Saturday, October 04, 2008

Supplemental Information on Digital Narrative

digital narrative sound and vision
This site offers users modules on what digital narrative is, and users can create their own. It's all focused on using a variety of media for storytelling, which prompts an interesting question in this research: what qualifies as digital "literature"? Is storytelling on the web now completely multi-media? Where does that place works that only contain a smaller portion of writing? I'm hoping to figure out some of these questions as I go, but if you have any input on them, by all means, let me know :) Back to the site: Because of the nature of the modules, it also provides a good list of resources for other websites and books pertaining to digital narrative. As it happens, one of the books it lists - First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, is one that I own, so I'll take a look through it by my next blog post and let you know if there's anything that may pertain to what you're looking at - even if it isn't examples of digital fiction, which is what I'm meant to me looking for.

Lev Manovich, software-based cultural forms
I briefly looked through Lev Manovich's work on software-based cultural forms, but his predominant focus is on images and video. He does however have an interesting article called Alan Kay's Universal Media Machine (the link is a .doc file), in which he discusses the use of the personal computer to imitate forms of older media, which I thought may pertain to the transformation of the written word from book to interactive narrative.

Other notable sites:
http://www.tads.org/if.htm - Good explanation of interactive fiction, which I mentioned in my first blog post

1 comment:

Andreas Kitzmann said...

This looks like a good resource. I'll have a closer look at it. Many of the academic books, such as First Person are also in my library, so this seems right on target. Lev Manovich is also relevant. Part of my chapter will deal with the role of images/video in digital narrative so this is also a good direction. In fact, in my overview of different types of digital narrative, I made the following categories: Completely text based, conventional hypertexts; hypermedia sites that incorporate visuals and sound as supplements to textual content; dynamic hypermedia sites where text has given way to primarily visual and/or game aesthetics and structures; Web 2.0 hybrids such as blog fiction, wovels, wikinovels etc. that are based on collaboration.