This morning we met with a professor teaching Fiction Writing who wanted to incorporate a DH assignment into the course that required the students to tell a story through a new technology of their choice.
The students will start by completing a 3-page writing assignment with pen and paper. Then they will be asked to translate that story into a digital medium. The keyword here is translate. Is chopping a thousand words of prose into 50 tweets a translation of prose into digital medium? I would say not. As with any translation, how does the language of the digital medium impact the text? How does the language of the digital medium provide different capabilities (or affordances) that inspires new forms of creativity?
As an assignment, students will have to grapple with the technological platform (the language) that they have chosen for their translation. Students must learn that every platform choice comes with limitations and constraints that have significant impacts on determining the structure of their narrative. While these restrictions appear to be determined by the technology, students should grasp that the limitations are the functions of the underlying software. The code behind the platform reflects the dictates of software developers.
Many examples of electronic literature try to work within or around those constraints. That likely is a simple reflection of the coding limitations of the authors.
I would prefer that students start their translation process not with the choice of platform. But start with creativity. And again with pen and paper. Approach the digital with a blank slate and not with the limitations of an imposed piece of software. Sketch out in pencil what would be ways of representing this narrative if the choice of digital medium was wide open. Have the students describe the capabilities that the software would provide to tell the story. Have the students create a storyboard, a flow of the narrative, with the technologies of their imagination. These tools may not yet even exist. But if they can be imagined, then the algorithms can be created.
What’s important is not that the students learn to tell a story in prezi or twitter, but that they learn that digital media is software that has capabilities and limitations defined by its creator. The process of software development is a creative act. While students in a fiction writing course will not become coders overnight, this exercise could inspire them to see the linkage between the creative process and the process of developing the tools that we all use to tell the stories in digital media.
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