Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:

Marc Ruppel

• The biggest shift in storytelling has been multiplatform narratives
• What are they? digital/analog, oral/audio, etc
• Examples of transmedia narratives: Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer series eight comic, etc
• Connectivity: Edges as transactional spaces
• Reading paths, instead of just left to right now…(It’s refreshing to hear this; I’ve been saying this for a long time!!!)

Migratory cues:

• Direct-URLs, books, phone numbers, business cards (the series Heroes was the example for some of these)
• Intermedial-Direct prescence of one site’s content in anothers
• Intersectional-One site reflects and approximates momentary events of another
• Often used in combination
• Visualize network as a whole

Christy Dena

• Presence of narrative and nonnarrative
• Jenkins transmedia storytelling definition
• Transmedia fiction definition: stories and games
• Distributed narratives, Jill Walker-Rettberg definition
• Jane McGonigal/Ubiquitous Gaming
• Jesper Juul/Definition of “game” (I wrote about that once)
• Fictional world is transmodel

After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see about Distributed Narrative)

I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.

Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.

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Ada Lovelace Day is an awesome idea going on today to celebrate women in technology. Participants are asked to blog about a woman in technology who has inspired them.

There are so many women I could blog about. To name a few: Angela Thomas, Molly Wood, Christy Dena, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and so many others. However, the woman who rises above all others in my mind, and for readers of this weblog this should come as no surprise, is Jill Walker-Rettberg.

I first encountered Jill’s work via, her now husband, Scott’s weblog while I was taking his senior seminar on postmodernism in 2004. She blogged about everything I was becoming interested in: weblogs, electronic literature, sticker art, and other emerging forms of New Media. It was her paper on that really was the big “ah ha!” moment for me about New Media. Combining sticker art, literary theory, and reader/user participation the way she did in writing about things like sticker novels and Online Caroline really opened the blinders for me about all of these things.

(Funny story about that article: the day I read it, I met Jill! I was at an event on and I overheard a woman talking to Dr. Tompkins, what sounded like an Australian accent, squinted at her for a moment, and realized who she was. I went over, introduced myself, and embarrassingly gushed about how much I like her weblog and articles. After talking for awhile, she was also very supportive of my then burgeoning hypertext project that would become War Prayers. Seeing a link to it on her weblog a few days later blew my mind at the time.)

Jill’s work with has been extremely influential in how I engage with both print and electronic literature. A lot of the first ideas I engaged with while planning what would become my MA thesis came from the time I spent the holiday break before last spring reading that article over and over.

Even if you don’t care about New Media (how dare you!), Jill’s weblog is filled with useful links. Whether about knitting or motherhood, or social networking, or other weblogs, or anything else I’ve always thought of it as the Boing Boing of New Media. So many websites I read daily I first encountered via her own.

Can I also mention that I have rarely met someone as honestly just flat out nice and engaged as Jill is? I’ve been told by people I am bit overwhelming at times, and don’t doubt it, and she has always been a wonderful person to email with or spend time chatting in person. While writing my thesis she has been helpful and interested in what I was doing with her work, to which I cannot truly state how appreciative I am.

Jill inspires me every time we send messages back and forth on Facebook or when I load her weblog in Google Reader. She even went and married my favorite professor, one of my favorite people ever and now they have a baby together. I wouldn’t be as involved in New Media if it weren’t for Jill’s inspiration. Thank you.

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I have put together Toni & I’s notes from our collaborative presentation entitled into a single PDF for viewing. I am very proud of our work during the spring semester. We worked together and pooled our interests, both unique and similiar, to examine the political history of how “texts” are defined.

All of this will be going back into my MA thesis, which due to some financial constraints, has not seen much new research but a few new branches in my thinking have developed. More on that soon. I can happily announce as well that I started the first version of a rough draft a few days ago. Once I have something remotely resembling a semi-completed draft I will leave a continually updated link on the sidebar for those who would like to follow along.

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I have created an annotated version of my presentation at Hypothesis?, the first ever Monmouth University English program symposium (which I organized with Toni Magyar). My presentation was titled Remixing The Canon: Electronic Literature & Distributed Narratives. After defining and offering examples of various forms of New Media and electronic literature I discussed the most recent evolutions in Barthes’ writerly text, including what Jill Walker-Rettberg has termed distributed narratives. I call for a look at “remixing” the canon to be more inclusive of electronic literature due to their often literary tone. The primaries examples I use comes from authors like Caitlin Fisher, Scott Rettberg, Nick Montfort, and Shelley Jackson. ()

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A new feature: Now that I am working on my MA thesis, I thought it would be useful to have a weekly post chronicling what I am checking out that particular week. I have also created a page above to document my bibliography, etc, as I work. There isn’t anything up there yet, but there will be soon. So let’s get to what I am looking at this week:

• Jill Walker Rettberg’s

Oh, it looks like that is all I am reading this week. Dr. Rettberg Walker-Rettberg discusses Feral Hypertext a bit more on her own blog.

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I am proud to announce that tonight I posted a synopsis of the general topic for my MA thesis on the blog for the program symposium I am co-creating. For those too lazy to click the link, here is what I posted:

I am going to start my thesis research in the spring on the evolution of the writerly text towards electronic literature. Once I have documented the writerly text’s most recent evolution, I would like to look at its general move towards electronic literature. With more schools across the country and around the world adding e-lit to their programs or tracks for New Media Studies, I would like to look at how this effects the literary canon, pedagogy, and how we decide what is and is not literature.

I am still looking for a second reader, but I think this is a big step. Next Friday night I will be speaking about my thesis at our symposium. I am also putting together a version of my ideas so far to submit a proposal for ELO 2008 next May.

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The fall symposium which Toni Magyar (nothing to link to…hint hint) and I have been planning has a date, time, and place now. It will be in the evening on Friday November 30^th in McGill Commons at Monmouth University. I will be presenting some of the ideas I am hoping to delve into in my MA thesis, which primarily will hopefully involve a discussion of the evolution of the writerly text and how electronic literature, specifically what Jill Walker-Rettberg has termed distributed narratives, effect literary canons, pedagogy, etc.

I hope people come out to this. Our primary goal is to build a community of English students, both undergrad and graduate, here at Monmouth. We are planning a bigger conference for the spring which will incorporate graduate students, professors, and undergraduates.

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