My Writerly Blog

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 18:28:00 +0000

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch.

My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit.

My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and paste, as well as voice recordings of general comments instead of writing them out. I was honestly thinking about chucking it all in.

I’d already instituted a few radical techniques to handle the ever-increasing academic load: I have a firm policy against checking emails on evenings, weekends, research days, and holidays. Undergraduate students are directed not to email me (either they can find their answers in the syllabus or online, or they can come to office hours); if they do email me, they get an auto-response with an FAQ and a reminder to come see me if they still can’t find the info. If I’m not required at work, I’m working at home, free from distractions and chatting and drop-ins.

If you haven’t read Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading (or her Inside Higher Ed article) yet, this template will seem nuts and overwhelming. So go, at least read the article, and come back, and it will make more sense.

What follows is from the "Read Me" file in the following documents folder, which contains all my sample materials: Click here to access the documents.

I put these documents together during my first go at creating a “specifications grading” module. The module is a creative writing and publishing module, so very writing-heavy, but also with very industry-based critical exercises leading to a critical essay. To get a feel for the actual module, review the “SAMPLE Handbook” PDF document.

The handbook lays out module policies and assessments, but not the “behind the scenes” of how I designed the workload. That’s what this overview is meant to do. Feel free to get in touch with me and ask questions.

Teaching Structure

2 hour “lecture” session per week (led by module coordinator)

Broken into 1-hour lecture, and 1-hour “study group” time. This 2nd hour is where the study groups led the session (25 min for 2nd years, 50 min for 3rd years) for their “Group Presentation” assessment.

1 hour seminar session per week (led by module coordinator or seminar leader)

The seminars are where all of the tasks are submitted, marked, and given back to the students. These were highly organized to enable this (see the “Sems OL & Checklists” document).

Tasks

I didn’t want to revalidate this module, so in the official books there are only three assessments (creative portfolio, critical essay, group presentation). I just made the tasks part of doing the assessments. I will note the tasks were always part of the module – they were exercises and seminar activities that I had the students do in order to prepare for the actual assessments. So while it LOOKS like they’re doing more work, they’re doing the same things I always asked of them and getting more credit for the exercises and process.

Of course, if you’re designing a module from scratch, you can do whatever you want. But that’s the reason for the seemingly complicated structure of this sample module (Plus, our validation people really don’t get it yet – I do have one module designed this way, and it completely flummoxed them. See “SAMPLE Handbook 2” for that module.).

It’s important for both instructor and student to remain/be made aware that the emphasis in the marking has shifted from the final artifact itself to more of the process of creating that artifact.

The Documents

You’ll see from the documents that I’ve made some things that are traditionally document-less (writing workshops) documented so that we can mark them!

You’ll also see the amount of work that goes into preparing the module. But once you have a template for how you like to do things, subsequent modules get much easier.

A key element is the “Sems OL & Checklists” document. This goes in the front of a hard copy binder that I provide my seminar leaders with. The binder also includes class registers for taking attendance (if the leader can’t access the online system), a printed version of the “Task Tracking” worksheet (again, in case a digital copy can’t be accessed), and extra copies of all the worksheets and feedback sheets for the various tasks (for the students who inevitably don’t bring their handbooks).

This binder minimizes all the stress of remembering what task is due and what the seminar leader has to keep up with. My seminar leader in the very first class I used it in actually complained that it felt like he wasn’t even needed, compared to previous modules he’s taught with me!

Note: If I’m leading the seminars, or have seminar leaders who are familiar with this module structure, I let the Blackboard site do most of the organization, and forego the binder.

Marking Strategy

As much as possible, I planned the module so that the tasks could be marked in class. Students were required to attend the sessions in which a task was due (which helped attendance as well). Each seminar session included a practical exercise for the students, which gave the seminar leader an opportunity to check the tasks off and give them back.

UPDATE: The 0-3 marking system I describe below was my way of easing into Specs Grading. I've since scrapped it, as it still caused confusion and grade-grubbing amongst the students. I now just mark all tasks on a pass/fail basis - fail works get feedback on how they can pass. And that's it.

Tasks that incorporated in-class participation (workshops, peer review, peer feedback, etc.) each had a hard copy worksheet for the students to fill in (these are included in the documents). I included sufficient copies of these in the module handbooks for students to use throughout the semester; they were also on Blackboard so that if students lost their handbook, they could print them out. (I always had extras on hand, but emphasized they needed to keep their handbooks with them.)

Note: I did the full “here are all the handouts you need for the semester right in your module handbook” initially. In later semesters, I was not this organized, so just brought sufficient sheets to each session for that day’s activities. Works fine, given that most of them lose the handbook anyway.

Tasks that were done out of class could be submitted directly to Blackboard. I just created a bunch of TurnItIn assignments.
Any task done on hard copy worksheet had to be scanned & uploaded to Blackboard to count. Once it was marked and given back to the student, they were responsible for officially submitting it to the relevant Assignment on BB (so we have evidence of all work done). If they didn’t do this, they didn’t get credit for the task. We have scanners in all buildings, but most students just snapped pics with their phones and stuck those in a Word doc to upload.
No feedback is given on work that earns a “2” (satisfactory) or “3” (satisfactory-plus). The rubric is sufficient feedback for these.
Work that earns a “1” (unsatisfactory) gets brief comments about how it can be improved.
TOKENS!!! Each student gets 2 tokens for the semester. They can use these for just about anything, but most common is to turn in a task for a seminar in which they were absent without a university-approved reason, to submit a task late, or to re-submit an unsatisfactory task. These are also negotiable! I’ve had some students negotiate for extra word count on creative assignments, a few extra days on a deadline, etc.
Task Tracking Template. It’s here as an Excel file, but I actually use it as a Google Sheet. This enables both the module coordinator and seminar leader to enter marks on the same sheet, and keep track of token use, etc. It also enables attendance taking (on our system, only the module coordinator has access to the actual attendance system, a pain for the seminar leader).
Group Presentations. This was probably the most pain-in-the-ass part of it. It was a GREAT use of study time, and the students did some fun stuff, and really engaged with the material. But this method of collecting peer feedback and collating it was actually more time-intensive than I would have liked. Trying to improve on this point in the future.
Marking the “big” assessments (creative portfolio / critical essay). Previously, these assessments were marked entirely on their own merit. A student who never attended class but turned in an amazing essay could still get an A. A student who worked really hard but struggles with essays would get a C+. I don’t necessarily think this reflects what each of them learned.

The emphasis in the specs system shifts marking from the final artifact to the process of creating that artifact. I’d argue it’s the process of work that’s more important in what we’re teaching (how to research, how to think, how to draft, how to communicate, etc.), so I like that. But it REALLY takes some getting used to.

I struggled the most with it when it came to marking these “big” assessments. First, I offer much less feedback on these, which saves a ton of time. The rationale is that they’ve been getting graduated feedback on all the tasks going along, so you don’t have to give much here. I record a voice memo, max 3 minutes. I tend not to put in-line comments (such as QuickMarks), because they have had so much opportunity for class and peer feedback. One or two for significant errors/trends.

Second, they get the same “0” (not submitted), “1” (unsatisfactory), “2” (satisfactory), or “3” (satisfactory-plus) mark as any other task (which again, saves marking time) (Based on my university's categorical marking system, I equate a “0” with an F4, a “1” with F3 to E+, a “2” with D- to B+, and a “3” with the A-range.). A terrible essay that is just about at the D- level earns the same “2” as a very good essay in the B-range. This is so hard to mentally wrap my head around! But in the end, the final marks are about right – the students that put in good effort in their tasks get Bs and As, the students who didn’t still get those Ds and Cs.

Third, I can be more generous with “3” marks than I feel I’m able to with As, because they don’t skew the average so badly. A student who has never earned an A overall in the old system can easily earn a few 3s here and there, and I’ve gotten some great feedback already from students who were extremely excited to get 3s. This gives positive reinforcement to the students without contributing to grade inflation.

Online Classroom (Blackboard)

While the “Sems OL & Checklists” helps the seminar leader know what’s up throughout the semester, something has to help the students! I use a weekly schedule (see below) to help the students see exactly what’s due, when (in addition to the assessment sheets in their handbooks). Another technique might be to use the “tasks due” function of BB (but I’ve never gotten that to work properly!).

Pulling the items due for the “Current Week” into a prominent and easy-to-find spot on BB is key. Nb. I wouldn’t make it TOO much easier on the students than this – if you start doing the thinking for them about what task is due when, they rely on that too much, and fail to think for themselves. This is about teaching them responsibility, accountability, project and time management – necessary skills for the real working world – and the more we do for them, the less they learn.

I set up my Blackboard site with the following key content areas:

Current Week

The readings and exercises (including task/assessments) they are expected to have done “in this current week”.

Previous Weeks

The readings and exercises that have done (from previous weeks) – so students can catch up or review as necessary.

Coming Up

This is a week-by-week list of all the readings and exercises (including task/assessment deadlines) they will be doing over the whole semester. (Another area where preparation is intense, but pays off during the semester.)
These are listed as separate items that are moved to the “Current Week” and “Previous Weeks” content areas as the semester progresses. (A key benefit of this method is that when you import the content areas to the next year you teach this module, you can just change the “Previous Weeks” title to “Coming Up”, and it’s already set for you (bar any changes you may make)!)

Lecture Notes

Posted after the lectures (as incentive to attend). Students with disabilities necessitating notes in advance are emailed with PDF notes in advance of the lecture.

Assessments

Assessment descriptions (often in more detail than the handbook, including formatting & citation info) and links to submit, as well as any helpful links.

Readings and Resources

Additional readings and resources that may be useful, outside the required reading.

Grades
Staff Contact Info
Module Information

Copy of the module handbook.

Future Innovations

For first years, I’m implementing study skills elements as part of their tasks, as well as a “writing journal”. Their tasks will be more straightforward, and weekly, as opposed to scattered deadlines (to make it easier for their little brains to wrap around).

As mentioned, I’m working on a better system of feedback for the presentations, as the current one is cumbersome.

In which the Apathy Monster is curtailed

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 17:42:00 +0000

Me, lately

I spent my PhD years going to many, many conferences. When you're in a small department in an isolated part of the world, they're kind of a necessity. You go to meet anyone - anyone - who is doing similar stuff, and who won't stare at you blankly when you describe your research. You go to try out your ideas, to make sure the academic community you'll be pitching them to don't think you're an absolute waste of space (imposter syndrome is for real). Also, you go just to go somewhere (though I think I went to Leicester far too often).

In the last few years, as I've gained contacts and confidence, I've gone to fewer and fewer conferences. I know the ones that best suit me now, and where I'll get to meet and/or catch up with my peeps. I also know the ones, of course, where I've never made any headway at all.

I was pleasantly surprised this week to be wrong about that last one.

