You can download the press release as a PDF here: QUT and BSU partner with The Writing Platform

Queensland University of Technology invests in The Writing Platform and Bath Spa University extends its support in 2014 

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has invested in UK project The Writing Platform, becoming its official Australian partner. It joins Bath Spa University which has extended its partnership for 2014.

The Writing Platform, set up by The Literary Platform in 2012 with National Lottery funding and support from Arts Council England, includes a website, bursary scheme and live events programme dedicated to helping writers understand their creative and career options in the digital age.

The two university partnerships enable The Writing Platform to extend its international audience and expand the range of resources and events it offers writers.

Donna Hancox, Senior Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology, takes up the role of Australian Project Editor and will commission content from Australian writers and thought leaders in digital writing and publishing.

Bath Spa University has extended its support for 2014, with additional investment in editorial content and the bursary scheme. Kate Pullinger, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media, who co-founded the project with The Literary Platform, continues in her role as Editorial Director. Bath Spa University and The Writing Platform will once again collaborate on the MIX: Text on Screens conference in 2014.

“QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty is excited to partner with the Writing Platform to explore digital futures for writers and equip them with the tools they may need for a diverse writing future.  We are looking forward to combining our research skills and creative networks with the expertise of The Writing Platform to deliver innovative content and spark discussion from the Asia Pacific region” said Professor Helen Klaebe, Assistant Dean, Research and Business Development, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.

“We are delighted to be renewing our partnership with The Writing Platform. Bath Spa University aims to develop and sustain a dynamic culture of digital practice and research in key areas such as creative writing. The Writing Platform enables us to share our resources and knowledge with an international network of emerging and established writers” said Bambo Soyinka, Head of Creative Writing and Publishing at Bath Spa University.

www.thewritingplatform.com is a resource for writers and poets­ – whether they are emerging or established, traditionally published, self-published ­or not yet published – and provides neutral and best practice information about writing in the digital age. Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher, Naomi Alderman and Porter Anderson. The Writing Platform also holds an annual fair and conference at Rich Mix, London, offering panel discussions, seminars, workshops and networking opportunities, which was last year sponsored by Kobo Writing Life.

In 2013 The Writing Platform ran its first Bursary Scheme, funded by NALD (National Association for Literature Development), which enabled two writers and two creative technologists to collaborate on a project of their choosing.

“We are delighted to be welcoming QUT on board as official partners to The Writing Platform and to be renewing our productive partnership with Bath Spa University, it’s a real vote of confidence in the work we are doing. These partnerships allow us to expand the resources we offer writers and develop our work in different territories, it’s an honour to be working with two such forward thinking institutions.” said Joanna Ellis, COO, The Literary Platform and co-founder, The Writing Platform.

For press enquiries and more information contact Laura Creyke, laura@theliteraryplatform.com / 07951 777 407

www.thewritingplatform.com

@thewritplatform

Notes to Editors:

About Queensland University of Technology

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a highly successful Australian university with an applied emphasis in courses and research. Based in Brisbane, the university has a global outlook, some 44,000 students, including 6000 from overseas, and an annual budget of more than AU$872 million.

Unique to QUT is the Bachelor of Creative Industries, which equips graduates with diverse knowledge, creativity and professional skills across a range of industries and practice.  Located in the Creative Industries Precinct, alongside research centres and creative enterprises, the QUT Creative Industries Faculty is not only training the creative workforce, but working with industry and government to grow the sector.

The Creative Industries Faculty offers specialist degrees across a range of creative study areas include the Bachelor of Fine Arts, Bachelor of Entertainment Industries, Bachelor of Music, Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Media and Communication degrees. Staff and students of the Faculty are noted for pushing disciplinary boundaries and many are producing bold experimental work in the digital and live domains.  Emphasising practice-led research has resulted in national and international recognition for the Faculty, and QUT is changing and evolving the modes of creative communication through its research.

