Reading Digital Fiction

This project will increase public engagement with digital fiction and provide empirically substantiated analyses to show how readers interact with digital fiction. Digital Fiction is fiction that is written for and read from a computer and can be Web- or app-based (for tablets and smartphones) or accessed via CD-ROMs. Digital fictions are different to e-books, however. Rather than existing as a digital version of a print novel, digital fictions are what are known as "born digital" - that is, they would lose something of their aesthetic and/or structural form and meaning if they were removed from the digital medium. For example, they may contain hyperlinks, moving images, mini-games or sound effects. Further, unlike e-books in which the reader moves from one page to another in a linear fashion, in many digital fictions, the reader has a role in constructing the narrative, either by selecting hyperlinks or by controlling a character's journey through the storyworld. Digital fictions therefore require that the reader interacts with the narrative throughout the reading experience. With the increasing availability and popularity of e-readers, such as the Kindle and associated iPad applications, e-books are increasingly being advertised, discussed and produced. Their cultural, social and economic significance is growing with print publishers now focussing much of their marketing effort in this area. As commercial products, e-readers are only available to those that can afford to buy them, but much digital fiction is available for free. While the move to e-publishing might suggest increased digital fluency and amplified general interest in digital textuality, public awareness of and engagement with born digital fiction remains relatively low. The project aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction in order to permit a more inclusive engagement with these texts and, in a related step, increase digital literacies more broadly. In a series of public engagement activities in Sheffield, Bangor and Aberystwyth, readers will learn about born digital fiction. Their engagement with the texts will enhance digital literacies and encourage a more explicit understanding of narrative form and structure in general as well as awareness of how digital texts are different from print. This includes: how to identify and respond to different types of plot and narration in digital environments; how to read texts that utilise images, sound and interactive navigational elements; how to combine reading and gaming; how to use digital technologies critically. The project also aims to empirically test the researchers' analyses of digital fiction. Primarily the researchers will consider how readers process the multimodal aspects of digital fiction - that is, the combination of different modes such as sound, images and text. The researchers will also consider the relationship between what readers expect to happen in the narrative as a consequence of their actions and what they actually find. Finally the researchers will investigate whether different forms of narration affect the relationship between the reader of digital fiction and the fictional world that it describes. Using a range of data collection strategies including questionnaires, focus groups and interviews, reader response data will be gathered from workshop participants as well as more established readers of digital fiction who belong to established reading communities (e.g. members of the Electronic Literature Organisation) and incorporated into the researchers' analyses. The result will be a more robust and, crucially, empirically based understanding of how readers interact with digital fiction. This part of the project will also inform wider cognitive-linguistic theories of literature by providing a replicable methodology for testing reader engagement with digital texts and well as a deeper understanding of how readers interact with fictional narratives in general.