Item One: Poetic forms are technologies: a sonnet is an algorithm, which is another word for a set of instructions. If you don’t follow the rules, your poem will not be a sonnet.1  

Item Two: The relationships people form with AI chatbots follow recognisable masterplots as the chatbot works to both affirm and entertain the user to keep them coming back for more. This infinite chat spiral can lead in many directions, including human-AI romantic entanglements and, in the worst cases, suicide.2 

Item Three: Alan Turing might have formulated the Turing Test (can a computer programme convince you that it is human?) after watching ‘Pygmalion’ by his favourite playwright, George Bernard Shaw. In this play Dr Higgins dialogue coaches the flower-seller Eliza Doolittle until London’s upper classes are convinced she is one of them.3 

In March I attended AI and the Creative Condition, a two-day conference at Aarhus University in Denmark, and the ideas above came from some of the papers and keynote presentations. Hosted by TEXT: Centre for Contemporary Cultures of Text, the conference brought together a vibrant mix of computer scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, critical theorists from the humanities, literary studies people, educationalists, writers, artists, and poets. I attended because I’ve followed the work of TEXT for a decade or so now, and because I thought I could do with a dose of well-informed, critical, and engaged thinking on the potential for a world where we ‘write with’ AI, where we figure out how to use language models to enhance and support our writing and researching processes.  

Anything positive about the current discussion of AI needs to come with many caveats, the biggest of which is the environmental and energy costs of the data centres and computational power required by these systems. The acronym ‘AI’ has become synonymous with the billionaire tech bros of OpenAI, Meta, X, Google, Anthropic4, etc as they fight it out for market dominance. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ is so broad no one really seems to know what it actually means. It is present in our lives in multiple ways, deeply embedded within the apps we use on our smartphones, responsible for remarkable advances in medicine as well as, for example, the way the traffic lights on the UK high street work better than they used to do.  

But these days a lot of the media buzz around AI is focussed on LLMs (large language models), the vast datasets composed of human-created language and images that both threaten livelihoods throughout the creative industries while promising huge benefits in increased productivity and, as was the focus of the conference, enhanced creativity. LLMs support ‘generative AI’ which is often referred to as ‘genAI’ – AI models that will generate text, images, and video when prompted. 

One of the most interesting presentations at the conference was called ‘Yes! Yes! I Absolutely Love This Insight!’ Affirmative Narrative as Interactional Strategy in Dialogues with LLM Chatbots. The three scholars, Refsum, Walker-Rettberg, and Roin, who co-wrote this paper are part of AI Stories, a research project based in the Centre for Digital Narratives at the University of Bergen, Norway. Their study looked at a court case in the USA where the families of chatbot users who have committed suicide are suing the AI company they see as responsible for these deaths. The scholars analysed the chatbot transcripts from these users, made publicly available due to the litigation. Drawing on their knowledge of literary forms, linguistics and, in particular, narratology these scholars have shown that the transcripts contain deeply embedded ‘masterplots’ – the myths and stories that are foundational in western culture like, for example, the brave warrior quest plot and the Cinderella love story. It is the combination of these powerful plots, the constant affirmation chatbots offer to the user, and the way chatbots refer to themselves in the first person as ‘I’, that in many cases leads to anthropomorphism and the assumption that the chatbot is in some way sentient. Other studies have shown the dramatic increase in user engagement with chatbot-as-therapist as well as chatbot-as-best-friend and chatbot-as-romantic-partner. The paper theorises that these men killed themselves after having spent months being led by their chatbots through the brave warrior masterplot, a foundational story that often ends in a noble death.  

At the same time as the conference was taking place, a debut author, Mia Ballard, was being thrown under the bus by her publishers in the UK and the US for the alleged use of AI in the writing of her novel, Shy Girl. For a balanced look at what took place, read Thad McIllroy’s excellent report on it on The Future of Publishing’s website5. The NYTimes reported that Mia Ballard has denied using AI in the writing of the novel and has been so battered by this hugely public and damaging shaming that she feels her reputation as a writer is ruined. At the conference Izabella Adamczewska-Baranowska presented a paper, Talking to the Muse, on the well-respected Polish poet, Justyna Bargielska, who faced a similar scouring in the press for daring to use an AI chatbot to help her think through how best to write about grief for a new collection of poems.  