About Bath Spa University

Bath Spa University is where creative minds meet. Offering a wide range of courses across the arts, sciences, education, social science and business to 7,000 students, the University employs outstanding creative professionals, which support its aim to be a leading educational institution in creativity, culture and enterprise. Based in stunning countryside just a few minutes from a World Heritage City, Bath Spa University ensures its students graduate as engaged global citizens who are ready for the world of work. In fact, 93 per cent of graduates find themselves in work or further study within six months.

The University also hosts one of the UK’s best-known centres for teaching creative writing. The Creative Writing Department, within the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, recently appointed 10 new teaching and research professors — all highly acclaimed in their creative fields — to join a distinguished team of practitioner researchers. Two of these appointments, Kate Pullinger and Naomi Alderman, reflect the vital role and priority Bath Spa has given to questions of writing and digital technology, as well as the digital future of the writing industry more generally. At Bath Spa University, as well as focusing on excellence in creative writing across all genres, digital forms are embedded in the creative writing curriculum from undergraduate through MA and PhD level.

Bath Spa has recently invested £26 million in digital media labs; these labs will be ready for use in 2014. As a recent recipient of the EU Commission’s ‘HR Excellence in Research’ award, the University Research Strategy aims to develop and sustain the culture of research and scholarship across the institution and its national and international profile in key areas such as creative writing. www.bathspa.ac.uk

About The Literary Platform

The Literary Platform is a specialist organisation working at the heart of books and technology. In 2013 it was selected for the British Council Creative Economy’s list of Top Ten UK Creative Entrepreneurs, and in the Guardian Professional/h.Club 100 list of most innovative and influential in the creative industries 2013.

It works with a wide range of clients, academic institutions and other organisations on research projects looking at the impact of technology on writers and publishing, as well as conceiving and producing its own projects with funding from Arts Council England and NALD such as The Writing Platform and Fiction Uncovered.

The Writing Platform bursaries have come to a close. We caught up with Ben Gwalchmai and James Wheale. This team  used the bursary to build on their existing work on story and movement and build a prototype of a mobile app called Fabler. Fabler enables users to experience story through movement: stories will play when the user is moving and stop when the user is still, with bonus content being revealed as the user progresses through the story. You can read their project diary entries here and here.

Hear about creative matchmaking from the second team, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, here and here, and read their final wrap interview here.

–

What did you make and where can our readers try it out? 

BG: We made a whole host of funs. We made an understanding that we’re all polymaths now. We also made an app prototype.

In order to try the Fabler prototype, you’ll need to download the AppFurnace app from your app store (iOS or Google’s Play Store, unfortunately I don’t think it’s on the Windows Phone Store) then add an app by pressing the + button, then using this url http://the.appfurnace.com/test/K25Nr/ thereafter you’ve just got to touch the title and press ‘play’. Let us know what you think!

JW: We made a working prototype of our Fabler Move engine, complete with a Tapas of working example pieces. Fabler Move is an audio playback system for stories that requires listeners to move to trigger audio. You can try our early prototype by following the instructions at fablermove.com

You had already developed the initial concept for Fabler before the bursary, what did the bursary enable you to do?

BG: The bursary enabled us to actually spend the time writing for and making Fabler.

JW: Make it. The award allowed us to commission a system whereby we took on the responsibility of testing and fine-tuning thus massively reducing total cost. The initial cash injection allowed us to plan out Fabler properly and build it to be scalable. Getting the ball rolling with the outsourced developer also freed us up away from the tech side of things, allowing us to focus on how one best creates content for it.

How do you work together? Are there clear delineations for who does what? Or do you both pitch in with everything?

BG: We’re a machine – a singular machine with two humans inside it in some kind of Drift. We operate the body Fabler.

JW: Yes. To be honest, applying under the term of ‘technologist’ was a little bit ridiculous given that I am professionally a writer. However, having clearly focused roles, much like a director and producer, I suspect allowed us to progress the app a lot quicker than otherwise. Ben and I are close friends as well as business partners and the Literary platform has afforded us the confidence to create full scale business plans and a set of goals.

 The period the bursary covered is over, what’s next for Fabler?

