The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and UVic Libraries would like to invite you to two talks as part of the Unravelling the Code(x): History of the Book Speaker Series. Please join us next Tuesday, November 24th at 1pm in Room 210 of the library for the following:
Machines Investigating What it Means to Be Human? The Paradoxes and Opportunities of Digital Storytelling
Dr. John F. Barber, Washington State University Vancouver
In most basic form, digital storytelling is the use of digital media to help tell stories. The attractions are interest in storytelling as a methodology for sharing information and the relative ease with which digital stories can be created and distributed. The promise is storytelling characterized by interactivity, nonlinearity, flexible outcomes, user participation, even co-creation. The challenges include constant focus on the essential ingredients of good narrative and effective storytelling. The desired result is engaging storytelling experiences.
John Barber, ETCL Research Associate, will outline different approaches to digital storytelling—from audio recordings to augmented reality—and suggest ways of using them for digital humanities research and scholarship.
Six Versions and Counting: How Digital Archival Research Changed Our Understanding of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger and Electronic Literary History
Dr. Dene Grigar, Washington State University Vancouver
Until the research undertaken with the Pathfinders project, it was commonly accepted that commercially published electronic literature began with Michael Joyce and his hypertext novel, afternoon: a story, in 1990. Until Pathfinders, when scholars talked about Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, they were generally referring to web version of the story that Malloy published in 2012 or the emulation found at her website. What scholars did not know until Pathfinders was that there are actually six versions Uncle Roger produced from 1986-2012 and that this work was the result of Malloy’s experimentation with “molecular storytelling” that had begun years before with card catalogs, rolodexes, quilts, and other physical objects that eventually led to the digital work that followed.
This presentation tells the story of the digital archival research into the work of the digital pioneer, Judy Malloy. It is a story that underscores the importance of archival research for developing an understanding of literary history as well as methodologies related to Digital Humanities for helping to make sense of born-digital literary work.