Digital Writers Research Articles

Paper and Technology Interaction in Production of Arabic Poetry: "Techno-Paper Poetry" Hypothesis as an Example

Since the emergence of the first signs of digital poetry in the early 1990s, a gap has been formed between two contrasting worlds: the physical (real) world and the virtual (digital) world. As time advanced with the advent of digital literature, the gap widened, leading to a profound intersection between individuals from both worlds, especially among the writers. Two contrasting tones, which are never converging, emerged: the tone of the traditional paper-based writer, who criticizes digital literature as a product of machines, claiming that those who believe in it lack the characteristics of true creativity and have escaped to the virtual world to hide their literary lack. On the other hand, the tone of the digital writer, who calls paper-based literature as remnants of the past, considering it inaccessible and it is impossible to interact with a defunct literature. These two tones had a significant impact on hindering communication with the digital literary system, resulting in its slow progress in the public cultural sphere and academic space. Thus, bridging the gap between the two worlds became essential by creating an intermediate transitional zone that represents a reassurance document for poets from the two opposing worlds, and serving that both forms of literature complete one another. The concept of "Techno-Paper Poetry" was introduced in 2019. It is based on two aspects: one being paper-based and the other digital. It involves a portion of the literature, which is written on paper, while the other is digitized and distributed online. Access to the digital section is achieved through the paper-based section by scanning the barcode or QR code using a dedicated application called "Aquarium Reader" installed on smart tablets. Based on the aforementioned, it becomes crucial to establish a literary roadmap to bridge the gap between these two worlds and legitimize this style of poetry as an active step towards pure digitization.

الأدب الرقمي العربي في محكّ الرصد التجنيسي؛ تأملات ومقارنات

This paper deals with the topic of Arabic digital literature from a genre perspective, looking at the extent to which its texts have sufficient characteristics to support its classification as an independent genre, by delving into an established question, which should not be skipped under any reason or pretext. The study contends that Arabic digital literature is still at the beginning of its path towards independence and the acquisition of a foundation that may be deemed unique. The Arabic digital writer still adheres to the paper style, drawn to the genres of written literature, as his texts do not include evidence of a deep assimilation of the characteristics of literature. It also lacks adequate absorption of its production and reception space and a clear distinction between the forms of expression provided by modern digital publishers, compared to what is provided by traditional paper carriers. Many Arab innovators continued to ruminate on the techniques of paper-based literary writing, arbitrarily transferring them to the computer world, without subjecting them to processes of experimentation and diligence that fit the new carrier. As a result, what they created were stylistically faded copies of texts, as if written or displayed on paper. This holds true despite the fact that few of them showed some boldness in synthesizing the distinctive artistic elements of different traditional genres, which make the digital space a window for creating very innovative and witty literary combinations. While many have taken advantage of some of the characteristics of digital expression, such as anonymity and interactivity, to create new textual forms that reveal large areas of daring and eagerness to cross some red lines, they have largely remained imprisoned by traditionally forged themes. Many of their texts also unfortunately remain tainted with some suspicion in regard to their legitimacy at the level of intellectual property, due to the intensification of piracy and plagiarism in the midst of the digital space.

Expert writers on how to achieve narrative immersion in digital games

ABSTRACT This paper explores the opportunities and challenges of writing narrative-driven digital games to foster a sense of narrative immersion. It does so by focusing on the experience of four expert writers, whose careers have spanned the modern video game era, and whose games have won awards and acclaim and sold in the millions. In their interviews, these game-writing pioneers describe some of the reasons that players play games, and convey their own struggles in writing for this medium. They suggest that those who wish to write high-quality, narrative-driven digital games should be well-versed in how to exploit a range of narrative elements, some of which are unique to games, while others have been present since storytelling began. They also stress the importance of understanding the complex interplay between narrative elements and game mechanics. Their suggestions underpin the development of several recommendations for the would-be digital game writer who seeks to foster a sense of narrative immersion for the player.

