Last year, I was invited onto local radio to talk about a new category introduced to the Queensland Literary Awards: the QUT Digital Literature Award. I had been invited in my capacity as chair of the judging panel alongside two of the shortlistees: Mez Breeze and Jason Nelson. The first interview question was directed to… Read more »
Beginnings and developments In 2010 when we began this adventure into new forms of writing, we had no real idea what we would receive as entries. A colleague of mine, Sue Luminati, was creating the first (and as it turned out, only) Poole Literary Festival. Sue pulled off a great success with some terrific… Read more »
What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you? Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the… Read more »
What follows is the text of a talk given by Dan Franklin for a seminar called Reading the Data: Informatics and Contemporary Literary Production, co-hosted by the Ambient Literature research project and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries The title of this talk is ‘Should a Great Writer ever feed the dolphins?’… Read more »
There were a lot of things to like about the Episodic conference that took place in London in October. Run by the Storythings team, it featured a range of interesting speakers working in podcasts, games, comics, and TV, an engaging host in Anna Higgs, and a lovely, friendly audience. I hope they do another one…. Read more »
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. This is the phrase. Adopted as a pep-talk by silicon valley Imagineers and tech startups, by creative writing students and university lecturers. It doesn’t mean what you think it does. It isn’t a hopeful phrase, isn’t an entreaty to… Read more »
This is the final installment of a three-part series on the work of the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Part 1 & Part 2 “Not my world. Not my accent. Not my story.” We could be talking about marginalised communities working with visiting artists, or institutions trying to address social exclusion. We could… Read more »
This is the second of a three-part series on the work of the University of Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Find Part 1 here. Last time, we touched on a quote by the father of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser. Twenty years ago, he wrote that, “Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to… Read more »
It’s always, ultimately, been about writing your own story. Modern information science and technology – the knowledge and practices that underpin the ways we entertain and inform ourselves, store knowledge, contact public representatives, commit crime or enforce the law, manage our finances or our health – have been wildly transformed since the heyday of the… Read more »
I have tried again and again to become another person. I have spent years trying to think my way into different people’s heads, language, rhythms. These people have sometimes been real people. More often they have been narrators and characters. Sometimes, though, they have been writers – writers I tried to be. One was the… Read more »