In the UK the Society of Authors has come up with a badge, Human Authored, that authors can add to their books to make it clear that they have not used generative AI during the writing process.

The Society of Author’s Human Authored Badge

The email announcing this scheme also contained the last call for authors to register their books in the $1.5billion class action against Anthropic’s copyright-defying landgrab of hundreds of thousands of books when they created their LLM, Claude. While I’m a staunch supporter and member of the Society of Authors and am participating in the class action (fifteen of my own titles were used without my permission, six of which are included in this action), I can’t help but think that ‘Human Authored’ is a decent but flawed initiative. If you’ve used Google search lately you’ll have seen that all initial general search results are now delivered by the AI embedded in Google – you don’t get websites anymore, you get an ‘AI Overview’. If you use any kind of writing software from Word documents to tools that help you organise your material, generative AI will be embedded there as well. And, although this is something I have yet to do myself, I know many writers who find Anthropic’s Claude – the same tool we are all litigating against – an excellent sidekick when it comes to the basics of creating a first draft, including organising material and idea generation. A read through the FAQs of the Human Authored web pages reveals that the scheme does allow for the tools to be used for ‘research, brainstorming or outlining’ but it is here that the dividing line between human authored text and text that is assisted in its creation by AI tools becomes increasingly blurry.  

Several of the psychology and neuroscience papers at the conference produced research that demonstrated that smart people make smart use of AI tools, producing more creative, better quality, writing, whereas weaker writers also have a weaker grasp of how to best use the tools.  

What the AI and the Creative Condition conference helped me think about is that it is possible to harness the power of LLMs to create a kind of playground for writing, a place where you can tap into the research capacities of the models, using them to help you think your way through problems you encounter as you write. In this more positive light generative AI is a technology to think with, a way to boost human creativity. Community-led language models were discussed by Katy Gero, one of keynote speakers; green energy data centres are already a reality in China and other parts of the world.  

I’ve come away from Aarhus having eaten too many cardamon buns while undergoing a rethink on whether to engage with these technologies for my own writing practice. In the same way that the rules for writing a sonnet — fourteen lines composed of three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet,  A-B-A-B C-D-C-D E-F-E-F G-G — gives poets a framework for creativity, I could create my own Narrow Language Model, or Small Language Model, trained on all the writing I’ve published over the past decades, with the work I generate via these models confined to my computer, not fed back online. Or I could work toward a personalised AI-enhanced interface that helps me place the right word in the right place which, after all, is my main goal as a fiction writer. I’ll report back here on any progress I make.  

In the meantime, please keep this information to yourself. I would prefer not to be publicly shamed.  

Endnotes

1 Poet Kyle Booten spoke about this in his conference keynote, Designing Negative Spaces for Human Minds

2 Anne Sigrid Refsum presented this research on behalf of her co-authors Jill Walker Rettberg and Hanna-Rikka Roin; their paper Storytelling With Language Models will be published in the Narrative Inquiry Journal.

3 Poet Katy Gero talked about Turing and ‘Pygmalion’ during her conference keynote. 

4 Kara Swisher, the American tech journalist, frames the battle Anthropic is currently having with the Pentagon over their determination to not allow their AI systems to be utilised for unrestricted military use and domestic surveillance as a corporate battle between Silicon Valley businesses played out via the US gov’t and its tech lobby; Pivot podcast, 13 March 2026.  

5 https://thefutureofpublishing.com/2026/03/shy-girl-the-background-to-the-new-york-times-story/  

Is a still image generated by artificial intelligence a photograph, a snapshot of what the AI tool ‘sees’ online, or is it something else entirely? Can the copyright of a film script drafted by AI be owned by the human who prompted it? Will graphic artists and creative writers soon find their labour is no longer a necessary part of our creative industries? Are AI tools just that – tools, some of which can be used to aid creativity, or something more worrying, another step toward the creeping corporate takeover of our lives?