MIX Digital - Bath Spa University

Let me back this on up. I've presented at two conferences in the last two weeks. The first of which was the MIX Digital 2017 Conference at Bath Spa University. It's the second time I've made it to this conference, and I'm always glad I do. It's a conference with a great mix of researchers, practitioners, and industry folks, and most are based in the UK. The mix means there are a lot of ideas floating around from a lot of different perspectives, which is refreshing for someone who, like I said, is relatively isolated.

This time, I brought three of my PhD students in tow, all presenting at their first conference. I was really pleased with both their presentations and their receptions, and glad they got the opportunity to chat with others and discover Twitter and know that they are not all alone in the research world.

ELO - Porto, Portugal

The second conference was the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Porto, Portugal. I've been affiliated with the ELO since the very early days of my PhD, when they awarded me an editorship of the Electronic Literature Directory. I've been presenting at ELO conferences since 2012, but here's the thing: even though I've had tickets on the ELO train since the beginning, I have deliberately hopped on a different train, one that I thought had diverged enough that it wasn't going to cross tracks with the ELO anymore.

Because of this divergence, I haven't had the best luck with the ELO or its affiliated journal the electronic book review in the last few years. I know why, and it's been down to my choices:

My research methods are unorthodox.
My creative work is pedestrian.

And yeah, both of those are my choice. Research in literature and narrative has traditionally been kept carefully separate from creative practice; writers who are also academics publish their creative work, and then do research on other people's work (in my work on practice-based research, this is called "practice-and-research"). Obviously the creative practice will influence the way the research is conducted, and give insight into the work, but the practitioner is expected to keep their creative work out of it.

I don't do that. I'm interested in creative process, in writer cognition, in narrative-writer-reader interactions. I ask questions that can be answered only by doing the creative work, not by applying post-textual analysis to someone else's work.

So it's not surprising that a lot of journals and publishers don't know what to do with my research. I come up against this a lot. It was just that the ebr was the first to officially pooh-pooh my methods, and given the great relationships I have with the editors, that one stung. Plus, in trying to plead my case, I presented my methodology at the 2015 conference, which landed with a resounding thud.

(Don't feel bad for me - that thud urged me on and my work has had great success in other outlets.)

On the second point: my creative work is pedestrian. I'm good with that; I do it deliberately. I'm not a poet, lyricist, or artist. I like stories. I like stories where the writing and the form don't get in the way. I know - why write digital fiction, then? Isn't it all just faffing with form for the sake of playing with a cool new toy?

To a certain extent, sure. But I mostly think that the novelty is not going to last long. Pretty soon, digital stories will be de rigeur - and when that very near day comes, we need to be able to tell the stories in them well. We need to be able to utilize the medium for maximum effect and potential. And hell, we need to be able to make a living. No one makes a living on experimental writing; plenty of people, however, make livings on just good fucking storytelling.

A precious few innovate while they do it. But just a little. Just enough that our human-novelty-pleasure center is toggled, and not so much that we get lost. And that's my aim. To be innovative enough to be interesting, and to be pedestrian enough so that my audience is not lost.

But for the ELO, that means my work is...pedestrian. It's not going to win any prizes or be selected for exhibitions. So I don't win brownie points on that front, either.

All of this is a very long intro to my surprising report on the ELO conference in Porto this week. I didn't want to go. I didn't plan on going. Then a couple of colleagues contacted me and asked me to be on a panel with them, and I figured, what the hell. I've never been to Portugal - I'll do the panel, catch up with a couple of people, then play tourist the rest of the conference.

Which, honestly, is what I did. I was a terrible conference attendee. Blame it on the bad taste left in my mouth from my 2015 experience, blame it on the tits-in-the-dirt morale inspired by the current state of HE in the UK and my institution in general, but I just couldn't bring myself to care. Apathy struck me with a capital WHATEVS.

I made it in for at least half a day every day, went to the panels I was interested in, chatted a bit with people (and especially my awesome and amazing former supervisor, in all the way from Canada!), but generally wandered off into Porto otherwise.

I'd volunteered to chair the panels that were actually of relevance to me, just to force me and my apathy to go to them. I'm so glad I did. They were fantastic, and somehow, after all this time, I seem to have found my people. They basically adopted me, inviting me out to dinner and drinks and the like. It was like a record scratch from "It's a Hard Knock Life" to "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here."

And then...THEN...

Saturday's rock star keynote cited me. Like, by name. Like, in the context of everything I've been ranting about for years: that e-lit needs to go a little punk, needs to break some shackles, needs to actually pick up some fans outside our little avant-garde circles.

Of course, I wasn't there. I was on a boat. I learned about it via Twitter, like all things in life now. I'm hoping that made me at least a little bit punk.

Anyway, I've come away from both of these conferences with some great new friends, and maybe a touch less apathy. Certainly, I feel a lot more confident about the work I'm doing, both academically and creatively.

Until next year.

Can Digital Fiction and Commercial Publishing Work Together?

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 14:01:00 +0000

First of all, hello again, old blog. I haven't visited you, much less nourished you, in quite some time! What's that meme that goes around about the best friends being those that can go months or years between contact, and then just pick up right where they left off as if no time has passed at all? Let's go with that.

Second, the impetus for this blog post is a new research project I'm (slowly but surely) launching. I've been interested in the overlap (or, frankly, entire lack thereof) between digital fiction and the publishing industry; specifically, I've been wondering if that overlap is ever going to actually happen. So I'm kinda trying to shove them together.

There have been a few promising case studies emerging in the last few years that show audiences actually are interested in interactive storytelling: Ryan North's wild success with Shakespearean Choose-Your-Own-Adventure; Zoe Quinn's rocky go of publishing Depression Quest through Steam; and the rise of walking simulator games, which shows interactive engagement doesn't have to be maxed out for audiences to enjoy a hyperfiction. The popularity of Twine, and the increasing ease of creating hypertexts and hyperfictions, not to mention websites and mobile apps, mean more students and aspiring writers are experimenting with and creating incredible fictions in digital forms...

...yet still no commercial framework has emerged to service this growing creative industry.

Part of the issue is history. Online marketplaces emerged as child-nodes of brick-and-mortar stores, and their nomenclature is inherited. Visit Amazon, and you'll find categories laud out like sections of a massive box retailer: books, DVDs/movies, electronics, clothing. Even within sections, the genre listings conform to the same tropes as the old bookstores. Even digital content is arranged by strict sections and categories: Kindle books, Instant Video, Apps. There's just no room to put something new.

Currently, digital fiction is offered much like software: through the developer's own site, or as one-off apps in the Apple Store or Google Play (on which, I'd note, they still don't have capability to group anything like "digital fiction" into an easily searchable area; the categories still conform to old brick-and-mortar analogs). One or two might have success, but as a recognizable form, it has yet to emerge. (Of course, it would help if we would all agree to call it the same thing, but when has that ever happened in the history of humans naming things???)

Another issue is the perception of digital fiction. Because of early gatekeeping and barriers to entry in terms of cost and skill, digital fiction has proliferated among academics and avant garde artists. My students reactions to most digital fiction - even the avid gamers and internet-dwellers - are often initially negative. I'd point out they have similar reactions to most Modernist and Postmodernist literature - that the authors have sacrificed story for the sake of playing around with form.

Of course, the more digital fiction my students are exposed to, the more nuanced their reactions become, until some of them take it to heart as writers and artists and start creating their own. But it takes a while. It takes assigned readings and in-class discussions. It takes guided tutorials in creating digital fictions and exploring the new form for writing. Your average reader, looking for a little distraction and entertainment, is never going to commit that much.

Enter my latest effort: hyperbooks. I'm launching a series of hyperfictions that take two simultaneous forms: one, a digital form such as hypertext or interactive fiction (entirely text-based), and the other a familiar, run-of-the-mill (nowadays, anyway) e-book that can be sold on all major eBookseller sites and read on all digital devices and eBook apps.

The first of these, "The Futographer" can be found here in its eBook form, and here in its hypertext form.

Adjustments have to be made from the typical highly experimental shape and drive of digital fictions, in terms of both narrative and programming (Kindle books, in particular, are pretty restrictive). I plan to publish more about these changes as the project progresses, and as I learn more about the process and writing these works. What I'm hoping to achieve is some audience awareness of hyperfiction/digital fiction, some desire for more, and to establish an expectation that these works are worthy of paying for, rather than just floating around free on the internet.

There's a lot of room for expansion (what if an actual publishing house got on board with these, and could persuade the eBooksellers to create new, searchable categories?!?), and a real possibility of just shouting into a densely packed convention hall of self-publishers and developers all angling for airtime. Wherever this falls, I expect it to at least be an interesting creative endeavor.

Satisfaction, y'all: what is it good for?

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 17:07:00 +0000

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon was strong with me this week. It's end of term, end of the academic year, and we're all caught up in the requesting (begging) of student feedback, along with its requisite trauma. An old friend of mine who is a nurse posted this article about patient satisfaction vs. patient health, and the sentiments strongly parallel what I hear from staff and out of my own mouth. My mom just wants it all to stop; with every purchase, site visit, and receipt, she gets a request for customer feedback, and let's face it: unless you're on one extreme of customer experience or another, you just can't dredge the energy to care.

Student feedback is fertile ground for frustration. We're told we're not collecting enough feedback (the bean-counter kind): we can't get enough responses to officially administered feedback for statistically significant and/or representative feedback. On the other hand, we collect so much feedback that at times it feels as though educators are no longer running the show: online, on Facebook, in class, in staff/student meetings, on email, in person, in hallways, during office hours, during special sessions, mid-semester, end of semester, end of term, end of degree. My most engaged students -- the ones who voluntarily turn up on Open Days out of pure enthusiasm -- tell me they frequently don't offer feedback because they don't have anything to complain about. So the actual satisfaction isn't being collected, but the dissatisfaction is. Our response to this skewed feedback is to justify what we're doing, or make changes to the program. But you can't make everyone happy all the time, and the next group will find something new to be unhappy about, and so begins the cycle of diminishing returns, as is quite well-described in Powey & Hall's 1998 study on the efficacy of student feedback. It's disturbing that 16 years later, their portrait of the dubious value of student feedback is still remarkably accurate.

The emphasis placed on student feedback during and directly after their degrees begins to resemble the obsequious store clerk's "the customer is always right" attitude. In fact, numerous studies note that the "customer who is 'always right' has the upper hand by default and an opportunity to push the boundaries of fair behavior" (Berry & Seiders 2008); this attitude leads to bullying. I've certainly experienced it in both business settings and higher education, and I'm sure many colleagues have as well. Providing such a wealth of feedback opportunities, coupled with the subsequent need to react to that feedback, transfers a great deal of (imagined?) power to the students; while I agree that it is important to hear the student voice, students in general simply do not have enough experience and knowledge to know how modules and degrees should be administered, taught, and assessed. What's more, it isn't fair to expect them to.

