Category: E-Lit

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End of Term

Hand-delivered and handwritten.

One of my favourite things about May is the messages that we often receive from graduating students.

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of receiving a handwritten and hand-deliverednote from Alicia Neptune, a graduating Communications student. Last Spring, Alicia was in my Electronic Literature course. She then went on to serve as one of our portfolio peer mentors this past academic year supporting fellow Capilano students with the building out and organization of their portfolio sites. She was lively and passionate advocate for the value of student portfolios, and I look forward to following her future projects.

The reflections she shared with me were wonderfully affirming and, in turn, she has reminded me of the importance of slowing down and reflecting on my own year. As Alicia sets out on her post-Capilano journey excited to explore what it might be to harness ePortfolios, reflection, and digital technologies for storytelling and educational journeys, I too am excited to actively consider how I might harness my own interests in these areas to shape my career going forward.

I think this morning’s CTE Teaching & Learning Symposium presentation on “StoryMachines” with my colleagues from across campus, including my co-presenters (Tania Alekson, Sean Ashley, Christina Lee Kim Koon, Sylvia Kind, Kathleen Kummen, and Judy Snaydon), might be the perfect leaping off point for my own May reflections.

Thank you, Alicia, for the inspiration.

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Looking Back, Looking Ahead

English 335: Electronic Literature is not a course that I get to teach every year, and so it was with some sadness that I walked out of our classroom on the last day of classes earlier this month.

Today however I discovered Reigns: Her Majesty thanks to Rhizome News and Celine Katzman’s piece on Leigh Alexander’s new swipe-based iOS game posted on the Rhizome blog.

When I next have the opportunity to teach this course, or a course with an e-lit unit, I will surely have to consider adding this piece into the mix.

According to Katzman, “Reigns: Her Majesty complicates that straightforward idea of power by introducing and focusing on two other practices that have historically empowered women: witchcraft and the pursuit of self-knowledge”.

According to Environment Canada, the rain is poised to return this weekend. A perfect opportunity to stay inside and explore Alexander’s latest work.

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Riffs on E-Lit: A New Podcast from Wonderbox

I was excited to spot last week that Lyle Skains and Jordan Glendinning of Wonderbox have launched a podcast on digital fiction.

The Wonderbox Podcast (available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Podbean) will be a twice-monthly discussion with Skains and Glendinning delving into “the wondrous world of digital fiction”.

If you are new to digital fiction, they suggest (and I do too) taking look at Bell et al’s “Screed for Digital fiction” (2010),  published on the Electronic Book Review, which defines e-lit as “fiction written for and read on a computer screen that pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium”.

According to Skains, the first few episodes of the podcast look at the digital fiction you’re already reading (even if you’re not really aware of it), interactive fiction and text adventure games, hypertexts, digital archiving, writing digital fiction, transmedia fiction, locative fiction, and the overlap of literature and games. Future episodes will include interviews and guests.

Looking to forward to taking my first listen!

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New Essay from Jim Andrews

As Reading Break wraps up, it is a pleasure to know that my Electronic Literature class gets to begin next week with Jim Andrews who will be joining us for an artist’s talk and Aleph Null 3.0 workshop. In anticipation of Monday’s class with Jim, I am looking forward to reading his new essay “The Role of Programming in Digital Art” (.pdf).

For sense of what we will be playing with during our time with Jim, explore the framing material that he has prepared for us.  I can’t wait to see what gets created on Monday afternoon.