Good Read! Yay PopSandbox! Digital lit: How new ways to read mean new ways to write - The Globe and Mail

via theglobeandmail.com

By Kate Taylor, Saturday July 9 2011

"The Next Day is a graphic novel about people who have attempted suicide. Once it is posted online in September, you’ll be able to click your way through it according to your own preferences about how it should unfold. CityFish is a Web-based short story, about a Nova Scotia girl visiting relatives in New York. Unfurling horizontally, like a scroll, it looks like a scrapbook, full of photographs and short videos of the places it describes. Inanimate Alice is an episodic, interactive, multimedia novel for children that offers text, videos and puzzles as it recounts the adventures of a heroine who becomes a video-game designer....

...“E-books as we know them are electronic replicas of books, it’s paper under glass,” says Kate Pullinger, author of the children’s novel Inanimate Alice – which can be viewed free online. (She also won the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for her conventional novel The Mistress of Nothing.) “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?”

Montreal electronic writer J.R. Carpenter, creator of CityFish, agrees: “I have been using the Internet as a medium since 1993. …There is fantastic multimedia, non-linear storytelling that has been going on since the beginning of the Web, and e-book publishers are not interested in that.” She says that a work such as CityFish, which explores odd corners of New York through the eyes of a displaced teen, is another way of reflecting the imagination, adding the visual images and sounds that are associated with places in the author’s mind.

These multimedia experiments often use short texts because readers seem unlikely to tolerate long passages of type in a video or interactive environment. “Maybe the chunk is not the chapter; maybe the chunk is the paragraph, and one paragraph can lead to more, different paragraphs,” says Caitlin Fisher, Canada Research Chair in digital culture at York University, who used that approach in her 2001 multimedia novella These Waves of Girls. “People have been figuring out how to get their message onto a single screen. It makes some writing better and some writing worse.”...

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