BG: BIG MAGIC FUN TIMES, YES? & <>s. BIG <>s. As well as much <3. More wine, also.

JW: We’ve applied for the IC digital sports innovation contest award and are waiting to hear back from that. We’re also going for arts council funding and are looking at a kickstarter project to provide apps for charities, which would be super interesting. So we’re still at the point of a cash injection before a business really takes off but I’m keen for an extension of this incubator period. We’ve forged some really exciting relationships and developed some integral ideas. A continuation of this process for another 6-12 months I think will really benefit us in the long run.

And what’s next for each of you – any projects we should be keeping our eyes peeled for?

BG: My debut novel, Purefinder, is coming out on December 13th and I’m making an adventure in Bodiam Castle with Splash & Ripple.

JW: Still touring my book Maskboy around the UK. I direct the world’s largest street game, 2.8 Hours Later – the cross city zombie chase game, for Slingshot and that’s touring until November. More info on that is available at 2.8hourslater.com.

The Writing Platform bursaries have come to a close. We caught up with Laura Grace and Caden Lovelace, creators of Invisible Islands.

Caden and Laura applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. You can read their project diary entries here and here.

You can hear from Writing Platform Bursary winners; actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about the development of their mobile app Fabler here and here, and read their project wrap interview here.

–

What did you make and where can our readers try it out?

Visit http://invisibleislands.com/ on your mobile device of choice!

CL: We made an entire other world. It wasn’t easy, but at least we have somewhere to go now when we’re through with this one. It’s in the form of an app, though, which makes me hope that the apocalypse isn’t too wet. In any case — it’s a web-app that, with the aid of your phone’s GPS, positions you on a map of some alternate world populated by small islands with diverse cultures. It’s a travel-guide, too, so you won’t feel lost even if in fact you are.

LG: I like to call it “A fanciful real-world journey across an imaginary archipelago.” It’s a browser-based app that works on location-enabled mobile devices. The central interface is a map, overlaid on your current location, populated with mysterious islands. To visit one, you need to physically walk there. We don’t specify a route, we just tell you the distance (as the crow flies) – the idea is that you explore your location in a new way, see your environment a little differently. Think of it as a quest, an adventure.

When you reach your destination, you unlock that island’s travelogue. Each one is a self-contained narrative, a land that buffets against your real-world location, and might make you look at the world anew, transport you somewhere else, or spark your imagination.

How did you come to the idea for Invisible Islands?

LG: Well, I’m an islander (my family’s lived in the Outer Hebrides since Viking times), and I’ve always been a little obsessed with islands and, more abstractly, the idea of being islanded – by pain, by love, by isolation. Invisible Islands actually began as a self-imposed writing exercise, inspired equally by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books (with the ever-changing magical land at the top of the titular tree).

I wrote a list of fantastical islands – The Island of Regrets, The Island of Lost Socks, The Island in the Stars, The Island of Everlasting Night, etc, and wrote 500 or so words every morning exploring what you might find if you visited each place.  As it grew, I began to see it as an interactive fiction of some kind – I liked the idea of a reader navigating a text in an unfamiliar way, stumbling across a fantastical place in an unlikely location. When Caden and I began talking about areas to explore as part of The Writing Platform bursary, the project struck a chord with both of us, and it became something even more exciting.

Laura you applied as a writer, Caden you applied as a technologist, how did you allocate the work? Were there clear delineations for who did what?

CL: Someone — I think possibly one of my art teachers at school — told me that when I was drawing something I should be spending 90% of my time with my eyes on the subject and only 10% on the paper. I don’t know about that as a rule — but in terms of collaboration it has always seemed to me that the conversation that is the bulk of the useful work, rather than the actual making. Laura and I stuck to our respective ‘making’ roles (her writing, my coding), but we shared the direction, in every sense of the word.

The most important role of the technologist is to say ‘yes, this is possible’ rather than ‘no, this is too hard / too much work’ (almost always meaning ‘I don’t know how’) — upon this hinges the quality and power of the result. I’m certainly not claiming to have never said the latter in the course of this project! But hopefully I’ve said ‘it’s possible’ enough to have brought out the idea.