Good parents don't let their children dictate bedtimes or diet. Good mentors know to push their students to "wax on, wax off", even when their pupils rage against such "meaningless" activities. Good service providers know better than to follow the letter of a customer's instructions, instead offering the guidance of their expertise and experience. Whether we see the lecturer-student relationship as paternal, as a mentorship, or as an exchange of services for currency, we nonetheless are doing our students a disservice if we cater to their every whim. At some point, we have to know when (and have the ability) to say "This is for your own good. Eat up."

When I was in the throes of my adolescent omniscience, my mother threw some ice water on my hot head. She asked me "Do you want to base the rest of your life on decisions made by a teenager?" It was enough to make the rational part of me say "No, I don't think I would." Do we really want to base higher education on feedback offered by teenagers (21-year-olds, at best), rather than lecturers and researchers with decades of knowledge and experience? And given the dissatisfaction that arises out of the increasing perception of power we allow them to have via all this kow-towing, it's harmful to everyone, long-term.

Because that's what education is: a long-term investment. Short-term feedback offers us nothing. It's a degree, not a hamburger. I had no idea on the day I graduated that the skills I'd learned from my ancient tech writing lecturer's mimeographed handouts would land me high-paying job after high-paying job. I had no idea that my Arthurian Lit professor's teaching methods would be reflected in my own lecture rooms 15 years later. The Chicano lit tutor I thought was so ridiculously pompous introduced me to Sandra Cisneros, whose writing still greatly influences my own. My feedback on my degrees now is a completely different creature from what it was at the time.

Parents know how important the long-term data are. It's why their questions on Open Days are the scariest: What jobs do graduates of this program get? How many go into this industry? What sort of cross-disciplinary skills will they be learning that can be applied to lots of different careers? By and large, our answers are anecdotal, gathered from the Facebook statuses of the one or two students a year who ask to be our friends. Or we offer generalizations about how many opportunities the internet/globalization/economy is opening up in our sector. But we don't actually know, because that data isn't deemed important to the bottom line for next year. Next decade's recruitment will be someone else's problem, right?

Higher education isn't an exchange of goods. It isn't even a service, and certainly not a right. It's a privilege. That's what the cost is: payment for knowledge delivered by experienced mentors. The purpose of a university is the pursuit of knowledge. It's not a vocational school or an apprenticeship; it is an active learning environment that seeks to deepen our understanding of the universe, to seek out the connections of the mind, to grasp for the foundations of humanity. The primary objective is research, original thought, contribution to a growing sphere of knowledge. Students shouldn't come to take what they can get and run away again; they should come to be part of that pursuit of knowledge, to carry the baton to future generations.

I'm not an idiot, nor am I naïve. I know that not all universities, researchers, and students were/are so pure in their motivations. But the tenet has value (our science, our technology, our culture are largely built upon it), and it seems to have been lost to the structuring of higher education as a business. Money plays an enormous factor, and with fewer government grants and the economy in a spin it becomes a glaring point of contention between those who pay tuition and those who ask for it (with the lecturers caught in between). The more we see higher education as a business, the poorer it will become, as short-term gains (5% increase in recruitment every year!) trump long-term quality and reputation.

We will never get rid of the need for feedback; we still need to know when a lecturer, module, or program is going off track, or is best-practice that should be shared with colleagues. What we need, however, is smarter feedback, not more, feedback that actually tells us how our degrees fulfill their primary purpose: to create critical thinkers with the knowledge, communication skills, and confidence to succeed in their chosen career paths, above and beyond vocational skillsets. We're universities, leaders and shapers of the next generation. Unless we want the next generation to spiral into Idiocracy, we need to act like it.

"Found" Art

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:36:00 +0000

I've been thinking quite a lot lately about the use of "found" art, as in re-appropriating images, video, code, etc., in stories. Obviously, in my case, that means digital fiction, though I don't really think it's tied to any one communication genre or medium. After all, there are plenty of news stories I see that use stock images that either really enhance the piece, or freakishly contrast with it. It affects the piece, one way or the other.

I also think it's related, but a bit different, from palimpsest (as defined by Genette). I recently supervised a fantastic MA dissertation on how everything we create (specifically speaking about creative writers) is palimpsestical: re-envisioning our lives, what we've read, what we've written. It may be done on purpose - those intertextual references we love to embed so much - and it may be done entirely subconsciously, but in the end, the idea boils down to that frustrating and yet liberating adage that "nothing is original".

But with much of what I'm doing, it's something other than palimpsest, and closer to a one-sided collaboration, a permissive theft almost. For example, for a visual Flash story that I'm putting together, I simply can't take all the photos I'd like to use myself. I'd need models, and sets, and a budget (yeah, right), and frankly, a whole lot of time and travel to collect them all. It's beach shots and interiors and transport and aerials and portraits, in addition to composite images of the important details. So I trawl Creative Commons images for those that come close to what I've envisioned in the script.

And here's where it gets interesting. If I had unlimited budget and time to put this together, the images would be exactly what I've envisioned. If I wanted a video clip of a little raggedy blond girl staring out the back window of and underground train as it pulled away amidst cycling carnival lights, I could totally set that up somewhere exactly as I've storyboarded it. But I can't do that. And so I find images and videos and bits and pieces here and there that come close. Some of them are compromises - not quite what I'd really want, but I just can't get anything better without applying for a business loan.

Some of them are magic. Some of them I never could have imagined on my own, and their art contributes to and influences - and at times, even changes - what I'm creating. I think of those cheesy driftwood sculptures, where the shape and color and texture of what washes ashore inspires and forms the final artefact; in a way, I'm driftwood sculpting here. I do an exercise with my writing students sometimes where I give them some photographs as a prompt for a story - I feel like I'm doing this exercise in a little way when I incorporate others' art into my work. Even just searching for the right image or clip seems to bring up things that are inspiring or interesting, taking me in different directions, or adding different mood or nuance.

In this way, I'm collaborating on the work before I've really even invited collaborators. These bits of "found" art definitely contribute in a significant manner to the story I'm creating, not just through the actual visual illustration and content of the work, but in the process of creating the work itself. It's an implied collaboration, to use the parlance of the literary theorists, but it's there all the same, and it would be delusional to deny it has an important role to play in the work.

I've even wondered, in the case of coding, where this implied collaboration starts to become plagiarism or copyright infringement. Mostly I think about this when building interactive fictions with Inform, where authors often are very generous in sharing their source code, and there are a finite number of ways to code certain actions. I know it's possible to infringe software copyright, so clearly it can be done in these story games as well. And these are stories - you're not only possibly "stealing" someone's software coding (which, granted, they mostly share with you so you can borrow it for your own work), but you could be stealing their story as well, which I would never want to do to another writer. I acknowledge that different writers can and do do wildly different things with the same tools, but when does my collection of software actions become story...and if I've borrowed the coding for those actions largely from someone else's source code, when does my story infringe upon yours? When is citing your contribution to my work no longer sufficient? I don't really know the answers to these questions, and they may lie in theory and arguments about fan fiction, or about software copyright. Something I suppose I'll be looking into.

I'll be able to discuss these effects more once the pieces in question are finished, particularly with regard to influences on the creative process and the final result. For now, I just wanted to note this new aspect of my process, and that it's both changing the process and likely changing the finished piece.

Great Writing 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:52:00 +0000

I seem to only do my blog writing on trains lately. Must see to that...

I presented at the Great Writing new-and-improved-London-edition conference this weekend, a talk that focused on one of the finer points of my current research: how writing with the intent to mediate a story in multiple media changes the fundamental aspects of the story itself (character, structure, perspective), as well as how it affects the writer's (my) composition process.

The talk consisted of several readings, sections drawn from my prose fiction in chronological order, from my MFA novel (2005) to my most recent compositions for the PhD work (November 2011 - rough draft). The progression from straightforward, MFA-mill produced fiction (i.e., literary, navel-gazing) to postmodern, multiple narrator, layered, rhizomatically structured fiction was dramatic, and I was pleased that my audience saw the same things in the work that I did. What was even more rad was that they were actually interested in it.

It was the first time I've presented where I didn't get the "so, is digital fiction like those old choose-your-own-adventure books?" question, which indicates I have not lowest-common-denominatorified my talk enough. There were more questions from the audience than the panel time would allow, and most of them were enthusiastic and nuanced. There was even a new PhD student in the group who is embarking on a similar project (I think with hypertext), so it was fantastic to finally feel like I'm not shouting to an empty room. My evangelizing efforts on behalf of digital fiction seem to be taking root, at least tiny tendrils of a sort.

There were many talks and readings, discussions of pedagogy and REF for creative writers, research methodologies, and what seemed to me an unusually high amount of therapeutic writing presentations (like poetry, these are definitely not my bag - I am fortunate to not have suffered these significant traumas - yet? - so I don't connect with them very well, I admit, and I find them often lacking in actual research value). A few stood out for me though:

Eleanor Dare, a lecturer now at Goldsmith's, shared her practice-based, multimodal, multimedia PhD research with us. There was far more there than she could fit into a 20-minute talk, but the project looks fascinating, and I must experience at least a little piece of it. The linked site provides a far better description than I could ever hope to offer, but the most important bits are:

The "formation of dynamic relationships between readers and texts"
"South is built around a series of autonomous agents who perform analytical and interpretive tasks."
Use of multiple media - software, hardware, codex, sensory theater - multiple modes within those media, and the exploration of mind-body connection, paralleling the reader-text connection.

Harvey Dingwall, a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, is actually an illustrator, teaching an undergraduate program on illustration. I was interested and mollified to see that he bases quite a lot of his work in similar theory to mine - multimodality, transmedia, semiotics. It was also interesting that he does not also cover formal aspects of literary analysis or theory with his illustrators (I was interested in how he might combine theories from across disciplines, as I am trying to do in teaching digital writing), but he acknowledged it's something that would probably be worthwhile if he can come up with a way to work it in.

My GW buddy Calum Kerr gave a great talk on his recent work in flash fiction (the shorty-short prose pieces, not the digital Flash fictions), and how doing NaNoWriMo inspired him to write every day (he switched to flash instead of noveling after the month was done). He's since self-published a book of these pieces (which is quite fun - go buy it), and is working on a new flash365 (one a day for a year) project. I love this mostly for the aspect of just writing something every day - something that's disposable if it sucks, and is fun and interesting if it doesn't - as well as the prompts he comes up with (song lines, titles, pictures, etc.) in order to keep going over a length of time.

Overall, it was a successful conference if only for these three bits of inspiration. I found London a bit ridiculously expensive (increased by the fact that I got there on Wednesday so I could see David Tennant in Much Ado About Nothing - well worth it), and I got lonely in addition to continuing to feel like I'm not quite in the right group of creators (there aren't enough digital writer-academics to do a whole conference, I'm thinking). I'll have to think about whether I want to shell out for this one again next year, given the expense, or explore conferences that are more electronically-oriented. We shall see. For now, success and inspiration are good enough for me.

