The Adaptive Process of Multimodal Composition: How Developing Tacit Knowledge of Digital Tools Affects Creative Writing

Many creative writers are turning to digital media and multimodal composition as an emerging genre of storytelling; many, however, do not have sufficient familiarity with digital tools to compose digital texts. Digital literacy is still an emerging area of pedagogy; online literacy and multimedia composition are becoming more prominent in classrooms, and deeper understanding of the effects of these tools on individual students and their work is crucial to development of teaching practice. Tacit knowledge of written narrative alone does not permit the creative writer to fully realize the narrative possibilities inherent in the multimodal form. This paper communicates the results of a practice-based research project, Færwhile, conducted expressly to examine the changes wrought in the creative writer’s process and understanding of narrative by shifting to a multimodal, digital composition process. In this paper, I analyze my creative works prior, during, and after development of explicit knowledge of digital fiction and digital composition tool, and discuss how internalizing this explicit knowledge alters the creative composition process. These conclusions, drawn from an in-depth experimentation for the express purposes of research, have implications not only for individual creative writers, but for students and teachers moving into multimodal forms of digital communication

Dissonant Fabulation: Subverting Online Genres to Effect Socio-Cognitive Dissonance

“Dissonant fabulation” describes an emerging genre of fictional narratives in online spaces whose generic conventions construct expectations of realism. This genre is defined not as a form but as a mode of written communication that uses its genre’s conventions and expectations even while subverting them to inspire social and political questions and discourse. Two case studies are analyzed for their creation of socio-cognitive dissonance leading to social discourse: Amazon.com reviews of BIC Cristal For Her pens and the faux Target customer service Facebook profile “Ask ForHelp”. The genre of dissonant fabulations is discussed and contextualized within critical digital intertextual discourse and fictional narratives

Innovation origins

The book establishes digital fiction in a foundation of innovation, tracing its emergence in various guises around the world

You and CO2: a Public Engagement Study to Engage Secondary School Students with the Issue of Climate Change

School students are growing up in a world with a rapidly changing climate, the effects of which will become increasingly apparent during their lifetimes. We designed and pilot tested “You and CO2”, a STEAM program designed to encourage students to reflect on their personal impact on the environment, while also appreciating their place within society to bring about positive societal change. Over three interlinked workshops, students analyzed the carbon footprints of some everyday activities, which they then explored in more detail through interacting with a bespoke piece of digital fiction, No World 4 Tomorrow. The program culminated with students producing their own digital fictions, allowing them the freedom to explore the themes from the previous workshops with a setting and focus of their choice. We reflect here on the experience of running the You and CO2 program and on the themes that emerged from the students’ original digital fictions

Playing for Change: Teens’ attitudes towards climate change action as expressed through interactive digital narrative play

We designed and pilot tested “You and CO2”, a STEAM program designed to encourage students to reflect on their personal impact on the environment, while also appreciating their place within society to bring about positive societal change. Over three interlinked workshops, students analyzed the carbon footprints of some everyday activities, which they then explored in more detail through interacting with a bespoke piece of digital fiction, No World 4 Tomorrow. Previous papers have discussed the feasibility of the program and student engagement with the concepts (Rudd, et al. 2019; Ross, et al. 2021). This paper presents analysis of the playthrough data as each participant in the program played the IDN to completion, examining trends in story selection choices for how they reflect students’ understandings and attitudes toward climate change and their own ability to make a difference in matters large and small pertaining to climate change

Climate change education through the You and CO2 programme: modelling student engagement and teacher delivery during COVID-19

While there has been an international call for action from the United Nations secretary general, individuals’ abilities to engage with climate change and actions to mitigate it can vary. In 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 and related school closures caused significant upheaval across the world; schools made immediate shifts to remote delivery, increasing workloads and decreasing access to outdoor spaces and opportunities to connect with nature. In this paper we will explore a rural, mid-Wales school’s approach to climate change education (CCE), and their experiences running the CCE programme ‘You and CO2’ through interviews with teachers and analyses of creative interactive digital narratives (IDNs) the students created on the programme. The paper will discuss what the school was doing before the COVID-19 pandemic, the effect of the pandemic on CCE in the school, and how the You and CO2 programme raised the aspirations and confidence levels of the school’s humanities department for teaching CCE. The findings in this study highlight the importance of localised knowledge, and engagement with local groups in successful delivery of CCE programmes, which was reflected in students’ IDNs

Discourse or gimmick? Digital marginalia in online scholarship

Marginalia has been studied as discourse, as historical documentation and as evidence of reader response. As many academic texts are now available electronically, it seems a natural step to incorporate the interactive, social functions of the Web 2.0. Digital marginalia in an academic publishing context has been a largely unsuccessful venture to this date, yet there are several promising developments. Tools have emerged that enable readers annotate online texts in an approximation of paper-based marginalia, with the additional affordances of two- (or many-) way discourse, digital archiving, and the ability to hide the annotations. This article reviews the contemporary practices of digital marginalia, narrowing in to focus on digital marginalia as a form of academic discourse and peer review. I analyse several case studies of digital marginalia and discourse within this context, including Nature’s trial of open peer review, Wellcome Open Research, PLOS ONE and PubPeer’s systems, as well as my own experience using open peer review with Hypothes.is in a special ‘disrupted’ issue of the Journal of Media Practice. The article examines the relative success of these initiatives, attitudes toward open peer review and concludes with some promising developments for the future of digital marginalia and discourse in academic publishing

The New Media Writing Prize Special Collection

This article introduces the New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) special collection (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2912) created on behalf of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries and hosted by the UK Web Archive. It is divided into two sections, presenting the perspectives of the archivists and the organizers of the prize respectively. The first section outlines the scope of the collection and how it fits within the wider collecting activities of the libraries. It explains the methodology and workflows behind building the collection, with a special focus on the quality assurance aspect of the process, and on what constitutes a ‘good copy’ in the context of complex digital narratives. Furthermore, it touches on the history of the collaborations between the British Library and digital writing communities, which resulted in numerous workshops, events, residencies and ultimately the creation of this collection. The second section presents the history of the Prize from the point of view of its organizers, highlighting its evolution through the years and plans for the future

The Fragmented Digital Gaze: The Effects of Multimodal Composition on Narrative Perspective

As society as a whole moves more and more into the multiplicative frames of the digital world, it is important to understand how using these interfaces affects how we think and how we communicate. In this article, the focus is on a creative genre of human communication: narrative. Emerging technologies have historically had various impacts on narrative fiction, from the emergence of mimetic narratives in novel form, to the camera’s influence on techniques such as flashback, and character gaze and perspective. These technologies can be seen to engage in an authorial partnership with the composer, “collaborating to create new media,” new narrative forms and practices. The specific affordances of digital media introduce multimodality, polylinearity, and reader/player interaction to fiction; the practice of composing such multimodal works affects narrative perspective, leading to fragmented and layered narration, metalepsis, and “unnatural narrators.” This article presents research based in the practice of creating a multimodal project, Færwhile (the digital component of this article), examining the progression of narrative perspective from mimetic to unnatural, analyzing the various narrative perspectives. While Richardson argues that the postmodern narrative perspective (utilizing contradictory, permeable, and dis-framed narrators) leads to “postmodern unreliability,” this examination of the Færwhile multimodal narrative will argue that a cohesive voice and its communicated metaphor can be created from the layering of disparate narrative perspectives. The effects described herein have implications for digital engagement and communication on a wider scale, as we attempt to understand how our rapidly evolving technology is also effecting change in our cognition, composition, and understanding of events communicated in digital spaces