LG: We spent a good while throwing around ideas and points of inspiration – writers we liked, shared interests. That made narrowing in on a shared vision much easier. I work with technologists on a daily basis so we had plenty of common ground when it came to mapping out the user experience, but Caden was definitely the voice of reason when it came to defining what was achievable within our limited timescale (working around day jobs, etc).

 You didn’t know each other before the bursary, how was it collaborating with a stranger? Did it differ to your previous experiences of collaboration? And would you work together again?

CL: Certainly. In my experience many collaborative projects fizzle out before they even get started! To take this one to some degree of ‘completion’ is certainly exciting and valuable, and no small amount due to knowing that The Writing Platform were keeping track of our progress (in a benevolent way, of course!)

It was quite interesting, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also slightly intimidating, to be doing the whole ‘getting to know’ process simultaneous with the idea forming and building processes. When I’m acting in a ‘technologist’ role I am very eager to please — perhaps even too eager at times, and trying to work out what sort of ideas Laura would be interested in without knowing her at all was certainly challenging! But I feel like we came to a mutually interesting idea, which is positive.

LG: It was a great experience – I think we were well-matched in terms of interests and approach. I actually found that getting thrown in the deep end – in terms of getting stuck into collaborating together – was a really effective away to get the project moving. Working with friends, or even colleagues, can be tricky – an existing relationship brings a certain amount of baggage, and it can be harder to negotiate ownership of a project or an idea. With the bursary, we were both bringing very different skills to our project, and making something that scratched a creative itch for both us was very much the focus. I think it worked really well. And I’d be happy to work together again, particularly in developing Invisible Islands beyond the MVP it is now.

The period the bursary covered is over, do you have further plans for developing Invisible Islands?

CL: The next step from my perspective is to put it into the form of an app rather than a website-for-phones. There’s very little difference really, but I suppose it is similar to the difference between paperback and hardback books — a feeling of ‘value’ or ‘quality’. Aside from this, there’s plenty of edge-cases to be taken care of and bugs to be ironed out. One of the tricky things about working with locative media and also with mobile devices is that it’s difficult to test it yourself — chances are all of the people who use this will be using it in situations that I haven’t!

LG: As Caden says, I think native app functionality would bring a lot to this project – for example, a thoughtful implementation of unobtrusive push notifications would work really well. In terms of the narrative, I’d really like this to be a project that evolves over the longer term. The possibilities for island destinations are pretty much infinite! Also, from the start it’s been an ambition of mine to include a collaborative element to the narrative itself – I love the idea of anyone being able to contribute island reports, and incorporating that into the text as it grows.

What’s next for each of you – any projects we should be keeping our eyes peeled for?

CL: Always, too many! I’m currently working on a project for a week long ‘tumblr-residency’ at the Internet Archive early next year (you can follow here) involving archaic MS-DOS interfaces. As well as this I’m planning the next phase of my avant-publishing project $5 Words and performing with Jerome Fletcher at the Electronic Literature Organisation conference, Paris, in late September.

If you like ‘weird twitter’ you can follow me at @neoeno and if you like ‘weird facebook’ you can follow me at fb.me/neoeno.

LG: Loads! But, most recently I’ve been working on a cross-platform TV pilot (with Doctor Who writer Stephen Greenhorn), funded by Creative Scotland and Playwrights’ Studio Scotland. It’s about hackers and rural murders and is pretty action-packed.

I’m also delving into something a little different at the moment – a line of bath products (really) that have been developed around the idea of brand storytelling as non-linear narrative, products that tell a story and offer a shared sensory experience. This was a personal project that has become an internal venture with Mint Digital. I’m really excited to see how it evolves!

I’m on that Twitter too – I’m @usherette.

A second diary entry from 2013 Writing Platform bursary winners actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and James Wheale; this team used the bursary to build on their existing work on story and movement and build a prototype of a mobile app called Fabler. Fabler enables users to experience story through movement: stories will play when the user is moving and stop when the user is still, with bonus content being revealed as the user progresses through the story. 