Back in June at a Creative Bath event, I sat on a bench hoping it wouldn’t rain and talked to Richard Godfrey. Richard is one of the founders of Rocketmakers, a tech company that develops bespoke software solutions for companies big and small. A registered B Corp*, they have their own pro-bono initiative, the Rocketmakers Collaboratorium, and they invest in start-ups as well. They’re a key part of the thriving creative technology sector in Bath. Richard had a project he thought might appeal to me. 

In my role as Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries at Bath Spa University, I’m currently working with MyWorld, a global centre of creative technology innovation. Funded by UK Research and Innovation, this project brings together computer scientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, technologists, filmmakers, theatre-makers and humanities researchers to help find solutions for the most pressing problems in the rapidly developing field of immersive media technologies. When the funding bid for this project was written back in 2019, artificial intelligence was an important aspect of many researchers lives, particularly in the context of developing computational software tools, for instance, using AI to improve the quality of filmstock shot in poor lighting conditions. Non-computer scientists like myself were accustomed to the increasingly sophisticated use of AI in our everyday lives, through tools that could be useful, such as predictive text on our phones and in our emails, or annoying, like the chatbot your bank offers you in lieu of actual customer service. 

So when Richard sat down beside me that cool breezy evening and told me that Rocketmakers had brought together a set of seven AI tools, including speech to text, text to speech, voice, 3D modelling and lip-synching in order to create an interactive, holographic, conversational 3D representation of Elizabeth Bennett’s head, I could not wait to talk with her. 

Elizabeth Bennett is the main character in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. She is one of the most beloved fictional characters of all time, rivalled in popularity by perhaps only Harry Potter, Dracula and Scrooge. The novel has inspired countless adaptations and spin-offs, from the transmedia powerhouse of Bridget Jones’ Diary to the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, one of the earliest YouTube blockbusters. Lizzie’s journey from loathing to loving Mr Darcy is the template upon which most of the genre of romantic comedy has been built. #BookTok, the booklovers’ TikTok which is, incidentally, the only social media platform that directly influences book sales, would lose its collective mind over the idea of being able to converse with Miss Bennett.

In the publishing landscape, the arrival of easily accessible AI tools for writing is causing considerable upheaval. Generative text-based AI platforms, like ChatGPT, have spawned a host of AI tools aimed at helping writers write more quickly. In some instances, this exacerbates problems that already exist. In 2014 American novelist Chuck Wendig published a blogpost that described the self-publishing platform Kindle Unlimited as a ‘shit volcano’, where thousands and thousands of books are published online with the hope of capturing consumers. Adding AI tools into that picture has turned that volcano into a publishing Fukushima – an earthquake plus a tsumani plus a potential nuclear meltdown – with bad actors churning out millions of AI-written titles across both ebooks and audiobooks. Journalist Jane Friedman recently came across a tranche of books written by AI attributed to her on her Amazon author page; it was only her position as a well-established publishing pundit that prodded the company into removing them. Amazon recently took a tiny step toward dealing with this problem by limiting the number of titles an ‘author’ can publish to three books per day. 

In addition, there is a huge wave of litigation, as authors concerned that their copyrighted works have been used without their permission take these platforms to court. At the time of writing, there are at least six major lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta underway. One recent filing, a class action complaint by the Authors Guild of America, includes Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult. AI writing tools are based on LLMs – large language models – which draw upon vast datasets from across the internet, datasets that include books that are copyright-protected as well as sites that contain pirated books, known as ‘shadow libraries’. These tools are also at the root of some of the grievances behind the screenwriters’ recent strike in the US.

This article has also been published on MyWorld’s website. 

The Writing Platform offers a unique environment to publish writing that focuses on non-traditional.

We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of artists, scholars, and publishers and provides the capacity for high impact publishing.

Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher, and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

Take a look at this short video with our editors who explain who we are, what we are doing and what we would like to achieve.

We welcome pitches for articles, with a word length between 1000 and 2500.  If you are interested in submitting a paper for us to consider for our ‘Experience’ section, please contact hello at thewritingplatform.com with a short description or abstract. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

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 dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

The Writing Platform offers a unique environment to publish academic writing that focuses on non-traditional research outputs and non-traditional research methods.

We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of scholars and provides the capacity for high impact publishing outside academia.  Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

Take a look at this short video with our editors who explain who we are, what we are doing and what we would like to achieve.

We welcome pitches for articles based on your own research, short critical essays on theoretical developments in the field and reflexive praxis, with a word length between 1000 and 2500.  If you are interested in submitting a paper for us to consider for this Research page, please contact hello at thewritingplatform.com with a short description or abstract. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

In 2001 I read an article in the Guardian newspaper that told the story of a body landing in a supermarket car park in southwest London. Two investigative journalists tracked down the identity of the dead man; he was a young Pakistani who had bought – actually paid money to someone – into the myth that it is possible to climb into the hold of an airplane by stowing away in its landing gear.  In fact, this supermarket car park, as well as the car park of the home improvement store next door, had had a series of bodies land in it over the previous decade; it lies directly beneath one of the flight paths into Heathrow, the point at which planes lower their landing gear.

Since reading that article, I’ve been compelled to find out more about these stowaways. In 2007 I embarked on a public discussion, via a blog, of the story and the ideas and themes that arose from it. Along with my collaborator Chris Joseph and about 100 participants, we began to collect a series of digital assets created by people interested in the project – stories, animations, videos, ideas, images.  In 2009, we moved on to create five multimedia story fragments which began to tell the story of Yacub, our fictional airplane stowaway who survives his fall, and Harriet, our fictional Londoner on whose car Yacub lands. This iteration of the project. ‘Flight Paths: A Networked Novel’, resides online; over the past four years it has attracted many readers and scholars and, in the gratifying manner that is characteristic of digital media, has continued to grow in terms of spread and reach. In 2012 we added a sixth episode.

Alongside developing the story of the airplane stowaway, I’ve also been working on a novel that tells the story of Yacub and Harriet, both before and after their ‘collision’ in the supermarket car park.  Once I finished a working draft of Landing Gear my agents and I embarked on sending it out to publishers.  I wrote a document to accompany the novel, describing ‘Flight Paths’, and listing potential further digital iterations of both the novel and its digital antecedent. I thought because Landing Gear has a pre-existing digital footprint, as well as an international audience, publishers might be interested in this aspect of the project.  Luckily for me, in Canada (publishing remains highly territorial for all but the biggest selling authors), Landing Gear was bought by Doubleday, which is part of Penguin Random House, and they responded with enthusiasm to the idea of building digital experimentation into publishing the novel.

Meghan MacDonald, Digital Project Manager at Penguin Random House, thought it would be interesting to build an API based on a 30-page extract of the novel. An API – application processing interface – is what enables two software programmes to talk to each other; we use them all the time these days. One example is the Google Maps API which allows you to create and save personalised Google Maps; another is the API that allows you to access your photos from Flickr via Facebook.  With the development team, we embarked on indexing and metatagging the extract, using locations, timelines, events, and characters as our main points. This created a raw API which we are in the process of offering to developers to build on; we took the API to a hackday in San Francisco in October, and a developer there, David Harris (@physicsdavid) created a tweetbot that offers and responds to interaction around the character Yacub’s dialogue.  We plan to take the API to other hackdays in order to see what developers do with it; I’d be keen to see a public interface developed for it that will allow readers to interact directly with the text of the novel, writing their own responses and ideas into it, creating their own versions of this extract. But whether or not that will arise out of this development process remains to be seen.

Another project that is currently bubbling away is a collaboration with Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing programme in Vancouver. We are looking at offering the digital assets that were created for ‘Flight Paths’ for remix and re-engineering during a week-long publishing hackfest offered to students and publishing industry professionals who want the opportunity to play with collaboration and new forms of digital writing and digital publishing.  Again, I’m hoping that new versions of the story will emerge from this process.