Addressing pre-service teachers as digital writers: Conflicts and inconsistencies in practice

ABSTRACT This article explores challenges faced when curriculum designers address pre-service English teachers as digital writers, in a “teacher as writer” program. The article considers the resilience of print dominance in writing, including in tertiary digital education spaces and how the rhetoric of digital expansion is accompanied by practices of proscription and constraint. While curriculum theory encourages pre-service teachers to think of themselves as agentive digital communicators, designers, and producers, their capacity to actually perform as digital writers during their formal studies may be limited. Teachers, meanwhile, may have ambivalent feelings about broadening definitions of writing. It seems that the entrenched nature of traditional literacies in education, despite rapid social change in broader communication media, results from a complex assemblage of generational and sexual politics, conservative or neoliberal agendas, and teacher workloads, capabilities and identities. The article invites others to consider contradictions in their own contexts.

The materiality of the intangible: Literary metaphor in multimodal texts

Based on a larger practice-based research project in digital writing, this article examines how the materiality of digital media contributes to a layered metaphor that delivers meaning, reflects on the cognitive processes (the writer’s and the reader’s) of navigation and generates a dynamic narrative structure through multimodality, unnatural narration and user interaction. Many writers and artists engage with their chosen medium through an instinctive understanding of the materials at hand, gained through experience; the explicit study of a medium’s materiality is not always required for artistic success, however, that may be judged. This article offers insights into the creative process of creating digital, multimodal fiction, based on a practice-based research project designed to explore the effects of digital media on author and text, and argues that digital media have a significant effect on the outcome of the artefact itself. Awareness of these effects, their variations according to hardware and software, and the affordances of these various materials offer the digital writer greater insight and capability to craft his/her texts for the desired metaphorical meaning.

Media

Media

‘Live and local’?

Literary festivals throughout the English-speaking world have been enthusiastic adopters of digital technology: uploading podcasts of author talks, posting videos of panel sessions to video-sharing sites such as YouTube, inviting guest bloggers to comment on proceedings and encouraging live-tweeting as a means of reinforcing audience members’ participatory agency. Such innovations serve to expand festivals’ reach to encompass dispersed audiences and, moreover, increase the longevity of previously transient events. They hence provide evidence to justify writers’ festivals’ claims on public funding as well as to delineate vibrant online and offline bookish communities of interest. However, wholesale uptake of digital technology destabilizes some previous givens of the literary festival as they have coalesced since the phenomenon’s 1980s efflorescence. The concept of authorship undergoes profound changes in a climate of online performativity, constant availability to readerships and digitally diminished ‘aura’. Equally, previously passive audiences are reconceptualized as amateur critics, co-publicists and even co-publishers in the case of crowdsourced subscription publishing. Festival programming may be sampled live or archived, and audiences are only partially tethered to a particular geographical location – a disarticulation taken to another level by emerging online-only writers’ festivals such as the #TwitterFiction Festival and the Digital Writers’ Festival. What are the implications of these shifts for our conceptualization of 21st-century literary community? This article seeks to address this question by proposing a theoretical framework for examining the digital/literary festival interface, analyzing a wide range of terrestrial and online-only festivals and underpinning this analysis with empirical audience interviewing conducted at multiple Australian and UK writers’ festivals and book towns. In bringing together these strands, the article presents a detailed picture of an important and currently underexplored dimension of the public encounter with literature at a moment of profound digital change.

Pervasive theatre

This article explores the opportunities and implications for new digital writing in transmedia performance environments. This article centres on the experimental Pervasive Theatre project ( Assault Events 2014, commissioned by futuredream funded through Arts Council England), which explored the potential of online social tools to create a multimedia, collaborative and participatory work situated across multiple platforms. This project brought together researchers, artists, writers, technologists and practitioners from the interdisciplinary fields of digital writing, transmedia and performance to explore ways to develop narratives that weave together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers in a way that would be exciting, immersive and participative. The project looked at different performative spaces including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vines, exploring how these platforms could support the delivery of original narrative performance. This transmedia approach informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working. Four aspects were of particular interest and will be explored in this article – how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them; how characteristics of different online social platforms inform style and content; how social media platforms can be used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers; and finally, how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning.

Leveraging Digital Mentor Texts to Write Like a Digital Writer

AbstractThis article presents an approach to reading like a digital writer to support adolescents' narrative writing in digital formats. By providing digital mentor texts for students to read like digital writers, a more comprehensive and perhaps deeper understanding of digital writing and the memoir genre can emerge.