Read their first diary entry here and their project wrap interview here.

Hear about creative matchmaking from the second team, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, here and here and read their wrap interview here.

—

Well we’ve gone and done it now – we’ve got ourselves a prototype.

It’s not yet as fully functional as we’d like but it certainly works.

If you’d like to try it out too, you just need to download the AppFurnace app from your App Store and add an app to AppFurnace with this URL: http://the.appfurnace.com/test/K25Nr/

Once you’ve loaded Fabler, select your activity [walking, running, cycling] in the settings then select your story in the content. Walk. Done.

In the coming months we’ll be adding more to it. You’ll be able to unlock more the more you come back.

We had a great day at the Mix 2 Digital conference presenting Fabler and talking with a great many fascinating people.

In many ways, we’re still analysing and working with the contacts we’ve made over the past 2 months to see what else Fabler can do.

As discussed at the conference, we’ve big plans for Fabler:

• Fabler: Still
• Fabler: Sports
• Fabler: …

That last isn’t a plan so much as a project plan – ‘Let’s see what else Fabler can do.’

We’re applying for Arts Council funding to further our research and we’ll be applying for a fund together with the Mixed Reality Lab from the University of Nottingham to see just how much Fabler can do.

The prototype isn’t the end of Fabler but, rather, just the beginning.

Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about the development of their mobile app Fabler here and hear, and their project wrap interview here.

Caden Lovelace, gives us an update on his and Laura Grace’s locative app which now has a name: Invisible Islands. The mystery deepens…

–

Did you know that, when you open your browser on your smartphone or tablet, the odds are that it is able to find out what direction you are facing? It doesn’t even have to ask you. It would be possible, perhaps even necessary, to create a text that is different when facing east than facing west. Combined with assessing the local time, it is possible to create a text that can only be read alongside the sunset, or the sunrise.

That is not what we are making. The simplest ideas transfix me at the moment, as I am working with the most complex. Laura and I have decided, from our island paradise, to create something big. We long dreamed of a writing as large as the world, and I hope that with this project we come a degree closer to this eventual goal.

This is a map of Falmouth, Cornwall, where I live. I am where the arrow is. I believe this map to be approximately 2.5 miles from corner to corner. The map extends, beyond the boundaries of the screen, to the limits of the world. To your house, to abandoned villages in South America, to every mile of anonymous ocean. Every point on earth has its corresponding point in this imagined map; somehow either above, below, or through our own. It is perhaps like the internet now is; passing right through us, omnipresent, ready for us to tap in.

The problems I am grappling with now are the problems of vastness. Absurd problems, like: what happens in Antarctica? Who can hold this giant map? How can our map best match the real world?

What does this have to do with writing? You can find out at the Bath Spa MIX Making Day. I am looking forward to telling you.

–

Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about their mobile app Fabler here and hear.

The final projects from both Bursary teams were showcased Wednesday the 17th July at our Making Day for writers at the MIX Conference 2013, a day of experimentation, collaboration and play for writers looking to learn new skills and develop their creative practice. 

The second of the two teams awarded The Writing Platform bursary fill us in on their progress: Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for the bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey.

Read their second diary entry here and their final wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about their mobile app Fabler here and hear, and read their final wrap interview here.

—

As briefs go, The Writing Platform Bursary’s remit is a broad and exciting one: we’re tasked with creating something that makes use of existing digital tools, and brings “new ideas and solutions for the wider writing community.” Daunting, but full of possibilities. Together with technologist, Caden Lovelace, I’ve spent the last six weeks digging deeper into this challenge, throwing around concepts of varying degrees of terribleness (in the firm belief that quantity beats quality in brainstorming), drinking plenty of coffee, and generally enjoying that magical first stage of making things – coming up with crazy, impossible ideas. And then, of course, you’ve got to actually make something. That part’s harder. As I write this, we’re just about at the half-way point in the Bursary timeline, on-track to reveal our hideous progeny/delightful creation at Bath Spa University’s MIX Conference in July. We’re excited.

