at the University of Victoria, Canada
- Mind – Media – Narrative conference at the University of Warsaw, Poland
- Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference 2016 at University of Cagliari, Sardinia.
We will analyse the ways in which WALLPAPER‘s multimodal set-up may help us develop a media-specific theory of cognitive deixis. We will also be sharing the results of our reader-response research for the first time and, in particular, showing how we might study participant responses to learn more about the complex, hybrid and dynamic nature of immersion in digital fiction.
Great WALLPAPER piece on The Literary Platform
We are really pleased to see an article in The Literary Platform about WALLPAPER and our reader response research. The Literary Platform is an online magazine that explores the intersection of books and technology. They have reported on digital publishing, reading, and literary experimentation since 2010 and it’s an honour to be featured in this publication.
Digital Fiction in Aberystwyth
We are pleased to announce two free workshops on Reading and Writing Digital Fiction. They will take place in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, on 16 and 17 June 2016. Dr. Lyle Skains, lecturer in writing at the School of Creative Studies and Media, University of Bangor, and editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, will lead the workshops.
If you are a writer who is interested in experimenting with new forms of narrative in online spaces, then this workshop is for you. Writers will be introduced to reading digital fiction, narratives that are created and read on digital devices. We will examine and discuss several works of digital fiction; the workshop leader will then guide you through the practical considerations of designing stories for digital platforms.
We will design narratives and create them in dedicated “storygame” platform Twine, a free and easy-to-use software that can create interactive stories regardless of your technological expertise.
Registration is free, but places are limited. Please book your place here: Thursday, 16 June or Friday 17 June.
Reading WALLPAPER at Bank Street Arts
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.
Reader Response Research Resumes
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 19th and 20th 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.
Reading Digital Fiction 