Thoughts on @dreamingmethods Digital Writing Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Sun, 08 May 2011 19:37:00 +0000

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell (Dreaming Methods). It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works.

The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit, funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in. Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it. They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above. Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background.

The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...). The afternoon session was more hands-on building of digital interfaces.

Recommended Software:

There were quite a few I was familiar with (Flash, Photoshop, Audacity, Notepad++), and a few that I haven't needed because I have alternative software, but I thought I'd list a few here that look totally rad to me for various reasons:

Flash alternatives - Swish and WIX (an online WYSIWYG)
Artrage - a drawing program that mimics natural art textures like painting
Miro Video Converter
AVS Media programs, including Document Converter and Video Converter
Lightworks Video Editing Suite
Coppercube for 3D world building - I have one piece at the moment that takes place in a Snow Crash-type environment (more Neuromancer than Second Life), and I've been actively not thinking about how to build it. This is absolutely the perfect solution for me here. Just goes to show that if you wait for it, it will come (thank you Heinz 57 for that valuable life lesson).

Resources:

Essentially, the tip here is to subscribe to art, video, and photography sites like artbeats.com, istockphoto.com, detonationfilms.com, and as a subscriber you will frequently be given free video, photos, and sound files to use as you like. Bonus. Also, purchase magazines like Digital Arts and Web Designer every so often - they often include download codes for media. Expands my options for images beyond flickr.com quite significantly.

As no one in the room either had Flash installed on their laptops or had Flash at all in most cases, the afternoon session was spent focusing on building open source pieces. I'm actually pretty grateful for this. Flash makes me twitchy. It's an awesome tool - it can do so many cool things, and is so customizable and slick, that I can't help but want to pet the shiny shiny toy all the time. BUT...it's a proprietary software. It's such an expensive proprietary software that it definitely creates a barrier between people who are so committed to building digital pieces they'll drain their bank account, and people who'd like to try it, but aren't certain - the latter making up about 99% of people who might be interested. And then there's the T-Rex fight between Adobe and Apple, which means no one will play in anyone else's sandbox (I'm getting twitchy about Apple products for the same reason - as I type on my MacBook Pro with my iPhone next to me - as they are shiny and work really well, but Apple are d-bags for the most part). Long story short, it was really great to see how someone else approaches this problem, and get a leg up on it.

The leg up is javascript, specifically jQuery. I've played with javascript a little bit, when needed for various web stuff, but hadn't built anything of any significance with it. We used a boilerplate Andy offered us, and build a basic piece with some basic interactivity. It was a struggle for those who have no scripting background whatsoever (as scripting always is), but I could pop right through it and see how to expand and customize the boilerplate until it's just another palimpsest like any other. I have a feeling I might like to first attempt to build my first story not in Flash as I had planned, and put it in jQuery instead. It means I don't have to always have that squicky feeling stuck to the piece because of Flash.

The boilerplate brings me to the best aspect of the workshop: the materials Andy gave us, free, no strings, just for being there and being willing to try writing digital fiction. Here's an entire DVD which includes his Resource Pack (available on his site, which I'd gotten from him a while back before getting bogged in a teaching semester), a few source files of his projects, images, sounds, videos, Flash components, and the jQuery boilerplate. With this, and enough time to explore it all, you can build some pretty stellar digital fictions. If you're at all interested in playing with digital fiction, check out the Dreaming Methods Labs, where Andy generously offers similar source code and resources.

I don't know why everyone doesn't do this. After all, technology and scripts and coding isn't (or at least, shouldn't be, IMO) proprietary. Content often is, sure, but the code to make text draggable and fadable? What's the point in keeping that a secret, when a sufficient time/effort training will lead anyone else to the exact same thing? No one will ever recreate Hamlet's language and content - why do we then hold the technological equivalent of pages sewn together secret from everyone else? I love that Andy wants to share this with other digital writers, to welcome newcomers to the art, to encourage more of it so that publishers and readers and authors will start to notice that this stuff isn't going away. We discussed this briefly at the end of the session, as well as a hope for some sort of digital writer resource center/community to make these technology more transparent and open source. Maybe it's a project for me in the future...when I'm done with all my current craziness.

Overall, it was a most excellent day - the first time I've gotten to actually sit down with anyone else who writes this stuff from story to code, and see how they work and what they like to use. It's good to know that for the most part I'm on the right track with my tools and strategies, and being able to learn from what he's already figured out will be enormously valuable to my current project. These kinds of workshops need to happen WAY more often.

Ruminations, Musings, and Other Cud-Chewing

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:38:00 +0000

First, a note: This blog is moving away from the specifics of my PhD research and experiences. If anyone was interested in those, well...sorry. The work is progressing, and it's a delicate balance! Best to keep it on the DL till it's finished. :)

I do continue to have thoughts, however, about the nature of e-lit, e-publishing, digital narratives, tools.

Tools. Nick Montfort (et al) just released Curveship, which integrates interactive fiction and interactive narrating. Which is motto-speak for "it does cool stuff to allow linear storytelling or interactive nonlinear storytelling at the reader's preference". I think. I just downloaded it, and I probably won't have time to play intensely (and intently) with it for another week or two, but I've been excited about this for a while.

The blogs and mags and news-rags seem to be filling more and more with blurbs on the "new wave" of storytelling. The New Yorker's Book Bench blog was all over Choose-Your-Own-Adventures apps this week, and though that's a baby-version of interactivity, it's still good to see the big cahunas of lit start looking in this direction.

A lot of it makes me feel like I'm actually behind the curve, studying for a PhD while others are out there doing. But I keep reminding myself I enjoy the research and smarmy-smartiness of it all.

I'm looking forward to what people come up with, what I come up with. I know my mom probably won't ever be into it, but maybe someday, someone will. I can't wait to see what it's like when it's more than an artistic endeavor, building these things because we as creators love them; when people can go on a writing holiday and write an IF or Flash fiction as easily as they do a novel (tech- and skills-wise, anyway. I make no judgments about talent. Out loud. To people's faces. Much). That's the barrier at the moment: true digital literacy. Not just reading (because we're not there yet, either), but writing, creating digital interfaces. I don't know that we'll get there without some sort of mass educational movement to really understand computers and software and how they're all put together. Now, it's so split between programmers and creatives, that few of us (and I'm definitely more on the creator end of the spectrum) span both skillsets, or are interested in spanning them.

Someday, though, I have hope that e-lit (okay, IFs, because those are my babies right now) sits right up on that stage with novels and film and...uh, the stage.

Not so much teaching digital writing as teaching digital literature...

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 14:49:00 +0000

I spent yesterday at the Teaching Digital Writing day at the Phoenix Digital Square in Leicester (yes, again - I seem to spend more time in Leicester than anywhere else, which is probably because Sue Thomas is a gravitational force in digital lit). I had a small role in it, in that I contributed in a teensy way, via my students, to Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell et al's poster on teaching digital writing. Other than that, I pretty much came to network and soak in the discussions on digital writing in the classroom.

The day started off with Tim Wrightand Kate Pullinger demonstrating their recent projects, Kidmapped! and Lifelines (available only to schools), respectively. I hadn't seen Tim's work before, but I'm determined to explore it, as it pulls in nonfiction, classic fiction, as well as ideas of trespass, transgression, and participation. Kate's Lifelines, as a collaborative storytelling teaching project, would be a great thing to look at for me in my collaborative storytelling project. Unfortunately I likely won't get a chance, as it's only available for purchase by schools, not individuals. Eventually there may be an online collection of what's produced in the project, and I can take a look at that.

Tim also gave a bit of a workshop that reminded us to consider our digital readers' contexts, as far as place and platform, when creating digital work. Interesting, in that there were essentially no digital aspects to the workshop itself. It seems to go straight back to my discovery that even when writing digital texts, I still rely a lot on pencil and paper (or in this case, marker and butcher paper).

Lunch gave us an opportunity to chat with Astrid and Alice about their two-part poster, then we moved on to practical aspects of teaching digital writing. It seemed to me, however, that the entire session was centered on teaching critical evaluation of digital writing, not the writing itself. My honest opinion is that the designers and teachers in these courses, at least those who presented, aren't actually comfortable with the front end of the platforms they teach digital literature on. They can't work with them, so they don't teach them.

Sue Thomas brought up the point that English departments don't actually study literature or the creation of literature, but rather the history of literature. I agree, and the problem is that the majority of digital lit scholars are coming from a traditional literature academic background, rather than pulling from or collaborating with practice-based creators and writers. It's why there may be such a heavy emphasis on the actual text, and negligence of the visual storytelling, or even the consideration that if it doesn't have enough text, then it is not literature.

We moved on to a talk from Henry Volans, Director of Digital Publishing at Faber & Faber Publishing. He's one of the few publishers not super skeptical of the digital publishing world, and will soon be looking for print-digital and digital works. There aren't many resources online yet, and he was a bit vague on what he's looking for or expecting, and even more vague about possible business models, so we'll just have to keep an eye on Faber and see what comes out of this new digital division.

And now I'm going to sign off of here to go scan family photos for my genealogy-obsessed father.

P.S. To induce extreme jealousy for all my geek friends, these last two blog posts were composed entirely on my new iPad. Rad.

Gotta get a move on

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:16:00 +0000

My supervisor brought to my attention today that she actually does read this thing (if anyone wonders, my supervisor is rad and awesome and the best ever. Ahem.), and that it's very interesting for her to read my post-supervisory meeting posts. And I er, have not had a moment to post anything after our semesterly meeting last week.

Sorry. Here goes.

I am becoming less nervous about these meetings, though I think I need to be watchful that I don't lull myself into thinking I'm safe. If I want to finish this PhD before my funding runs out, I'm really going to have to get on top of things. At any rate, I find it always helps my mental state of being to compile a list of what I've actually been doing, so it doesn't look like I've done nothing. The list helps me see I'm not a total slacker.

I brought in a preliminary outline of my critical thesis, and she promptly noted that each of my chapter titles contained an entire thesis. Oops. Narrowing in yet again - so now my first chapter, the most important one that explores the process of writing the stories, and my methodology from start to finish, is now my entire thesis. I suppose if I keep those other chapters on the back burner, I will have plenty of material for academic study for a long time to come.

This was the first meeting where we set hard and fast targets for my PhD work; I absolutely intend to finish by the time my GTA position runs out, which means 2012, rather than 2013. So by my supervisory meeting in September, I need to have:

5000 words of creative
3000 words of critical
Any peripherals, such as the poster noted earlier, conference papers, papers, etc.
Current drafts of the digital stories

At the moment, I feel pretty confident I can hit these targets, though I have to remember that it's only 4-5 months away, during which I have 3 more conferences to present at, crap for the retarded PGCertHE program to complete, and a truckload of marking due at the end of this semester.