‘An Infinitude of Possible Worlds’: Towards a Research Method for Hypertext Fiction

While the investigation of creative writing as a research method is gathering apace, little work has been done into the specific case of hypertext fiction (fiction written through a digital medium). This paper argues that, while there remain certain similarities between paper-based and digital texts, fundamental differences in design and construction remain. If hypertext fictions are to be successfully understood, then the role and purpose of the digital writer needs to be more fully analysed as part of the creative process. This paper argues that Possible Worlds Theory offers a way forward. With its focus on the ontological structures created by hypertext fiction, Possible World Theory actively embraces narrative indeterminacy and ontological changeability. In this sense the method provides a structured means by which the creative manipulation of the unique affordances of a digital medium by a writer can be theorised.

Collaborative writing: Duel

Abstract This article is a description of how the digital writers Andy Campbell and Kate Pullinger worked together to create a new piece of online fiction, Duel. Detailing their work processes, from conception through formatting a bespoke scripting process, and on to writing, creating digital assets, and technical experimentation, this article gives a clear and detailed picture of their collaboration.

Reimagining a Writer’s Process Through Digital Storytelling

Building on Hillocks’ (1995) concepts of the declarative and procedural knowledge that writers need in order to craft effective writing, this article explores the writing process of one pre-service teacher as she moved from a personal narrative to an essay to a digital story. The authors argue that digital writers—in addition to needing declarative and procedural knowledge—must also understand knowledge of technology in order to more fully realize the potential of digital storytelling. Implications for teachers and teacher educators are discussed in relation to Mishra and Koehler’s (2008) "technological pedagogical content knowledge,” or TPACK.

The Role of Invention in Digital Dating Site Profile Composition

Abstract This study investigates writers enacting rhetorical invention within a non-academic digital environment. The data described and analyzed came from dating site participants who completed surveys about their composing processes and who provided profiles they had previously written for a dating site. In particular, the investigation considers the inventional choices writers make to represent themselves through discourse in this particular environment. Qualitative textual analysis led to the identification of these digital writers’ invention strategies along four dimensions: assessing self, assessing task, planning/composing text, and assessing interaction. The findings complicate our understanding of the relationship between rhetorical invention, audience, and impression management and suggest that rather than engaging in invention within the discovery versus creation binary, digital writers actually employ a spectrum of approaches to invention. Overall, this study suggests that audience is deeply connected to invention throughout the profile composing process: the participants expressed concerns about ethos, pathos, and the process of impression management within their writing, and these concerns all connected to audience in various ways.

Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards call for an expanded view of literacy instruction, one where children learn to critically consume and produce text using technology and media. This article describes how a Digital Writers' Workshop can be a vehicle for integrating multimodal composition into the classroom. It offers general workshop principles and strategies, followed by a multimodal poem project illustrating how to scaffold students' design processes. It invites teachers to contribute to the conversation about literacy and technology integration at The Reading Teacher‘s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/pages/The-Reading-Teacher#!/pages/The-Reading-Teacher/297544810290021.

Ethos, Pathos, Logos, Kairos: Using a Rhetorical Heuristic to Mediate Digital-Survey Recruitment Strategies

How might the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos play a mediational, intervening role in the successful administration of online surveys? What are the general costs and benefits of conducting survey research? Based on the activity of administering an online survey ( N= 334) testing knowledge and understanding of US copyright law among digital writers (both students and teachers) in US technical and professional writing (TPW) programs, I blend Rhetorical Theory with Activity Theory by conducting a rhetorical analysis within an Activity Theory paradigm. I posit that a rhetorically informed heuristic mediates between the researcher and potential participants when the researcher attempts to recruit individuals to respond to an online survey.

Cross-Cultural Collisions in Cyberspace: Case Studies of International Legal Issues for Educators Working in Globally Networked Learning Environments

This article explores some of the legal and law-related challenges educators face in designing, implementing, and sustaining globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) in the context of conflicting international laws on intellectual property and censorship/free speech. By discussing cases and areas involving such legal issues, the article makes visible some of the issues educators may want to consider as they design courses and curricula. First, using the Pakistani–US case of Axact v. Student Network Resources, the author examines issues of authorship and the related issues of copyright law and plagiarism. The author then addresses questions, moral rights, and authorship using the French case of Turner v. Huston. Next, the author explores issues of free speech/censorship and defamation as they have arisen globally in the blogosphere. The author describes several specific instances where such issues have resulted in legal consequences for the digital writer involved. The author then develops a possible solution to some of these legal issues arising in GNLEs by way of the idea of ‘the commons’. In this area of the discussion, the author also examines Creative Commons licensing as well as problems with protecting the appropriation and exploitation of traditional knowledge, and the politics of defining ‘the commons’. The author draws on discussions around the global repatriation debate to inform her exploration in this section. Finally, the article concludes with some recommendations, taking into account the legal and law-related issues of copyright, plagiarism, censorship, defamation, and defining ‘the commons’ as these issues arise in GNLEs.