One of the most enjoyable parts of this whole process has been the experience of creative matchmaking, as facilitated by the wise judges of this year’s Bursary. Caden and I had never met prior to winning but, as we’ve discovered, our literary interests and touch-points are rather scarily simpatico. Equally, our individual points of focus have proved nicely complementary: Caden tackling the problem from a technologist’s point of view – with an awareness of both the possibilities and restrictions available to us. Leaving me to both indulge some flights of fancy with the narrative side, and explore the product’s user experience from an author’s point of view – something I’ve found really inspiring. It’s interesting to think of a piece of fiction as a ‘product’. Who will use it, and why? How will they use it, and where? It opens out a narrative experience beyond text, into something to be used, prodded, played with. Something that can fit into a reader’s life in a new way, and can exist more concretely in the ‘real world’.

Living in different cities has meant that, for the most part, we’ve had to collaborate remotely – with long email threads forming the basis of our process. As we’re still at the delicate building-and-refining stage, we’re not quite ready to reveal specific details of what we’ve come up with (sorry!), but here’s a taster of the points of inspiration that our emails have covered (hint: what we’re working on is hidden in there somewhere…):

–        Stories for mobile devices

–        Italo Calvino

–        unresolved detective stories

–        narrative-led lucid dreaming

–        shape-shifting/responsive stories

–        Richard Linklater

–        social media as one vast intermeshed narrative

–        conversations with future selves

–        Borges

–        stories that take years to be told

–        Umberto Eco

–        location based stories

–        macro-locative stories

–        archaeologists of the future…

–        (We’ve also discovered a mutual love of lists.)

For this first blog post, we were asked to describe “the journey so far”. The experience of story as a journey, and as a destination, is something we’ve been particularly interested in – we’ll be expanding on this in later posts. More abstractly, the Bursary’s brief of exploring “new ideas and solutions” has been an invitation to set sail, to take a risk on creating something that might work, and might not. Whatever the result, we’re enjoying exploring an exciting territory – the place where stories meet technology, and anything can happen. And, as Henry Miller put it, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

The first of two teams awarded The Writing Platform bursary fill us in on their progress: Actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale used the bursary to build on their existing work on story and movement and build a prototype of a mobile app called Fabler. Fabler enables users to experience story through movement: stories will play when the user is moving and stop when the user is still, with bonus content being revealed as the user progresses through the story. 

Read their second diary entry here and their project wrap interview here.

Hear about creative matchmaking from the second team, Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace, here and here, and read their wrap interview here.

—

Understanding the benefits and limitations of what we’ve created has taken up most of our time.

We’ve written test stories – a tapas of tales – and plotted our future schedule. We’ve stayed up late into the night writing and recording, tinkering and testing. We know, for sure, that it won’t play in your pocket when you’re on a train. We also know that disco dance powered stories are a-go-go. We now understand our platform better which has honed our palette for creating content.

The visceral engagement with stories that we were after is already evident in our beta versions 0.1 and 0.2. Although it feels somewhat of a Pandora’s Box, we expected limitations.

We’ve recorded two test stories: one has a soundtrack, the other doesn’t. We’ve got technical specifications to figure out yet and continue to test. We’ve sent the beta out to some testers and we’re looking forward to the feedback. One of them is currently in Spain and testing how transposed the story makes you feel, even when surrounded by another language. One of them is fellow bursary winner Caden Lovelace and he has been instructed to find ways to kill it as efficiently as is possible and return it to us in several million pieces so we may figure out: one, how he was able to do so; and two, how we can ensure no one can do it again.

We’re meeting with sonic ethnographers, User Experience designers, and User Interface designers before we make 0.3.

James is cracking on with how best to integrate soundscapes, sound effects, and drafting music to match the form. Ben’s been recording his dulcet tones and honing story extracts to test out.