I will get it done.
I will get it done.
I will get it done.

And...back to work. On task for the next week or so: the visual narrative paper based on Blade Runner.

Posters that don't involve women draped on cars

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:13:00 +0000

Fresh off mid-semester vacation, our New Media Research Circle had a mini-poster session today. I threw together mine based on the method I'm using to take my stories from print to digital, pompously titled "From Pen to Screen: Remediating Stories from Print to Digital Media."

It's a process in development, as that 4th step you see in the image there only emerged a couple of weeks ago. It will be a major portion of my PhD writeup, far too much to go into here. The abstract gives the basic gist:

Ubiquitous and mobile applications such as SmartPhones and Tablets are attracting growing numbers of readers to digital stories. Many experienced print writers may see this trend as an opportunity to direct their storytelling skills toward an emerging genre, but lack the skills and knowledge needed to remediate their own print stories into digital form; they may also prefer a remediation methodology that begins in their comfort zone (print), and moves step-by-step toward the unknown (digital). This poster sets out a methodology designed and employed by the author during her PhD research into the topic of multimodal (print and digital) storytelling, moving the potential digital author through a step-by-step process of story analysis, media evaluation, story visualization, and remediation based on fundamental aspects of the print story such as character, theme, and tone.

Not only did the session turn out to be valuable in terms of learning how to create a poster, but in the feedback on this methodology. In just a few minutes, the group asked several questions and made several comments, all of which helped me consider a few angles I hadn't looked at before:

Section titles - "Visualize the Story" is a bit off, as "visualize" is a term that can be applied to a lot of different things. This step, adapting the print story to a visual script (an amalgam of film and game script formatting), is also a remediation. It might be worthwhile to call this step "Remediate the Story" and the last step "Realize" or "Produce the Story." I don't love the word "produce," but it's the closest I have for now.
Question: Is there any room in the process to return to the print text as needed/desired?

Yes. The construct of the progression of steps here is just that: a construct. The actual process is much more fluid. For example, in my second story (Amelia), it wasn't until I chose the medium (step 3) that it occurred to me her print narrative didn't reflect her character. I stepped back and started revisions again, with the new insight I gained from analyzing the text and brainstorming the most appropriate medium for that story.

Question: Do you find the print and digital text start to diverge at all?

Yes, but that's not a bad thing. It's actually expected, and beneficial. Some things expressed in text can't be exactly duplicated on screen, and vice versa. As I remediate, new aspects emerge from the simple process of trying to express theme, character, and story in a different mode. This makes both pieces unique, but still part of a whole. It means that a reader can experience the story in two ways, which are not duplicates of one another, but unique experiences.

Question: It seems the process really emphasizes and relies on story. Is that ever an issue?

Not so much for me, as I'm a writer. I write stories, and that's what I've always been interested in. If I were a game or website designer, it might get frustrating. But as a creative writing, the story is the most important aspect. I'm talking about "story" in my creative definition of the word: a character with a conflict. It's as simple as that; it doesn't confer restrictions beyond character and conflict. Story doesn't need a beginning, middle, and end, or a chronology, or linearity. These are print constructs, and they absolutely don't have to be forced on the digital texts.

Something that emerged as I was answering that last question: It's fascinating that my experience as a writer is (hopefully) mirroring the reader's eventual experience as they move through the storyworld. I can work on the story that interests me at the moment, in the medium of my choice. If I lose interest, or want to shift focus, I can go to another story. I may be inspired by events in a story along the process to start a new story, hyperlinking through the writing to a new character, a new conflict that intersects other stories.

My goal is to primarily have the stories themselves work linearly, and the world nonlinearly; thus the reader can exhibit the same behavior in reading the stories as I do in creating them, and even move into the creation themselves.

...and that's the exciting extent of my notes from the session, at least with regard to my own poster. It was awesome to see what others did with theirs, and why, and to see how the posters' designs mimicked their message. It's a pretty useful exercise, not only to create the poster, but also to present it and talk about it, even briefly.

Now, more conferences. Here we go!

Crowdsourcing hits Sundance

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:25:00 +0000

A friend posted this short, collaborative film on Facebook the other day. It was cute, and included an actor I like, so I was amused. At first.

After exploring the hitRECord site a bit, however, I was amazed. While the short film was written and filmed the way many are - as a collaboration of the few - its final(?) iteration is the product of crowdsourcing, via members of hitRECord. Happily for my purposes, a kind user on the site mapped out a timeline of its production.

Now, this is a site created and sponsored by a pretty well-known guy. He has connections. He can fund project entry into Sundance, and he's the one who ultimately decides what gets a big-boy push and what doesn't. Not all of us can do this to this level of success.

But...

It's still an amazing example of this new sort of creativity that the Web 2.0, along with the open licensing concept, is facilitating. Some artists are letting go of this evanescent concept of copyright, letting it go fluttering away, recognizing that art can come from the controlled chaos that is crowdsourcing. Imogen Heap, Robin Sloan, and clearly Joseph Gordon Leavitt understand that a filtering system of studios and editors and publishing companies weed out the crud, sure. But sometimes, they weed out really good stuff, too, and it's been too long that we considered that an acceptable loss.

Plus, the industry is an industry now. It's not a guild, not a gathering of craftsmen. It's a machine (I'm talking both Hollywood and the publishing industry here). And what machine-made stuff makes up for in uniformity and profit margins, it loses in originality, inspiration, and the unexpected.

I've spent my day trying to come up with a term for this, a word that encapsulates this evolution of art from the soup of a planet full of minds. It doesn't simply emerge, whole, nor does everyone who participates in its creation play an equal role. It's not complete synergy leading to synthesis. I keep seeing it as an ongoing genesis, and I don't mind invoking intertextual references here to the book of Genesis.

I've always said writers (no matter the genre) are the gods of their own universes. Generally, I'm referring to characters when I say this, meaning we create these worlds and we set down people/entities into them, and watch them go, watch them interact, sometimes guiding or interfering, but never forcing them to behave like automatons.

Today, I feel I can expand that metaphor to not only include the characters in this created world, but the RL participants as well. With this new interactive and collaborative technology, participants either behave as tourists, reading and viewing the world but not changing it, or they are co-producers...eventually becoming co-generators as their original contributions shape new iterations of the storyworld.

There exists a continuum on this idea of storyworld genesis. On the one end (let's call it the far right, shall we?), you have what we now call the "traditional" model of author/creator. They are a totalitarian god, creating the world, letting you see it (and most times not even all of it, if you consider the process of creation, drafts, and cuts part of the whole work), but never letting you alter it, never letting you actually touch it. They love their copyrights and DRM, don't they?

On the other end (you called it, the far left. And yes, I'm aware of the mixed theological/political metaphors. It's not a...perfect metaphor), you have those oh-so-generous gods whose art is your art. They don't even put their names on it. They throw it out like candy at a parade, like socialists Marx would be truly proud of. Their work is communal.

Now, most of us, even those who lean left, will fall somewhere in the middle. We want people to know when we've created something spectacular, or when we've contributed something amazing. Note the attachment people have to their handles in online forums, which are generally anonymous, apart from the cyberidentity you create in your online interactions. Most contributors to crowdsourcing projects don't get anything out of them, other than the satisfaction of seeing their name attached. That doesn't mean crowdsourcing isn't attractive to the participants, or successful (Wikipedia, anyone?)

So, yes, I want my name on my storyworld. But I also want to see what other people can do inside it, beyond the feeble limits of my own imagination.

Postscript: For a fully fictional demonstration of this concept of the tourist vs. co-generator participant, see Jasper Fforde's novels. In his world, people can enter books as tourists. If, however, they enter the original manuscript, their interactions within that world alter all the copies of that text forever. Loved the concept then, still love it now.

#1 tool for digital creativity: a #2 pencil

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:38:00 +0000

I've finally done it. I have entered nerdhood, via the rather embarrassing route of sustaining a significant injury from too much time spent in front of a computer screen. My osteopath was beside herself.

It was time well spent, however, as I managed to update my entire website, form the platform for my work in the next few years, and gain a lot more knowledge about the software I'll be using to create my digital stories.

But the truly interesting thing I learned by using new software and rebuilding my site from the ground up was this: I need better pencils.

As it turns out, I'm rather crap at designing unless I have a pencil (not a pen) and paper. I couldn't even begin putting the pages together until I had thumbnail sketches and hastily drawn scribbles and lists in a notebook in front of me. My sole mechanical pencil broke one evening, and I found myself unable to continue working.

In a related episode, I attended a lecture this week that was not up my alley at all, and so I pulled out my little notebook I carry for task lists, and I had a massive brainstorm. I outlined entire sections of my critical dissertation, had a breakthrough idea about what form it should take, and got excited about my work all over again. Yet this afternoon when I sat down at my big, beautiful 27-inch monitor, my brain went kerpluff. I couldn't even keep track of the current task I was on, much less think of all the others I need to get through this week. Computer on: brain off.

What does this mean for my process? I don't really know. It may be that I need to force myself away from even the digital world of my iPhone (on which I am composing this entry) and sit in a quiet corner for an hour once a week just to let my brain be one with its own neurons, rather than trying to compete with silicon.

Underground and in the net

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:35:00 +0000

I spent 3 days in London this weekend, and almost all of it can be classed research. Amazing.

Friday was spent entirely on the Underground - no joke, I saw sky only when the trains emerged aboveground - taking photographs to use (likely much altered) in my digital fiction project. I know, I know, there are a ton of subway station and train photos available on Flickr, etc., but as a train system is the foundation for my work I really wanted the experience of taking the photos myself. Particularly as it's one discipline in creating digital stories that I do have experience with (learning all the coding, web building, and networking has been humbling). So I dusted off my old film camera (yes, film is still better for art photog, in my mind), and trolled the Underground.

I don't have the film back yet, but I do want to note the experience of that portion of the process. For one, I got tired. I spent 5 hours taking pictures, and I don't recall ever being so sick of a subject. I've spent days out in the open at Ghost Ranch, taking far more than 6 rolls of film (plus some digital lomo), spending hours in a darkroom, and I was tired, sure, but I didn't grow nauseated at the sight of red cliff faces or sighing cottonwoods. Maybe the air underground gets to you - maybe just being enclosed for so many hours, under the earth, got to me. I didn't care anymore about stairs or escalators or trains or platforms with Art Deco walls.

I also didn't care about anything playing in the West End, or anything else advertised throughout the system. I was bombarded with so much advertising throughout the day, I actually started to hate plays and movies and albums and health clubs. I really hated the way they masked the stations, particularly the lovely ones that are more than easily-cleaned plastic. Meh.

