Yesterday I spent all day reading a brilliant dissertation Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You a Part of a Fictional World (PDF) by Jill Walker at University of Bergen in Norway. Here’s her weblog/main page and her publication page. I’m reading it as background material for part 2 of my networked novel essay. The dissertation made several amazing points which I’ll discuss later.
I encountered another dissertation by Scott Rettberg, Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel (PDF) which provides excerpts from Rettberg’s Unknown fiction project and some literary discussions. I’ve been a big fan of Rettberg’s Unknown hypertext . (Looks like Rettberg is teaching at University of Bergen also–wow, great time to be a student there!). (Here’s an interview with Rettberg and interviews with other hypertext people (conducted by Scott Mills of trAce).
trAce is a center for various online literary experiments located in Nottingham, English. I met the manager/director Helen Whitehead and one other person at Hypertext 2000 conference. Their portal page contains several interesting-sounding essays which I’ll blog about later.
Also, happened to notice that Jane McGonigal is posting her Phd “They Might be a Game” up on her website. I’m praying it won’t be any good.
For the sake of completeness, here’s blogs/publications site of two other literary-minded people: Nick Montfont and Angela (Anya) Thomas: Here and here
Finally, in the last 24 hours I’ve been reading widely for a teleread essay. The aforementioned, Lukacs, Jane Smiley, Jaron Lanier, several wikipedia posts, several hypertext examples, a Slatenight website devoted to SecondLife, not to mention my web-based email, my usual haunts, archive.org music page, NetVibes, the editing page of my current work assignment and google group pages about evolution/google calendar synchronization.
So after I push the Submit button, I can rest easily, knowing I can close all my browser windows and start again. Ahh, that is a wonderful feeling!
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