Teaching the new writing: technology, change, and assessment in the 21st-century classroom

How has the teaching of writing changed in the 21st Century? In this innovative guide, real teachers share their stories, successful practices, and vivid examples of their students' creative and expository writing from online and multimedia projects, such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, electronic poetry, and more! The book also addresses assessment: How can teachers navigate the reductive definitions of writing in current national and statewide testing? What are teacher's goals for their students' learning - and how have they changed in the past 20 years? What is 'the new writing'? How do digital writers revise and publish? What are the implications for the future of writing instruction?

Study Report: Knowledge and Influence of Copyright Law for U.S. Professional Writers Working in Educational-Context Digital Environments

In fall 2007, with the assistance of research adviser William Hart-Davidson, PhD, Co-Director Writing in Digital Environments Research Center, an empirical study was conducted exploring copyright law's mediational influence on digital composing using a sequential transformative mixed methods research design. A digital survey (N=334) was administered to a randomly selected population of students and teachers in US technical and professional writing programs. Discourse-based interviews designed to elicit tacit knowledge were also conducted with digital writers regarding how they factored in copyright law and fair use in their composing decisions. Student interviewees ranged from professional writing undergraduate to rhetoric and composition PhD candidate on the job market. The discourse-based interviews were supported as well by examining a wide variety of web texts supplied by research participant interviewees. The study sought to examine three main areas of inquiry: 1) the status of knowledge and understanding of copyright law in the field of technical and professional writing as well as with professional writers; 2) the thinking processes, or rhetorical invention, of writers in these programs composing webtexts in light of copyright law; and 3) what happens to mediational means as writers leverage them in digital contexts. In this report the study's six major findings and seven granular findings are briefly summarized and discussed. Questions, an answer key with explanations, and question-by-question survey results to the knowledge portion of the copyright quiz are provided. The source material for this report derives from dissertation research and text (Rife, 2008). This report outlines levels of chilled speech measured as part of the survey, as well as specific areas of misunderstanding and understandings about copyright law within the field of technical and professional writing and suggests implications for teaching, learning, and research.Six Major Findings:The study's six major findings were: 1) Web spaces are sites of cultural collision, or commonplaces, where writers occupy sometimes conflicting positions; 2) The intertextuality of web-space-writing provides support for Foucault's theory that the single author is an ideological production representing the opposite of its historical function, i.e. the author-function, in the larger culture; 3) Contrary to assertions by a number of scholars, for digital writers speech is not chilled. Copyright law as a system of invention organized by rhetoric instead produces speech; 4) Rhetorical topics congeal as a heuristic mediating the digital composing process of writers. Copyright law is just one topic in this heuristic, and not the most important topic; 5) For this group of writers, ethics trumped the law in importance when considering digital composing choices; 6) Whether copyright law serves as a rule or tool on the activity theory triangle is influenced by levels of writers' knowledge and understanding of the law. Seven Granular Findings:The study's seven granular findings concern clear misunderstandings among professional-digital writers regarding: 1) the difference between copyright and plagiarism; 2) the differences between unauthorized use and authorized use; 3) the government exception to copyright; 4) the fact that US copyright law protects creative work to a higher extent than it protects factual' work. Additionally clear areas of understanding are discussed such as: 5) understanding that US copyright protects derivative works; Despite claims of other scholars, the survey also found:6) digital writers were not all that uncertain about their knowledge of copyright and fair use and writers have a relatively stable confidence level regarding their own understandings of the law. Finally: 7) the technical and professional writing community believes that knowledge of copyright law is important to their work as digital writers.Implications:Implications for teaching, learning and research include suggestions for changing technical and professional writing curriculum and pedagogical approaches, the need for continued disciplinary theory building in the area of composing process theories as well as research design, and the call for additional research with respect to a number of complexities and contradictions that emerged from this study.

Digital Writer Story

Digital Writer Story