Digital Narrative Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Examination

187 Pages·2021·4.259 MB·English

by  Daniel Punday (editor)

DIGITAL NARRATIVE SPACES
There is a broad consensus that digital narrative is “spatial,” but what this crit-
ical 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 inno-
vative 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.
Daniel Punday received his PhD in English at The Pennsylvania State
University. He is currently Head of the Department of English at Mississippi
State University. He has published on contemporary literature, digital narrative,
and narrative theory. He has recently completed his term as the president of
the International Society for the Study of Narrative. His previous publications
include Computing as Writing (2015) and Writing at the Limit: Searching for the
Vocation of the Novel in the Contemporary Media Ecology (2012).

DIGITAL NARRATIVE
SPACES
An Interdisciplinary Examination
Edited by Daniel Punday
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-51444-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-51443-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-05388-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003053880
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CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction: Four Types of Textual Space and their
Manifestations in Digital Narrative 1
Marie-Laure Ryan
1 Transmedial Unnatural Spatiality and Postdigital
Dystopicalization in The Pickle Index 20
Astrid Ensslin
2 Tailing Rebus: Plotting a Consipiracy in Digital Space 36
Brian L. Greenspan
3 Virtual Wandering: Embodied Spatial Narrativity in
Walking Simulators 49
Gregory Whistance-Smith
4 Mapping Imaginary Spaces: From Database to Folk
Cartography 70
Paul Wake
5 From Screen to Silicon: Reverse Engineering the
Computational Infrastructure of Nick Montfort’s Round 88
Lai-Tze Fan
vi Contents
6 The Digital Terrain of the Literary Anecdote 109
David Ciccoricco
7 Footprints in Spatial Narratives: Wearable Technology,
Active Reading, and a New Digital Literary Mapping of
Dorothy Wordsworth’s Scafell Pike Excursion 125
Joanna E. Taylor and Christopher Donaldson
8 Archival Interface and Nationalist Memorializations of 9/11 143
Dhanashree Thorat
Conclusion: Digital Space and the Keyword 160
Daniel Punday
Index 173
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
David Ciccoricco, Department of English and Linguistics, University of
Otago. He is the author of two books on contemporary literature, cognitive
theory, and digital media: Reading Network Fiction (Alabama, 2007) and Refigur-
ing Minds in Narrative Media (Nebraska, 2015).
Christopher Donaldson is Lecturer in Cultural History at Lancaster Univer-
sity. He works on 18th- and 19th-century cultural history, especially changing
perceptions of the value of landscape and the environment. He has co-edited
Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2016), and has published exten-
sively in journals such as International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing,
Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Review of English
Studies.
Astrid Ensslin is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen.
She is the author or editor of eight books, including Literary Gaming (2014),
A nalyzing Digital Fiction (2013), and The Language of Gaming (2011).
Lai-Tze Fan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the
University of Waterloo, Canada, and a Faculty Researcher of the Games In-
stitute. She researches digital storytelling, media theory and infrastructure,
research-creation or critical making, and systemic inequalities in the techno-
logical design and labor. Fan is an editor and the Director of Communications
of Electronic Book Review and an editor of The Digital Review. She is co-editor
of the collection Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates from Electronic Book Review
(Bloomsbury 2020), and is the Editor of special journal issues on “Canadian
Digital Poetics” and “Critical Making, Critical Design.”
viii Notes on Contributors
Brian L. Greenspan, Department of English Language and Literature, Car-
leton College. He has published essays on digital humanities in the influential
Debates in the Digital Humanities collection and in journals such as Digital Studies/
Le champ numérique and MediaTropes.
Marie-Laure Ryan is an Independent Scholar. She is the author or editor of
more than a dozen books, including Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2003), Avatars of Story (2006), and
the influential collection Narrative Across Media; The Languages of Storytelling
(2005).
Joanna E. Taylor is Research Associate in the Data Science Institute at Lan-
caster University. She works on literature and culture of the long nineteenth
century, particularly Romantic poetry and environmental history. She has
published in journals such as International Journal of Geographic Information Science,
International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, and Essays in Romanticism.
Dhanashree Thorat is Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State
University. Her research is situated at the intersection of Asian American
Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Digital Humanities. Broadly, she examines
how colonial and racial ideologies shape the technological imagination, specif-
ically in technical infrastructures, platforms, and policies. She has published in
journals such as the South Asian Review and Asian Quarterly.
Paul Wake is Reader at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author
and editor of four books, including The Routledge Companion to Cultural and
Critical Theory (2013) and Conrad’s Marlow: Narrative and Death in “Youth”, Heart
of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Chance (2007).
Gregory Whistance-Smith  holds graduate degrees in Architecture and
Digital Humanities from Dalhousie University and the University of Alberta.
His research explores the interplay of design, technology, and culture in the
built environment, and he practices architecture in Edmonton, Canada.
INTRODUCTION
Four Types of Textual Space and their
Manifestations in Digital Narrative
Marie-Laure Ryan
The first thing that comes to mind, when we think about the relations of space
to narrative, is the space in which characters live, act, and move—the space of
the storyworld. Let’s call it mimetic space (mimetic being taken here as synon-
ymous with representational without implying that this representation must be
faithful to reality). But the space of the storyworld is not the only kind of space
that artistic and more particularly narrative texts can make significant. In Ryan,
Foote and Azaryahu (2016), four types of textual space are defined:
1. The spatial form of the text
2. The space materially occupied by the text
3. The spatial context of the text
4. Mimetic space, or space of the storyworld
In this chapter, I will explore these four kinds of space, first in terms of their
manifestations in print-based literature and second in terms of the digital narra-
tive applications they have inspired, and of how these applications put into play
the distinctive affordances of computer technology. For type 4, however, I will
skip discussion of non-digital manifestations because they are too well known.
Spatial Form
The concept of spatial form was introduced in 1945 by the critic Joseph Frank
to describe a type of literary meaning that emphasizes internal relations be-
tween parts of the text at the expense of temporal progression and of the tra-
ditional narrative effects of suspense, curiosity, and surprise (Sternberg 1992).
While Frank envisioned spatial form as a mode of organization typical of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003053880-1