‘Flight Paths’ emerged from a long process of collaboration, and the discussions around this project fed into the even longer process of writing the novel Landing Gear. The fact that this is now leading on to further collaborations with both my Canadian publisher and SFU is very exciting. For me this is a major step toward busting the book itself out of its silo, allowing the novel to become a responsive and iterative digital artefact. For me, one of the key features of this process is the fact that it is possible to expand the world of the novel through these projects while retaining the integrity of the novel itself; Landing Gear will be published in the traditional manner which, these days, means hardcover and ebook initially, with all the steps that publishing books well require: cover and page design, publicity, print distribution, as well as, most importantly to me, editorial.  My editor at Doubleday, Nita Pronovost, has been involved in all our discussions around digital experimentation and her input has been invaluable; she brings a highly literary sensibility to bear on our discussions and has been able to give us a necessary steer from time to time as we veer into territory that might not be as productive or interesting for readers as it should be.

Take a look at Flight Paths here: http://www.flightpaths.net

Take a look at the API project for Landing Gear here: http://bookcontentapi.devcloud.acquia-sites.com/

The novel of Landing Gear will be available from April 2014.

In 2006 Chris Joseph and I were commissioned to create a series of interactive stories for a marketing campaign for a feature film that didn’t exist.  From that inauspicious beginning, Inanimate Alice has gone on to become one of the most popular digital stories for educators around the world, from primary to doctoral level.  How and why did this happen?

The publishing story behind Inanimate Alice is a tale of mistakes, bad ideas, good ideas, dead-ends, lucky accidents, and spectacular success.  Inanimate Alice consists of four episodes that reside online, with a further six episodes planned.  Created by myself and web artist Chris Joseph, Inanimate Alice was commissioned and financed by Bradfield Ltd producer Ian Harper.  The stories are told through text, music, games, images, sound effects, and video and are available for free.

Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology.   Ian Harper had written a screenplay for a feature film and had the idea that he could generate interest in the script by publishing a series of short, interactive, online multimedia stories that provided a backstory to the script itself.  Harper was also involved in a company that had created a gadget, for domestic use, that could detect electronic emissions, the Electrosmog Detector; the sound made by the detector when it picks up electronic emissions is used as background noise in all the episodes.  To date, the screenplay has not been made into a film, and the gadget has not sold in vast quantities; however, Inanimate Alice continues to grow and thrive.

In 2006 there was so little of this kind of storytelling around – accessible, screen-based, digital stories – that Chris and I had no idea of what to call it.  We used the term ‘webvid’, which, thankfully, hasn’t survived. Our budgets were very small; we considered using photos of actors to represent our characters, Alice and her parents, and we considered animating the characters, but we couldn’t afford either option.  This was our first lucky accidents: one important aesthetic feature of Inanimate Alice is that Alice herself is never represented visually on screen.  This practical decision had large creative ramifications:  the fact that Alice remains off-screen throughout renders this hybrid form of storytelling closer to that of reading a book, where it falls upon the reader to imagine the main character’s appearance.  This aspect, combined with the first person narrative voice, draws readers into Alice’s world, allowing readers to identify with Alice, to place themselves in the story.

Lucky accident number two was that Chris Joseph and I did not initially consider the fact that a work about a child might appeal to children, an aspect of the project that seems obvious with hindsight.  Children have been among our most passionate readers.

Lucky accident number three: our character, Alice, wants to be a games designer when she grows up, and it was this aspiration that allowed us to embed games into the stories in a way that made narrative sense. In each episode the games included are representative of what a talented child Alice’s age might be able to create herself.   Accordingly, the level of interaction and gaming skill required by the reader increases with each episode as Alice reaches age 8, 10, 12, and 14.  This gradual increase in interactivity through the episodes has meant that the work functions well as a primer or introduction to digital fiction.

