Bringing the Art of Design to the National Park Service: The Fort Vancouver Mobile Project

This panel offers three academic papers that explore the use of mobile technologies in electronic literature. Organized from contributions that appear in the forthcoming collection, Digital Storytelling with Mobile Media: Locative Technologies and Narrative Practices, edited by Jason Farman, the impetus behind each of these papers is the ways in which mobile media are transforming the creation, dissemination, and experience of electronic literature.

The panel situates these mobile media narratives historically, acknowledging that mobile media have always affected the ways narrative is produced and disseminated. By locating mobile media historically and defining it broadly — yet simultaneously understanding the important impact of contemporary mobile technologies, especially locationaware mobile devices — this panel investigates the relationship between mobile technologies and narrative forms.

Drawing off of compelling examples of electronic literature that utilize location-based mobile media, we seek to develop a theoretical grounding for a meaningful analysis of mobile media narratives. Using examples such as TXTual Healing, [murmur], the Fort Vancouver Mobile Project, and student-designed electronic literature, these papers cover topics such as the transformation of reading interfaces from individual consumption to community engagement, the affordances and constraints of locative narratives, and practices of intermediality.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)