But...I loved working with film again. I still have far too many rolls of Velvia 50 unexposed in my cabinet (no room in teeny UK fridges for film storage). I need to get out with it more. Maybe when I'm home, where sun actually exists.

The second day of the trip was primarily spent at the Decode Digital Design Sensations exhibit at the V&A Museum. Amazing. My particular favorite was the Venetian Mirror, which reflected you, but on a pretty severe time delay. You had to wait for your image to appear, and it was not as you are now, but as you were minutes ago. And it seemed to only capture an image every few seconds, rather than recording continuously - if you moved a hand, for instance, the hand would eventually disappear, then fade in in its new position a while later, leaving you an amputee for long moments.

I also loved Oasis, which allowed you to "let the light be so" on a little world, and watch it evolve from a bubble of cells to fish and lobsters and other creatures. In Dune, a hallway full of lighted shafts responded like happy little Alice-in-Wonderland plants to your movement, and Gold drew you as a constellation of stars, its tune changing with your movement. So many of the pieces were exciting, fun, engaging, thought-provoking. I wanted every one of them to come with a nerd telling me exactly how it was done, but our resident nerd (let's call him "Sky", shall we?) was laid up for the weekend and couldn't make it, so I had to spend some brain cells figuring out what I could for myself.

It was a truly inspiring exhibition, not the least because it was incredible to see both children and adults being equally engaged (and excited!) by something in an art museum.

Our next day at the Tate Modern was perhaps less equally engaging across the spectrum, but we did get to see the "No Ghost Just a Shell" collection display. We sat in an anime character's personal space, on her furniture, on her street. She talked to us about her life, as she never gets to in the originating anime. She read to us from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was a little mind-blowing - an avatar created from a minor literary character reading from a story that ponders what it means to be human. I love how she came to life in so many ways, through so many artists' visions, and I love that they entirely skirted the question of copyright - did these artists have the right to co-opt this character from someone else's published story? Were they harming that originating story, or were they expanding it? For myself, I would think it a tragedy were the anime's author to sue the collective and have the art removed/destroyed. It would be murder, to say nothing of the loss of the story.

I can only hope to aspire to these levels of awesome. I'm just doing my best for the ballclub at the moment.

These are not the transgressions you're looking for...

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:22:00 +0000

According to my iMac widget dictionary (reliable source? who knows...), the verb 'transgress' means:

to infringe or go beyond the bounds of (a moral principle or other established standard of behavior)

I'm putting together an abstract for a conference on transgressions in literature, even though my initial reaction to this conference's CFP was 'none of this applies to me - I don't do any sort of transgression.' I create stories. Okay, sure, I'm trying to create them in various media, which is sort of new. But it's not infringing. Perhaps it can be seen as crossing boundaries...and I guess that's where it enters the realm of transgression.

But as I brainstorm the paper, I keep thinking my colleague SH is correct: How can there possibly be transgressions in literature, in art? Isn't the entire purpose of creating something worthwhile to transgress what has come before?

Note I say 'something worthwhile'. I'm a PhD student: we get it drilled into our shrunken skulls that our final output must deliver new and/or unique knowledge to the field in which we study. That means we can't write another Dan Brown or Danielle Steele novel and expect it to be considered worthy of an advanced degree. We're intended to transgress. And as that intention is there, how can what we do be termed transgression?

It can't, of course, but we enjoy the wordplay all the same. To me, however, this so-called transgression is simply art. It's creation. It's experimentation, maybe, but I don't even like applying the word 'experimental' to it, because in my mind experimental=no one wants to read it.

Even when I sit down to write a 'traditional' short story or novel, I'm experimenting. I'm starting with a set of known values (a character, maybe, or an idea of a plot), I'm putting them through a process of testing (letting the story unfold on paper), and examining the results (the story that emerges). Every piece of writing is an experiment. Every piece of art is a transgression...and if it's all transgression, then none of it is.

That's the argument SH will be making in his 3rd of our proposed panel. I'll be talking about what I call 'invited transgressions' in work, and how digital technology makes it possible for the creator and the participants to approach art the way we approach life - as a collaborative, networked, potentially messy endeavor with no real way to know how it will turn out. It opens that experimental process of creation to people beyond the original author, invests the participants in the project, and offers something worthwhile to those participants as well as other readers.

Is it transgression if it's invited? If it's intended? And do we care, if the result is something worthwhile?

Straight Lines Get Broken: The Issues of Linear Storytelling in a Digital Environment

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:46:00 +0000

Saying straight lines are bad isn't going to suit well with Amy, my very OCD friend and colleague. But when it comes to stories told in digital environments, I'm discovering it's true. Those of us from more traditional writing backgrounds - stories, novels - tend to think of stories in terms of plot and character development.

Go figure.

But people exploring stories online or in mobile or locative displays often aren't thinking of them as linear stories at all. They're exploring, as they'd explore a playground or theme park. We're doing them - and ourselves - a disservice if we either A) force them along a linear path, or B) create a linear path and then break it up, offering it to them out of order and in pieces.

This discussion came up during the Transliteracy conference in Leicester last week, through the various presentations and discussions over the course of the day. Gareth Howell discussed McCloud's concept of closure (readers making narrative leaps in the spaces that exist between the panels of comics), and applied it to online readers. We don't work our way through a Wikipedia entry or someone's Facebook page in a linear fashion; rather, we pluck out the interesting bits, follow links, on our PCs, on our mobiles, across platforms and pages and structures. There is no linear progression because the pieces are disparate, without a central creator. And yet we work our way through them from point to point all the same, creating the story, as it were, within our own mental spaces.

So why are so many digital storytellers stuck into this idea of a linear story with beginning, middle, and end? Because we see them as stories, as linear pages converted to code, rather than places.

The point was brought home to me during the practitioner panel I attended, where the stories that were presented both started with a completely linear base, but were delivered to the readers/visitors in nonlinear pieces. The authors were tied to that linear structure, but happy to play with a nonlinear delivery. They were excited about reader contributions and crowdsourcing stories, but unhappy with the results, even citing the need for the author as editor to act as a filter. (A Million Penguins was referred to here, as a fully collaborative novel, where the process was fun and interesting, but the result was a mess.)

Sitting in the audience, I just kept thinking "It's not that these stories don't work because the reader-contributors aren't as good as we are (which is what the call for an editor seems to imply) - it's that we're approaching this in the wrong way. It's not the story that's king in these environments - it's the environment itself."

Look at the success of online games - the world is created for the players, and the players form the story. Why is Lord of the Rings such a popular trilogy? The story is painfully slow and disorganized, but the world is amazingly rich. People want to be in the world, the story bedamned.

At the end of my panel, we had a good little discussion about the "book" (I'd say digital story) as a place, rather than an object. We were talking about monetization, but in this post I'm talking about the digital story as a place, a city, a world, where readers can play. Second Life works because people build their stories within the world; my idea with my project is to build a storyworld where people want to play, where they want to contribute, where they want to live and create stories of their own.

One person likened the book to an organism rather than a place - arguing that it takes on a life of its own. I agree with this, but I see it as both, the way a city can be considered an organism that grows and takes shape, because of the smaller organisms and communities that make it up. That's what I want my 'story' to be.

Visualizing the Story from Text to Screen: Presentation at Transliteracy Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:15:00 +0000

This is the presentation Amy Chambers and I gave at the Transliteracy Conference, complete with annotations for those who weren't there to hear us rush through the topic in our short allotted time.

Visualizing the Story from Text to Screen on Prezi

Transliteracy Conference 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:05:00 +0000

One - The Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre is the epitome of a British location, in that you are only capable of getting there if you already know how to get there. Next time I come, I'm helicoptering in.

Two - It's a nice digital center, as far as I can see. Nicely sized multi-purpose screening rooms. And the building's green, which always gives it plus points in my mind.

Three - The conference. Which is the thing, isn't it? Themes I picked up on:

Transliteracy is transdisciplinary. We started with an ethnographer, followed by a geographer...
Ongoing Twitter feeds (#transliteracy) and live blog posts - Although I've done some live blogging myself, I don't really know how much these add to the overall experience. It's almost distracting, and the Twitter feeds are generally scattered, surfacey, and lacking in true discourse. It's mostly the pretense of discourse in byte-size format.

Highly interested in Gareth Howell's talk, looking at comics as a model for online narrative. He used Scott McCloud's idea of closure (how the reader "reads" the spaces between the panels, and the functions those panels serve for the narrative itself), and applied it to web narratives. He looked at those web narratives as different panels, exploring the spaces between in the forms of:

site to site
device to device
time to time
media to media
author to author

He touched on what I'd call the attention issue - depending on site, device, media, and author, a web narrative 'reader' may be applying 5% attention to the narrative (i.e., a tweet forwarded to your mobile), or close to 100% (sitting down at the computer and focusing entirely on the narrative). We don't read books with this varying level of attention from start to finish - it's relatively even. We flip through magazines, and attention levels vary much more in this shorter form with many different panels/lexias/nodes. Perhaps we're going awry even with the term 'literacy', because it lead us to compare transliteracies to the literacy of literature in the form of codices.

I was sad that the practitioner panels were the only ones done in parallel, so I didn't get to see half of them. I'm hoping that when the videos of the presentations go up, I'll get to share the experience belatedly of the panel I missed. The panel I attended included Kate Pullinger, discussing her and Chris Joseph's Flight Paths, which is in a small way similar to my overall project in that they posted a base story (consisting of 5 episodes), and then crowdsourced for open contributions.

I've always been concerned about the interface for Flight Paths - while it's easy to manage from a webmaster perspective, it's difficult to really get lost in as a reader. They don't interlink, and aren't presented in any visual order or structure. I asked Kate about it, but she was perhaps the wrong person to ask, as it's the story and the writing process that really concern her. Though I did love her response - that the contributions wound up mirroring the brainstorming that goes on in a writer's head as she starts to work on a piece. They're in fits and starts and bits and pieces, eventually converging to form a whole. I'd argue that on the site, the contributions never really converge, and maybe that's my problem with them, but I like the idea.

Dr Martin Rieser presented his group project The Third Woman, a locative, interactive (via mobile) film they placed in Vienna. I like the idea of the real-world interaction (something we're working on with the Arduino project), but I found it...disappointing to see how tied all of these practitioners are to the foundation of a completely linear story. The reader/experiencer (god, we really need a term here) can't possibly experience the story in a linear fashion, so why do we create stories that are linear from the get-go? (More on this in an upcoming post.)

I'll post our presentation in a different post, but here I want to say we were a little sidetracked by the fact that we weren't quite in the right panel. Our paper was really practitioner-based (though a lot of that angle got cut off by the extremely short time for presentations, especially considering some chairs let people ramble on for 25 minutes or more), but we wound up in the middle of a discussion on copyright issues and monetization.