We’ve found the more you walk with someone whispering, bellowing, or laughing a story at you – a story that’s directly in your ear and responds to your movement – the nature of the stories we can use is affected. This is far more than an audiobook: your attention is piqued by these stories written specifically for this moving form.

You don’t want to stop moving. You want to finish the story.

The Writing Platform is pleased to announce the first beneficiaries of its bursary scheme awarding two writer-technologist partnerships with £3000 each.

The Bursaries have been awarded to Caden Lovelace @neoeno & Laura Grace @usherette and Ben Gwalchmai @BenGwalchmai & James Wheale @JamesWheale, both partnerships will work on a jointly conceived digital literature project for three months (from 1^st April – 30^th June 2013). At the end of this time they will present a piece of work or a prototype at Bath Spa’s Mix Day on 17th July and the work will be showcased on both The Writing Platform and The Literary Platform.

Established to support creative experimentation and interdisciplinary learning between writers and technologists, The Writing Platform Bursaries, supported by the NALD Futures Fund are awarded to writers and creative technologists who the judges believe will bring new ideas and solutions for the wider writing community while making creative use of existing, readily available, digital tools and platforms.

The Writing Platform Bursary launched in February 2013, receiving 77 entries across the board. The Bursary is supported by the NALD Futures Fund and the judging panel was Kate Pullinger, Editor of The Writing Platform and Professor of Creative Writing & Digital Media at Bath Spa University; Joanna Ellis, Associate Director, The Literary Platform and Leila Johnston, creative technologist and Managing Editor of The Literary Platform.

For more information about the winners and their projects see the full press release.

The Writing Platform Bursary, supported by the NALD Futures Fund, is designed to support inter-disciplinary learning and collaboration between writers and technologists.

The fund will support two one-off bursaries of £3000. Each bursary will be allocated to a project team, consisting of one writer and one technologist, who will work on a jointly-conceived digital literature project for a period of three months.

What we are looking for:

Projects that explore an issue that is relevant to the wider writing community. These might include, but are in no way confined to: new creative forms, methods of disseminating work, ways of engaging audience.

Ideas that make creative use of existing, readily available, digital tools and platforms to achieve their aims.

What we expect of bursary recipients:

At the end of the project each team will supply a piece of work or a prototype, along with a case study about their project and the experience of working together. Case studies will be published on The Writing Platform and The Literary Platform for the benefit of the wider writing and technology communities. The case studies may also be showcased at Writing Platform live events.

Projects will run for the three months from 1st April to 30th June 2013. Anyone applying for a bursary must be able to commit time to the project during this period.

The purpose of this bursary is to support inter-disciplinary learning and collaboration and so, naturally, we expect those participating in the projects to engage with one another in an open and supportive manner.

Eligibility criteria:

Only those resident in the UK are eligible to apply.

Writers are eligible if they can demonstrate that they are currently active and a desire to develop their practice in new ways.

We welcome applications from writers irrespective of whether they are traditionally published, self-published or unpublished.

Technologists are eligible if they can demonstrate an active interest in arts/ technology cross-over in their work to date.

Application process:

The deadline for applications midday on Tuesday 12th March 2013.

Successful applicants will be notified by Monday 25th March 2013.

Writers and technologists may apply individually or in ready-made pairs.

Ready-made pairs must consist of one writer and one technologist. The writer must meet the eligibility criteria for writers, the technologist must meet the eligibility criteria for technologists, outlined above.

If you are applying as an individual writer, you will find the form here.

If you are applying as an individual technologist, you will find the form here.

If you are applying as a writer/ technologist team, you will find the form here.

Selection and pairing process:

The bursaries will be awarded by a selection panel consisting of:

Kate Pullinger, writer, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, editor of The Writing Platform; Leila Johnston, creative technologist, journalist and maker; and Joanna Ellis, Associate Director at The Literary Platform.

Successful individual applicants will be paired by the selection committee according to common interests.

The decision of the selection panel is final.

If you have any questions about the bursary email hello(at)thewritingplatform(dot)com with the word ‘bursary’ in the subject field.

Good luck!