Torsten Reimer, who runs this site, was suggesting that rather than just publicise The Puzzle Box I ought to write a word or two about what I’m trying to achieve with it and why it might be interest to student of the new media/hyperliterature field.
On the whole I’m suspicious of work which seems to need a technical or theoretical explanation before it can be properly appreciated, but basically this is my attempt to produce a new media, interactive but still user-friendly story for children and adults, in the tradition of The Box of Delights and (to a lesser extent) the Narnia books. One of the things I’m trying to do is explore the design and layout potential of Flash and HTML - I mean their potential for enhancing text on the screen, and making it a pleasurable reading experience rather than a trial of endurance - because I think this has tended to be neglected by new media writers, and there’s actually a lot of mileage in it. I’m also trying to get hyperliterature away from the paradigm of plonking the reader in a text-maze and letting him/her grope around until some kind of pattern starts to emerge - which in theory is supposed to set readers free from authorial tyranny, but in practice usually makes them feel bewildered and victimised. Read the rest of this entry »
The Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference is always one of the highlights of the year for Intute. It presents a chance for us to find out about new ideas, trends, and projects and catch up with some of the leading lights in the field. This year, it’s going to be in Cambridge. The full conference programme, with a list of speakers and performers, is now up at: http://www.rsd.cam.ac.uk/drha08/programme.aspx. Registration is open until the 1st August, and the conference itself begins on the 14th September.
This year’s theme is “New Communities of Knowledge and Practice”, and the conference aims to “bring together an array of creators, users, distributors and custodians of digital resources in the arts and humanities to Read the rest of this entry »