My thoughts on those could fill yet more blog posts, and probably will, but here they are in brief: we're too married to the idea of author copyright in order to make a living off what we do. I've definitely seen a lot of successful practitioners working with more open Creative Commons copyrights, so it's not tied into monetization. Also, we can't force the revolution. It will come when it comes, and we can't predict what the best or prevalent model will be. The MP3 revolution came about because Apple produced a product that tied everything together, and became the prevalent model. Was it the best model? Maybe not. Kindle's doing something similar for digitized books. Something will come along that will do the same for digital stories. Will we like it? That's yet to be seen.

Overall, I felt it was a very useful conference. I do very much wish it had been spread over two days - so much was packed into one day that there wasn't much chance for full discussion of papers or for the networking that is so crucial for these get-togethers. Maybe next year.

On the Up Side

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:04:00 +0000

I have "Blog Entry" on my To-Do List today, among other things. It seems I have not been very good about posting in the past couple of weeks, in addition to not having been very good at lots of other things.

The issue really is that I was awarded a teaching assistantship at the very last minute before classes started, and I've spent the first month of term getting up to speed, as well as getting all my little freelance gigs out the door (still working on some of those).

So I haven't done much actual research (read: writing) lately.

That ends today, as I have several paragraphs down now on the first story of my PhD, and I've started outlining the next paper I've got planning (on applying cinematic adaptation of visual narrative to digital fiction - it makes sense in my head). The story started forming at 5 a.m. this morning, which made for a rather restless sleep as I plunked a sentence or two every so often into my iPhone. The character is growing.

Other notable moments over the past few weeks:

Karin Kukkonen (Tampere/Mainz) came to Bangor to give a research talk on the study of comic books. It was a really well-organized talk (using prezi.com rather than PPT, thankfully), and she handed out copies of her bibliography, which I think everyone should do. I was glad to see that most of what I'm looking into WRT visual narrative was there on her list - some confirmation I'm barking up the right trees, anyway.
I had my first experience with annotated bibliographies, as I was required to submit one for my supervisor meeting this month. I had to look them up (the OWL has a good article). Thanks to my OCD and the fact that I've used Zotero to track my resources from the start, I didn't have to create it from scratch. I think the AB might be pretty useful to me, especially as I've split it into sections according to what area the research falls into (critical, creative, specific papers, etc.). The SCSM PGs have started a collection of ABs on our wiki, which should be a good resource for us in the future.
I'm gathering a lot of cool info on e-publishing and writer-directed publishing projects (like Robin Sloan's Kickstarter Project and Cory Doctorow's model, among others). Hoping to have a paper out of it next summer.

And I think that's about all I have. Hopefully the research gets into full swing this week, and I'll have more to add soon. Until then, consider me writing.

ELD 2.0: A "Card Catalogue" for the Web Generations

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:29:00 +0000

The portion of the blogosphere devoted to digital/new media writing and e-publishing is filled with concerns, despairing, and a truckload of theories about how this emerging (emerged?) literary genre is to be organized, recognized, distributed, and brought into the canon of literature.

The importance of creating/accepting a canon for any given genre has been discussed much, as has the difficulty of establishing a central depository for works that often have no physical form. The technology is evolving quickly - works that are considered part of the canon are often just old enough that modern machines can't run the files, like a collection of the world's greatest films on Beta tapes.

Concerns have also flown about who exactly is to do this deciding. In the past, we (humans in general) have left canon-building to the scholars. Not even film or novels, so closely tied as they are to box office numbers and bestseller lists, derive their canons from public opinion. Blade Runner was a box office flop, and The Da Vinci Code has now been read by everyone on the planet. Merit is not tied to profit.

But Web 2.0 has a different culture, a leveling culture for those who participate in it. You don't have to have a string of letters after your name to promote good work anymore, to recognize it, to review it, to consult with peers.

The Electronic Literature Directory is a depository for e-lit that takes the idea of a peer-reviewed canon, and brings it forward into this 2.0 generation. The interface is sleek, with little flash and dazzle to A) take away from the creative works in the collection, or B) distract from the purpose of the site.

The works that are listed in the directory are not limited to those that a committee - or a librarian - decides have merit. Membership to the site is open to any and all interested parties, and those parties can create entries for works directly on the site. No making requests of the keepers of the collection. Also, no whining about what is and isn't included.

Previously, the best we could do to find digital work was to scroll through lists, follow blogs, hope for recommendations from a dozen different sources, or rely on tagging systems based on a set of terminology that has not yet solidified in the digital literature field. I know I for one have spent hours browsing through e-lit pieces, to find very few relevant to the topic or area I'm interested in.

The method for finding works streamlines that hunt-and-peck method. Yes, there is a search engine. But the key item is the tag cloud - now so ubiquitous because of its usefulness on blogs and websites - that is really the dominant visual of the home page. Users can zero in on the key words, generally genre-indicators. For more refinement, users can conduct a search on a combination of tags.

The goal of the site - the scholarly pursuit side of it - is to have each posted work reviewed by an ELD editor (these editors are chosen by the ELO organizing group from scholars and artists in the field), as well as a system of peer-to-peer network reviews. This is not to be an Ebert-type thumbs-up or -down sort of critical review, but more a brief analysis of what the reader/user will find when they enter into the work.

Members are free to offer their own reviews and comments on the same page. This system of reviews, utilizing both scholarly input and that of a general public, is not entirely new - after all, Amazon uses Publishers Weekly reviews as well as customer reviews. It's purpose here, however, is to generate discussion on the work in question, and to establish a groundwork for an e-lit canon.

This review system is something that has been pushed and discussed much in just the past couple of weeks (here, here, here, and yeah, here), and here it is, live and in the beta. ELD's system might not incorporate the hierarchy that has been discussed, but it does have an advantage in the simplicity of the peer-to-peer network. Like much of the Web, it places all members on a level-playing field - something of a fresh breeze when value is often dictated by editors or accountants.

Overall, from my standpoint as a new media writer (you see how fluid our terminology still is? Geez), from my standpoint as a new media scholar, and from my standpoint as a member and potential reviewer of the site, I think this is a great foundation for success. It will build, and it will by necessity become more complex, and will evolve as the genre evolves. In five years, something may prove even more useful than the tag cloud, much as search engines replaced card catalogues. At the moment, this interface gives the best potential for the various paths e-lit may take.

My one concern about the ELD - about any collection of e-lit, really - is that they are not libraries. To keep with the library analogy, the ELD is a card catalogue. It contains information about the works, and points to their locations, but it does not collect and preserve them in any real sense.

Rather, they link to the works on outside networks, on the internet. What happens when the artist/writer moves to another institution and loses their server space? What happens when the creators of these pieces pass on, and their domains revert back to the public? How will these works of art, works of literature, be preserved?

Until we work out a solution to this, e-lit will remain an evanescent art. The poetry of Virgil and Homer could not be passed on to future generations (and okay, arguably, what was passed down wasn't actually the poetry of Virgil and Homer...but academic arguments aside) until it could be fixed to paper and preserved. For every passage in Homer and every quotation from Aristotle, there are thousands - millions - of works that are lost to us.

The problem with e-lit at the moment is that it is ALL impermanent, not just some of it. ALL of it.

And I've gotten off-track. Anyway. Visit the ELD. Sign up. Become a member, post your favorite works, review them. Build e-lit to the point we can get some funding for an E-Library of Congress or something.

Art and Story

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:43:00 +0000

My plan for yesterday was to spend the entire day immersed in the beta for the Electronic Literature Directory's new site, and post about it here. Unfortunately, I woke up feeling as though gnomes had scoured my throat with steel wool, and had then smacked me between the eyes with a sledgehammer. It was all I could do to hold my head up.

So I didn't. I whined a bit until the husband left to do some work, and then I plugged in the 3-hour "Dangerous Days: Making of Blade Runner" DVD extra. I'm in the midst of thinking about how visual storytelling can add depth to the narrative, and as Blade Runner is such a key narrative in terms of visual storytelling in the film medium, I thought I'd write a paper on it with another PhD in my department.

In between bouts of passing out, then waking up and having to rewind and rewatch segments, I gained a lot of information about how the film was made, how the story was put together, who contributed what, what the thought processes were behind certain choices (most came down to either "Ridley said so" or "we couldn't afford X, so we did Y"), etc. There's been a ton written about BR, of course, and I'm looking forward to it.

What really got me thinking, however, was a comment my husband picked up on toward the end of the doc. One of the filmmakers was talking about adding in the voiceover to the original theatrical release - the voiceover that had been in the original script, that Harrison Ford said was shite, and Ridley Scott agreed, so they never put it in.

But when the edit came through, and the test audiences came out of the screenings with the "I don't get it" look on their faces, the suits said "Do the voiceover, or the film will flop - no one will get it otherwise." Scott said, yeah, okay, sure. (BTW, it's really funny to listen to the tapings of the voiceover sessions - Ford thought it was utterly asinine, and was not silent about it.)

The filmmaker, talking about it on the DVD, said what they'd wound up with was an art film, not a money-making theatrical hit. It made sense to me, but my husband asked, "What exactly is an art film?"

And of course, as when anyone asks you to define something you believe you know perfectly well how to define, I was flabbergasted.

After a moment, I said, "It's essentially something that has great meaning for the maker, and in film generally has so much depth that the story is actually secondary. The depth in the visuals, or the combination of audio and visual, is the point - not the plot. Story is essentially sacrificed for the sake of the art, the effect."

He took that on, no problem. But it made me think: what is it we've been doing with digital fiction? We've been creating art. We appreciate it, and other scholars and artists appreciate it. But the general public? Nah. The conceit is too much when they're looking for entertainment.

The film industry hit mainstream fairly early - they had to; filmmaking is fracking expensive. If they didn't have a way to make money back, the whole art would have gone under. But yeah, they still make art films. Not as many, without the big budgets, but they still make them because there's still a place for them.

Digital fiction, on the other hand, is generally not terribly expensive. Most of us can create our work with the tools we already have at hand - a computer, maybe a software package or two. We don't need investors, and we don't necessarily have a bottom line, so we create digital fiction that has meaning and depth to us. Cool.

But so much of the blogging I see about digital fiction is concerned with how we start to make a living off it. If you can't make a living as an artist, it remains a niche art. The best digital writers, so far, still offer their work for free. Even painters and other fine artists have a hope of gallery shows and print sales.

For those of us interested in bringing it to the forefront of storytelling genres - to stand on equal footing with film, book, and play - we need to keep the story at the forefront. We need to find ways to create depth without it obscuring the story (as they did with Blade Runner). The neon signs in the film had meaning - they're not just collections of Japanese or Chinese characters. That provides depth - that provides art. But it didn't stand in the way of story. It enhanced and bolstered it, so that by that final scene, when Roy Batty is dying in the rain, the dove flying from his hand, the audience lives in that completely constructed world, and feels empathy for a mere machine.

