Call for papers| RCL nº. 58 | Digital Narratives: Theories, Criticism(s), Achievements

Submissions’ deadline: December 30, 2022

Expected publication date: July 2023

Editors: Rui Torres (University Fernando Pessoa; ICNOVA), Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen, Center for Digital Narrative), Scott Rettberg (University of Bergen, Center for Digital Narrative), Joseph Tabbi (University of Bergen, Center for Digital Narrative)

 

Digital Narratives: Theories, Criticism(s), Achievements

Digital narratives include stories in computer games, electronic literature, virtual and augmented reality, chat bots, web and mobile apps as well as stories that circulate in social media or are AI-generated. Algorithms play a central role in our everyday experiences of these stories, increasingly contributing to the organization, generation, and structuring of narratives.

Our special issue will address, specifically, how an awareness of digital technologies, platforms and algorithms can help us understand newly emerging digital narratives in our current globalized network society. For this, interdisciplinary research is required, combining scientific and technical knowledge about platforms and algorithms with lessons from narratology, semiotics, and cultural studies, among other disciplines.

A digital work can sometimes produce loosely structured, multi-vocal gatherings, and there might also be sustained and interactive narratives. It all depends on how both authors and readers adopt and adapt to digital media, how the works circulate among authors, co-authors, and readers, and how we creatively and critically play with networked and multimodal forms of writing.

As new computational environments emerge from our distributed and ever changing  media ecology, our cultural contexts shift and transform as well. The impacts of algorithmic narrativity on renewed and emerging narrative forms demand contextualized and situated studies about how they are produced, circulated and extracted, as well as self-assessment and criticism to explain how interactions of human authors with non-human agents are programmed, structured and delivered.

The goal of this issue of RCL is to analyze how digital narratives remediate our cultural contexts by confirming or opposing the specific affordances of platforms, and how these exchanges create opportunities for media literacy, education and social justice.

We invite scholars and artists to submit papers or visual essays that address the interaction between human storytelling and computational methods in digital narratives, selecting one or more of the following topics:

Theories – Speculations and reflections on languages and forms of digital narratives:

• Frameworks: analysis, interpretation, and visualization;
• Classifications: taxonomies and shared vocabularies;
• Effects: on readers/viewers/players;
• Pedagogies: digital skills and media literacy;
• Methodologies: participatory and/or human-centered design, gender and feminist HCI;
• Unfoldings: storytelling across gaming cultures, social media, and online communities;
• Dialogues: transmedia and hybrid forms, immersive experiences, language and media interfaces.

Criticism(s) – Interpretation and discussion of digital narratives that focus on the following themes and disputes:

• Storytelling for social justice: equity, diversity, inclusion;
• Ecology: climate change and the Cloud, environmental damage made apparent via computation;
• Shareable narratives: issues of privacy, censorship and surveillance;
• Preservation of narratives and narratives as preservation: critical archives, cultural heritage, historical memory;
• Utopias, dystopic, epic and apocalyptic recurrences in digital narratives.

Achievements – Presentation of processes and models embedded in digital narratives:

• D.I.Y. tools and software as a form of cultural criticism;
• Experimental, expanded and radical forms: utopian landscapes and other futures;
• Creative research, activism and archivism.

Articles can be written in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will be blind peer reviewed. Visual essays will also be accepted. Formatting must be in accordance with the journal’s submission guidelines, and the submission must be made via the OJS platform.

Guidelines for submission and instructions for authors: https://rcl.fcsh.unl.pt/index.php/rcl/about/submissions

For inquiries, please contact Rui Torres: (rtorres at ufp.edu.pt)

Note: Send signal indicating that it is the number #58