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September 28

Today we discussed Roland Barthes and his concepts of readerly and writerly and how the concept of a writerly text have important connections with our study and discussion of new media.

Then we covered our definition of narrative which will play an important role for the rest of the semester.

We then used the online (hypertext) novel 253 [...]

[NMP09] Hypertext, Writerly, and Narrative

Today’s New Media Perspectives class continued our discussion on the forms, structures, and terminologies of hypertext with a different piece called 253 by Geoff Ryman.

253 is what I would call a more accessible piece of hypertext in that it presents people, places, and events in a more descriptive manner. It has a more traditional “writing” style [...]

[NMP09] Readerly vs Writerly

An interesting discussion began today in New Media Perspectives following our introduction to Barthes‘ ideas regarding the readerly and writerly.

This overview shifted to a discussion of hypertext with a reading of Richard Pryll’s Lies (a work from 1994 that still stands as a great introduction to the idea of hypertext.)  This was followed by a more [...]

New Media and Science

Jessica Sanner finds Rob Bryanton. His book website, put together in flash, is a good example of hypermedia concepts we’ll be exploring in New [...]

The New YouTube Account

We’ve set up our new YouTube account!

Check [...]

Prepping for Digital Storytelling

We are starting our next project in digital storytelling today.

Here are links to tutorials for the software you might be using:

Windows Movie Maker (comes free on all Windows machines).

Another free download you might want to try is Photo Story 3 for Windows.

On the Macbooks, there is iMovie 08.

Lastly here is a site with links to all [...]

Interactive Fiction Assignment Part 2

This week we will continue our journey into the production of interactive fiction by learning how to populate our worlds with items to be looked at, examined, and interacted with. Then we will begin to delve into the more complex issues of how to make these worlds behave appropriately.

This will cover items 2 and 3 from [...]

Games and Politics

This story and its narrative have been bursting online:
As we’ve been tracking on GamePolitics, Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, a faculty member at the Art Institute of Chicago, was invited to present at – and then abruptly booted from – Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute.

Following his RPI expulsion, Bilal’s Virtual Jihadi exhibit was moved to the nearby Sanctuary for [...]

An Intro to Hyperdrama

From [...]

On VideoBlogging

[...]

 
icon for podpress  VideoBlogging: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Post-modern Writing: The Cell Phone Novel

Idea for ongoing blog posts:

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular

How does this phenomena relate to the 5 principles of new media and to the concepts of readerly vs. [...]

Dreaming Methods

Dreaming Methods has a new work up that explores space and navigation and how all this can provide context to narrative. For Dim O’Gauble:

A boy experiences frightening visions which he shares only with his grandmother. Told through a matrix of narratives, drawings and [...]

Why You Shouldn’t Go Inside

Michael Harrington sends along this video that illustrates pretty well the separation between the observer and the work. We have the diagetic space of the storyworld, which functions according to its own internal logic, and we have our position as observers or experiencers of that text. What if we were allowed inside of Cortazar’s [...]

Harold, Narrative, and Variables

On Wednesday we broke Harold down into its narrative parts, which we could follow from the slides into which we’d cut the book, moving the “pages of the book” to Powerpoint slides, illustrating Harold as he exists in one kind of material, paper, to another, digital.

Digital is another kind of clay.

Anyway, Harold, as we know, creates [...]

Harold and Objects

Soon we will be talking about Harold and the Purple Crayon. One of the distinctions I want to make with Harold is that between the “object,” an important foundational term in new media. The distinction helps us understand what it is we’re talking about when we say the word “newspaper,” “text,” or “book.” In a [...]