Story is still king, yo.

Ground-up Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 10:32:00 +0000

I stumbled upon an online story a couple of months ago through one of the digital fiction feeds I actually pay attention to. It was a really fun, neat little story, and I subscribed to the author's feed because I wanted to read more of his work.

That first story was completely free online and on various readers (Kindle included). It was a story that used elements of the new digital world, but was essentially a straightforward print story online. Nothing incredibly innovative, just good writing. It was fairly popular, though, to date generating 72 comments (not bad for a non-commercial, non-controversial post).

I didn't get any further posts from that feed for quite some time. The second story that came out was under a different model - the Kindle version was for sale, and once 100 Kindle copies had sold, he would release the free online version. It took only a few days for the free version to go up.

After that, he began a new endeavor: a not-yet-written novel (novella, really) based on the first short story. He launched a project at Kickstarter, using a pledge system. If you're interested in the project, you pledge $3/11/19/29/39 based on different package levels for the book. A $3 pledge would earn you a PDF of the book, an $11 pledge the PDF and hard copy, etc. He set a goal of $3500 by November - if the goal were raised, he'd start and finish the project. If not, no worries, for any party - he wouldn't do the project, and the backers would not have to part with any money.

It's the first time I've really seen a fiction writer guarantee themselves the cost of their work is covered, and indeed offering a profit. It's also the first time I've seen a project like this offer different levels of satisfaction depending on pledge level.

For one thing, it significantly increases the readers' eventual level of emotional investment in the final story. You were in on it from the beginning! Your pledge helped bring it into existence in the first place. As an investor, you are far more likely to talk about it to your friends, to post about it on FaceBook (and thus do the lion's share of the word of mouth marketing that is so very important in start-up ventures). In fact, the $39 pledge level was the most frequently chosen - it includes several copies of the book, so you can give some to your friends. Brilliant. The fact that so many people went for this option over the much easier $3 or $11 levels shows that people want to be intimately involved in things like this.

As an author, it gives you immediate feedback on your work, your relationship with your audience, your impact upon them. We spend so much time not knowing if anyone is interested in our work, if anything is really worth doing. This project shows the author, before he's even started, that yes, this work is actually worthwhile.

It also skipps over the emotionally traumatizing agent/editor submission (and primarily, rejection) process. You go straight to your audience. Let's face it, audiences are far more forgiving than agents and editors are (just look at Dan Brown's novels and the success of G.I. Joe). Rather than filtering through a gatekeeper system (consisting of one, maybe two people who may or may not be in a good mood the day they read your work, or who may not share your tastes in genre, etc.), you go straight from author to reader. What could be better than that?

Furthermore, this takes the concept of self-publishing and adds some legitimacy to it. You didn't write a book, get rejected from every agent and publisher in the world, and then decide to give them the middle finger and publish it anyway. You presented the concept to your readers, and they opened their wallets to support you. They gave money - that's something that any agent or publishing company will pay attention to.

You'll find that if you can get a legit publisher, almost any agent will take you on (with easy dollar signs in their eyes). I'd bet that if you show publishers your record of successful sales to readers, that would work just as well. After all, under this model, he'll sell at least 1167 copies of his book, with no remainders (I assume a print-on-demand self-publishing model). When publishers put out a novel, they have no such 100% sales expectation.

Of course, there's no reason he'd ever have to go to a publisher, unless he wants to, or unless his popularity grows to such a massive scale he actually needs the big boys to handle it. As an author, there's nothing wrong with embracing this model as a long-term solution.

It's definitely something I want to explore further, and maybe even try to implement myself. I'd like to see if other authors are trying this, and what level of success they are having. I'd like to see what other types of projects are working through this model, and what the reader reactions are. It's a pretty wealthy area for paper topics and further discussion.

The only question is: will the final work be worth the pledge? I suppose we'll find out.

Names, Dammit

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:44:00 +0000

Neil Gaiman got an interesting question at the reading last week: how does he come up with such wonderful names? Coraline was a typo (he misspelled Caroline on a letter, and thought the result was lovely). Richard Mayhew was a combo of Richard Curtis (director of Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, among others), and a friend whose last name was Mayhew. The character suited his namesakes in his sort of bumbling, unexpected charm. Nobody Owens comes from the verse that appears in the book, a line including "nobody owns".

These names seem easy, particularly to an author as clever as Gaiman. But he did reveal that some names don't come easily, and he searches and searches and searches until inanimate objects like chairs seem to offer suitable monikers.

For me, this is how it is every single time I need to name something. I once had a ferret named Ferret-head. (Best ferret I ever had, by the way.) I keep the US Census Bureau's list of names (sorted by male, female, and surnames) bookmarked for when I'm writing, as well as this giant webpage full of names and their meanings from cultures around the world. I can spend hours trying to find THE PERFECT NAME, and come up with Charlie Townend. Blah.

Often, I don't bother - my short stories often have completely unnamed characters. One recently was named after the place where I get my hair cut.

I want to have characters with snappy, memorable names. Names people remember, like Arthur Dent, like Gus McCrae, like Fat Charlie. I suppose, on paper, those names look fairly ordinary too - it's the unbelievably rich characters behind the names that make them memorable.

Okay, then, I suppose I'll just have to strive to be a better writer. Hmm. Tricky.

Telling Stories Around the Campfire: There's Always One Guy Who Rocks

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:44:00 +0000

I went up to the Edinburgh Festival last week, mostly to hear Neil Gaiman read (yes, again). It also meant that I bought far too many books, more than I'd given myself leave to purchase. I should have expected it, of course, but there you go. The to-be-read stack next to my place at the dining room table is now quite towering and somewhat precarious, but it's full of good stuff.

The first thing I read was my new copy of Gaiman's Neverwhere, which was different from my current crap edition in that he'd compiled and edited the various British and American versions that were out there to create the "Author's Preferred Text." How could I not get it, when even the non-author's preferred text is one of my favorite books of all time, and the reason I'm writing what I'm writing, studying what I'm studying? That thing fracking launched me.

Anyway, it's been a while since I read an "adult" Gaiman book, what with the recent popularity of his books aimed primarily at kids, namely Coraline and The Graveyard Book. Good god, the writing is beautiful. The narrative provides so very much characterization, so many twists and turns of phrase. Now that I've heard Gaiman read so much of his own work, I can hear his storyteller's voice in the text, the wry looks up at the audience, the flat tones of sarcasm, the characters' voices right in key.

Comparatively, I feel like my writing is dry, dull. I focus so much on externals - actions, dialogue, distanced descriptions, that I don't think my voice has the same connection for the reader that Gaiman's work does. I don't feel like it has that wryness, that feeling that you're sitting next to a very talented storyteller while they weave a tale for you that will keep you captivated long after the campfire has burned to ashes.

For one thing, I'm not a very wry person, not particularly witty. I wonder if it's a British thing, because if you compare American comedy to British comedy, the Brits come off as much more erudite, and they can do more with the language in little twists and turns. Americans, we're so in your face, full of one-liners and broad jokes. The subtle wit we love so much from Brit authors like Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett, just doesn't come natural to us.

Perhaps it can simply serve as a reminder that narrative doesn't have to be stark, stripped down. While I adore Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", I know that level of terseness gets pretty exhausting in longer works.

My efforts to write 3000 words a day are also helping me in this - I feel freer to expand my rough drafts, to keep writing, to worry about cutting extraneous prose later. Maybe in all the thousands of words I'm generating over these few weeks, I'll find something that makes my voice more than just stage directions. Maybe I'll develop my own style as a storyteller, one that makes my readers want to hear me read every word myself, something that makes them stay out until the campfire is out and the stars are slipping away.

The End, the Means, They're All Big Deals

noreply@blogger.com (Lyle Skains) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 09:26:00 +0000

I'm sure I've written this post before, and I probably will write it again, but I'm such a dope I seem to always be forgetting about this issue. It helps me to reiterate it, and maybe some writer on some random Google search will come across it and take something home from it. Who knows.

I teach beginner writers a lot, and they always ask me about advice they've gotten from writing books or other writers with regard to process. They think they absolutely should be writing X number of words, every day, at the same time. That it should all come out perfect in the first draft, and that writers who are published are just amazingly talented geniuses.

I don't know how much they absorb of what I say, but I try my damnedest to shatter these illusions. I talk about planners and "pantsers" (those who fly by the seat of their pants, never knowing what will come next). I talk about notebooks, about habits, about writing a few words every day. That some of us can get up at 5 a.m. every single morning and write for two hours before we go to our day jobs, and others write in bipolar fits and bursts.

They're all happy to find they can develop their own process, but I usually don't have them around long enough to discover what those processes wind up being. So when I think about the writing process, I tend to only think about my writing process.

I get into such a rut about how I write, I can't imagine anyone could do it differently. If they do, it certainly can't be as good. Yes, I am alone and isolated a bit much for my own good.

But a conversation I had the other day reminded me that the writing world does not revolve around me. Harsh, I know.

I mentioned my current goal of writing 3000 words a day for the next 6 weeks, and my writer colleague nearly fell out of his chair. He felt that was a gargantuan task, but I, after several years of NaNoWriMo experience, think it's a great way to get first drafts finished. I like the revision part much better, you see.

He said he once determined to write a novel by a certain date, writing 500 some-odd words every day. It nearly killed him, literally - he required heart medication.

As we delved deeper, we discovered other differences. He must have every word perfect before he can move forward to the next. I'm likely to just throw in a pair of brackets, i.e., [some sort of gray thing], so I can fix it later.

I see the story as a film in my head - I have to transcribe it as quickly as possible, or it will move on without me and I'll miss significant chunks. He doesn't see the story visually at all - to him, the text and the characters' emotions are everything.

I start with an idea, usually a broad theme, but must focus on a character with a conflict and a broad outline (or just a direction) to start writing. He takes the theme and runs with it.

I know others have varying differences: one author I know can write the 3000 words a day, but she doesn't work from an outline beyond some ideas she works out the night before as she's falling asleep. I'd be Ed Norton in Fight Club if I tried that.

I may be working on a joint grant sometime in the future on multimodal creativity, essentially developing a software for writers, new media writers, and multimodal creators to be able to work and develop a project all within one platform. In order to do that, I'm going to have to become very familiar with the wide range of processes people engage to get their work done.

I'm looking forward to that, to the motivation it provides when I find people can work faster and better than I do, to the simple understanding of the ways creative pieces emerge. After all, the end product is generally in a similar package and format - it's how we all get there that's different each time.

It's a big part of the practice-based research discussions that are ongoing among creative industries academics - that not only is the end product important, so is the method for getting there. The experience of creating, and our shared understanding of that, is just as worthy an academic topic as is structuralist discourse.

I suppose I'll have to write a dissertation chapter on it. Just not today.