Inanimate Alice

Inanimate Alice is a work of digital fiction by co-created by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph and, as creative director, Andy Campbell. It combines text with images, video, music, animation and games to create a hybrid form of storytelling. 

In September 2012, ‘Inanimate Alice’ went up on The Space, the BBC/Arts Council England showcase, featuring in the Literature and Spoken Word section. 

In June 2012, ‘Inanimate Alice’ was named as one of the American Association of School Librarians Best Websites for Teaching and Learning.

Over the past few years, ‘Inanimate Alice’s has gained a powerful reputation as a vital transmedia title in education.  Work has begun on episode 5, which will appear in autumn 2012.

Episodes 1 through 4 are available to view online for free. ‘Episode 1: China’ won the first ever prize for Digital Art awarded by MAXXI - the Museum for the Twenty-First Century - DARC, and the Fondazione Rosselli. It also won the IBM Prize for New Media at Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media . 

Story Map made at Free Word in Spread the Word workshop

Here’s the Story Map we created in the 5 November 2011 digital stories workshop that Spread the Word hosted at Free Word.  Lovely photos and accompanying texts.  Thanks to everyone who participated! 

View Digital Stories Workshop in a larger map

Duel - presentation at ELMCIP workshop, Karlskrona, Sweden, June 2011

I gave a presentation at Cabaret Voltage in Karlskrona in June this year:  a world premiere, sneak preview, of my new digital fiction project, ‘Duel’.  I’m working on ‘Duel’ with Andy Campbell of Dreaming Methods and One to One Development Trust.  We’ve moved beyond the basics that you can see here now, but are keeping it all under wraps for the time being.  Thanks to the ELMCIP Knowledge Database for this video. 

Ebb & Flow: Ipswich schools digital stories project

‘Ebb & Flow’ is a digital fiction project I helped create working with five secondary schools in Ipswich during the 2010-11 school year.  For more information on this wonderful project, go to my blog entry. 

Inanimate Alice on Facebook

Inanimate Alice , the digital fiction I created with Chris Joseph, produced by Ian Harper, isn’t as dormant as it might first appear.  For the past year the already active pedagogical community based around the stories has been growing rapidly.  The clearest manifestation of this currently is the Inanimate Alice Facebook page.

Under the auspices of the generous Lara Fleming (@larfleming on twitter), the page is regularly updated with news from educators using Alice in their classrooms, and writers and networkers who are using Alice as an example of digital fiction suitable across many age groups.  While we wait for Episode 5 to get a green light, it is great to see so much lively community interaction focussing on the story. 

TRG - Transliteracy Research Group

At DMU where Kate holds the post Reader in Creative Writing and New Media, she co-founded, with colleague Professor Sue Thomas, the research group, TRG.  TRG provides a focal point for their activities in the practice of and research into Transliteracy. 

Transliteracy is currently defined as ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.’  However, as more people, from more fields, find the concept useful in their own work, the definition is growing and changing.  There’s an active community of artists and academics working with TRG and the hashtag #transliteracy sees a fair amount of action on Twitter. 

www.transliteracy.com

Lifelines

Click here to view an online demo of Lifelines - interactive short stories that bring texts alive on screen. Lifelines is a ground-breaking new programme of short stories created for the interactive whiteboard, PC or Mac. Each story brings a child’s world to life through audio, video and imagery, drawing pupils into new experiences ‘first hand’.

he series consists of two CD-ROMs, each containing nine short stories which use history and geography themes. Each story is accompanied by easy to follow Teacher’s Notes and photocopymasters to help you get the very best from the content.

For more on the series visit the publisher Rising Stars.

Flight Paths

“I have finished my weekly supermarket shop, stocking up on provisions for my three kids, my husband, our dog and our cat. I push the loaded trolley across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track. I pop open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky. And I see him. It takes me a long moment to figure out what I am looking at. He is falling from the sky. A dark mass, growing larger quickly. I let go of the trolley and am dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can’t move, I am stuck there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles toward the earth. I have no idea how long it takes - a few seconds, an entire lifetime - but I stand there holding my breath as the city goes about its business around me until…

He crashes into the roof of my car.”

The car park of Sainsbury’s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London, lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport. Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park. All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft. It is thought that none could have survived the journey, killed by either the tremendous heat generated by the airplane wheels on the runway, crushed when the landing gear retracts into the plane after take off, or frozen to death once the airplane reaches altitude.

‘Flight Paths: a networked novel’ seeks to explore what happens when lives collide - an airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. With your help, this project will tell their stories.

Flight Paths

A Million Penguins

‘A Million Penguins’ was a collaboration between Penguin Books UK and my students at DMU; we asked the question ‘Can a community write a novel?’.  The wiki was open to contributions from 1 February to 7 March 2007; 80,000 people logged on, 1500 people participated.  The result was… well, the result was the result.  My colleagues at DMU, Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas, wrote ’A Million Penguins Research Report’, a fascinating look at the project.