There is a broad consensus that digital narrative is "spatial," but what this critical term means and how it is used varies greatly depending on the discipline from which it is approached. Digital Narrative Spaces brings together essays by prominent scholars in electronic literature and other forms of digital authorship to explore the relationship between story and space across these disciplines. This volume includes an introduction with Marie-Laure Ryan’s typology of space, followed by thought-provoking individual chapters which explore innovative explorations of electronic literature, locative media, literary tourism, and the mapping of real-world literary spaces. The collection closes with an essay analyzing continuities and discontinuities in theory of space across the chapters. This volume will provide an important framework for establishing a dialogue across disciplines and future scholarship in these fields.

Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding how space works in narrative and narrative theory and how narratives work in real space. Thus far, space has traditionally been viewed by narratologists as a backdrop to plot. This study argues that space serves important but under-explored narrative roles: It can be a focus of attention, a bearer of symbolic meaning, an object of emotional investment, a means of strategic planning, a principle of organization, and a supporting medium. Space intersects with narrative in two principal ways: ''Narrating space'' considers space as an object of representation, while ''spatializing narrative'' approaches space as the environment in which narrative is physically deployed. The inscription of narrative in real space is illustrated by such forms as technology-supported locative narratives, street names, and historical/heritage site and museum displays. While narratologists are best equipped to deal with the narration of space, geographers can make significant contributions to narratology by drawing attention to the spatialization of narrative. By bringing these two approaches together--and thereby building a bridge between narratology and geography--Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative yields both a deepened understanding of human spatial experience and greater insight into narrative theory and poetic forms.

This open access book considers the stories of adolescents and young adults from different regions of the world who use digital media as instruments and stages for storytelling, or who make the media the subject of story telling. These narratives discuss interconnectedness, self-staging, and managing boundaries. From the perspective of media and cultural research, they can be read as responses to the challenges of contemporary society. Providing empirical evidence and thought-provoking explanations, this book will be useful to students and scholars who wish to uncover how ongoing processes of cultural transformation are reflected in the thoughts and feelings of the internet generation.

The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

Refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by looking at digital-born fictions.

This remarkably clearly written and timely critical evaluation of core issues in the study and application of interactive digital narrative (IDN) untangles the range of theories and arguments that have developed around IDN over the past three decades. Looking back over the past 30 years of theorizing around interactivity, storytelling, and the digital across the fields of game design/game studies, media studies, and narratology, as well as interactive documentary and other emerging forms, this text offers important and insightful correctives to common misunderstandings that pervade the field. This book also changes the perspective on IDN by introducing a comprehensive conceptual framework influenced by cybernetics and cognitive narratology, addressing limitations of perspectives originally developed for legacy media forms. Applying its framework, the book analyzes successful works and lays out concrete design advice, providing instructors, students, and practitioners with a more precise and specific understanding of IDN. This will be essential reading for courses in interactive narrative, interactive storytelling, and game writing, as well as digital media more generally.

The book shows how digital-interactive television (digiTV) will affect the relation between the broadcaster and the consumer. Standardization processes, technological paradigms, and application development issues will be discussed. The emerging applications, innovations, and future concepts are described in detail. The triangle: content - end-user - technology will be conceptualized to create a vision and to overview provision of services that will be major innovative elments in the world of digital television. From the technical side, eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based metadata standards are a major element in realizing new innovative concepts in the world of digital, interactive television. This book clearly shows by the introduction of applications and use-scenarios, which conceptual requirements and metadata models are applicable, which metadata subsets are applicable due to resource limitations, which metadata aspects are needed for nonlinear content viewing, etc. The book gives a broad and detailed both visionary and technical overview useful for graduates, engineers, and scientists; and last but not least decision-makers in the broadcasting industry.