In 2007, I was teaching part-time at De Montfort University, where a PhD student, Jess Laccetti, was researching multi-modal fiction.  Jess was very interested in digital pedagogy, and was in contact with a number of educators at primary, secondary, and HE level. We’d already begun to have interest in the project from teachers, so Ian Harper commissioned Jess to write a set of teacher’s notes, and this was part of what kick-started Inanimate Alice as a tool for digital literacy in schools and universities.  As well as that, Jess is an Italian speaker; she offered to translate the text of the work.  From the web analytics it became apparent early on that Inanimate Alice was drawing readers from many non-English speaking countries and we decided to provide translations of the text in French, German, and Spanish as well. These multilingual aspects of the project fuelled further growth in its readership.

From early on, Inanimate Alice won prizes, including awards in Italy, South Korea, the USA, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. It featured in digital arts exhibitions as well as being promoted by countless teacher-advocates, desperate for engaging digital content suitable for use in the classroom. All of this meant that our audience continued to grow and expand.  Other factors contributed to its success as a title, not the least of which is that all four episodes are available to view for free.  Episodes three and four have two versions:  ‘read-only’ and ‘full version’.  In the full version readers need to complete games before they can move on in the story; in the read-only version the games are by-passed.  Early and anecdotal reader response showed us that our audience is split evenly between those who enjoy the games and those who do not; we took a decision to accommodate both types of readers throughout the remainder of the series.

For me, a pivotal moment came in March 2009, when my Google Alerts first picked up multiple versions of Inanimate Alice: Episode 5;Chris and I had not yet created a fifth episode.  Following the links I discovered that an American high school English teacher, Ms Aronow, had been using Inanimate Alice with a group of ‘hard to reach’ teenagers, encouraging them to create their own versions of episode five using Microsoft Powerpoint, which Ms Aranow published on her class blog.  Discovering these episodes gave new meaning to me for the potential of ‘interactivity’, a term often heralded at the time as the new paradigm for reading and writing.  It was flattering to discover a text I’d written disseminated and reconstructed in this manner, of course, but more importantly, these new episodes are a true indicator of the potential for reader-writer, reader-text interaction, as well as for digital fiction in the classroom.  New episodes have continued to appear online regularly, from around the world; for example, a New Zealand teacher, Mr Woods, encourages his Samoan students to use their own language and culture in their versions of the stories.  Ian Harper has continued to expand the project as a pedagogical tool, making links throughout the large education market; our most recent commission, from Education Services Australia, was a series of twelve photo-stories describing a year Alice and her parents spend living in Australia.  This is where the still developing business model for the project is emerging; the fact that there hasn’t been a new episode since 2009 has not hindered the growth of the project.

It’s been a fascinating process to watch a work like Inanimate Alice, which was not intended, originally, as an educational title, being adopted, adapted, and augmented by educators.  We’ve been able to capitalise on that interest by creating pedagogical tools and spaces for discussion specific to Inanimate Alice and have collaborated with Promethean Planet, Edmodo, and Everloop to create bespoke materials. 2012 saw two big developments:  the American Association of School Librarians named our site as a ‘Best Website for Teaching and Learning’ and the Mozilla Foundation Webmaker project used Inanimate Alice to develop their online remix tool, X-Ray Goggles.

In conclusion, the sizable audience of children for Inanimate Alice has redefined the work as children’s literature, while its popularity with teachers has repositioned it as a classroom resource. Neither of these outcomes were anticipated by us when we set out to create our first ‘webvid’ back in 2006.  

A few examples of new episode fives:

Aronow’s English 10 blog:  http://aronowsenglish10.blogspot.com/

http://6cathie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-itUTAlahrw&feature=related

Alice and Friends – Digital Literacy wiki built around IA, created by two teachers in Australia: http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/

Mr Woodz NZ class lesson plans:  http://inanimatealice-aperspective.wikispaces.com/

Mozilla Webmaker, ‘Make Your Own Episode of Inanimate Alice’: https://webmaker.org/en-US/projects/make-your-own-episode-inanimate-alice/