Listing entries tagged with story

creative versioning project   10.03.2005, 11:59 AM

"I don't have a single early draft of any novel or story. I just 'saved' over the originals until I reached the final version. All there is is the books themselves." - Zadie Smith

This is a call (re-published from the Electronic Literature Organization) for writers to participate in a creative versioning project, hopefully to begin this winter:

Matthew Kirschenbaum is looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution ­- thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.

For guidelines and contact info, visit ELO.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:59 AM | Comments (2)
tags: CVS , ELO , book , books , concurrent_versioning_system , digital , digital_literature , ebook , editing , eliterature , lit , literature , novel , project , revision , revision_history , story , versioning , writing

Intertextual Community   12.12.2004, 9:58 PM

When I read about Shelly Jackson’s new project—to “publish” a story by tattooing each of its 2,095 words onto the body of a different person—I thought what a great idea, and I wondered if it might actually be telling us something about the direction books are going. As the digital book begins to emerge—glorious, ephemeral, and electric—are we going to feel compelled to make something even more intimate and rarified as counterpoint?

"Skin Literature"

Posted by Kim White at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)
tags: experimental , hypertext , intertextuality , jackson , literature , narrative , publishing , story , tattoo

Live from "Scholarship in the Digital Age" Conference at USC: The New Story   12.10.2004, 2:53 PM

Scholarship in the Digital Age
This morning’s presentations got me thinking more about the narrative of the future—the multilayered, accreted story style that John Seely Brown referred to. How is that story going to be told and received? Will the novel become the dinosaur of alphabetic literacy?

Is the new book going to be a game, conversation, multi-layered, multi-authored, highly mutable and never-ending story? Assuming that the story is a conceptual device the culture uses to deconstruct reality, to make meaning, and to create, in some cases, a kind of anthem to rally around, what happens when our traditional narrative structures are replaced? If the single author, plot-driven novel is not the form of the future, then what do you get when you ask a million gamer/authors to shape an epic on the fly? What happens to our perception of reality if our stories are unstable, mutable, and open source?

Posted by Kim White at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Games , USC , book , books , conference , conferences_and_excursions , john_seely_brown , linearity , literacy , narrative , open_source , plot , story