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1. Engineering stories? A narratological approach to children’s book apps

   With the rise of smartphones and tablet pcs, children’s book apps have emerged as a new type of children’s media. While some of them are based on popular children’s books such as Mo Willems’ Pigeon books or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, others were specifically designed as apps. This paper focuses on examining book apps under the aspects of implied user strategies and narrative structure. Using a narratological framework that also takes into account the unique characteristics of the medium, a terminology for the analysis of book apps will be sketched out. Furthermore, an exemplary analysis of iOS book apps for pre- and grade school children comes to the conclusion that, far from offering the child users room for individual creativity, a large number of apps rather train their users in following prescribed paths of reading.

   (Contains references to more creative works than currently registered:

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.04.2014 - 06:24

2. Disguised Tales: A Masqueraded Complexity in Children's Electronic Literature

   This paper explores what I define as a “masqueraded complexity”, a term that refers to the way
   children’s electronic literature disguises its multiple features to a formative reader (the child/young adult) in order to maintain/assert the whole range of semiotic and narratological creative approaches allowed in this new literary scenario. The paper paper also examines the lights and shadows of children's digital literature's inherent properties from an educational perspective. To support this exploration, I combine theoretical approaches to digital literature (Ryan, Murray, Hayles, Landow, etc.), the exploration of the digital literature landscape for youngsters and recent studies on children's literary education (Chambers, Colomer, Tauveron etc.). Some of my own research group ongoing case studies with real young digital readers will also be used to illustrate the outcomes.
   Despite its obvious heterogeneity, electronic literature presents a series of common complexities
   

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 20.06.2014 - 18:13

3. Antiabecedarian Desires: Odd Narratology and Digital Textuality

   Writing systems break temporal barriers and enable the sharing of knowledge and its preservation. As if they were living organisms, the narratological structures that conform textual communication are made up of replicative ordering principles and coding forms whose roots can be traced back to a Semitic proto-alphabetic script. However, literary history also includes many examples that, like viruses, have sought to disrupt the body of alphabetic textuality. This paper looks briefly at three fundamental artists, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, and at some contemporary pieces of electronic literature. Their questioning of ABC ordering patterns anticipates the debate on the importance or not of linear structures in representation systems.

   Maya Zalbidea - 19.08.2014 - 14:15

4. Immersion and Interactivity in Digital Fiction

   Digital fiction began by defining itself against the printed book. In so doing, transgression of linearity and the attempt to reduce the authorial presence in the text, were soon turned into defining characteristics of this literary form. Works of digital fiction were first described as fragmented objects comprised of “text chunks” interconnected by hyperlinks, which offered the reader freedom of choice and a participatory role in the construction of the text. These texts were read by selecting several links and by assembling lexias. However, the expansion of the World Wide Web and the emergence of new software and new devices, suggested new reading and writing experiences. Technology offered new ways to tell a story, and with it, additional paradigms. Hyperlinks were replaced with new navigation tools and lexias gave way to new types of textual organization. The computer became a multimedia environment where several media could thrive and prosper. As digital fiction became multimodal, words began to share the screen with image, video, music or icons.
   

   Daniela Côrtes Maduro - 05.02.2015 - 12:28

5. Shapeshifting texts: following the traces of narrative in digital fiction

   We have been referring to electronic literature as a corpus of texts with dynamic and
   multimodal features. A digital text can change during reading and assume the form of a
   collage work, a film or a game. Additionally, the text as a whole (Eskelinen, 2012),
   because of its own transient nature, might never be presented to the reader. The text
   can be played at such a pace as to be partly or completely ungraspable. Due to the range
   of forms assumed by the text, it might also be unable to return to an early state. This
   means that the reader might not be allowed to reread or replay the text in order to achieve
   a final or coherent version of it. This also means that there might be no original state to
   return to.
   Shapeshifting is the ability of a being to take the form of an object or of another being.
   This has been a common theme in folklore and mythology and it continues to be explored
   in games or in fantasy and science fiction films, as well as in literature. Since digital
   fiction is created through a computer and this tool can show emergent behavior, texts can
   

   Daniela Côrtes Maduro - 05.02.2015 - 14:48

6. Imersão e Interactividade na Ficção Digital

   A presente tese de doutoramento é dedicada a uma forma de contar histórias com cerca de três décadas de existência. Recém-chegada ao horizonte literário, a ficção digital começou por definir-se através de uma contraposição face ao livro impresso. A transgressão da linearidade e a tentativa de reduzir a presença autoral no texto, foram tornadas em características fundamentais desta forma literária. As primeiras obras de ficção digital eram descritas como objectos fragmentados que continham lexias interligadas através de hiperligações. Esta estrutura tinha como objectivo oferecer liberdade de escolha ao leitor e uma maior participação na construção do texto. No entanto, a expansão da World Wide Web e a emergência de novo software e de novos dispositivos permitiram a criação de experiências adicionais de leitura e de escrita. A tecnologia possibilitava a introdução de novas formas de contar histórias, mas também novos paradigmas. A hiperligação acabaria por ser substituída por novas ferramentas de navegação e a divisão em lexias acabaria por dar lugar a novos tipos de organização textual.

   Daniela Côrtes Maduro - 20.09.2016 - 14:29