“Lifelines” is a collection of nine short stories that Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph created for Rising Stars, an award-winning publisher of books, teaching resources and software supporting school teachers and learners.

The digital short stories, published on CD-rom and accompanied with additional educational materials (including a teacher’s book by Mike Ward that included various in-class scenarios for each story), were designed to be viewed on computers (PC as well as Mac) or in the classroom on interactive whiteboards. Each story is 5-10 minutes long and is told from the first person point of view of a child narrator, blending text, audio, video and images. Stories depict life from a perspective that might be unfamiliar to its readers and are related to topics in the British secondary school curriculum (KS2 and KS3), introducing historical, geographical or sociocultural contexts.

The goal of the project was to supply schools with innovative materials to teach the analysis and production of digital text in an engaging and exciting way, to develop students’ digital literacy skills and to stimulate creative writing. Each of the nine stories is accompanied with an asset bank of sounds and images used to create the story and a pdf file of the script. These materials were included in order to enable students to create their own digital stories. Links to popular open-source programmes enabling working with audiovisuals (Audacity, Photo Story and Comic Life) were also included .

On her blog, Pullinger described “Lifelines” as “the first fairly large commercial commision” that she and Joseph have taken on and as “a big step towards finding ways to create income from this type of work”.

Due to copyright restrictions we cannot redirect you to the work itself. However, you can see two videos of Kate and Chris talking about the project and interacting with the stories.

“Ebb & Flow” was a collaborative digital writing project led by Pullinger in which digital authors, including Pullinger and Tim Wright, worked with students of five Suffolk schools on creating digital stories set in the River Orwell region (the river flows through both Ipswich and Felixstowe where the schools were located).

The project began with a boat trip. Seventy five pupils sailed down the River Orwell to collect digital assets (short video clips, photographs, sounds), natural objects that could be digitalised later and inspiration to create stories. Later in the school year, these collected materials were used during workshops led by digital writers (Pullinger herself conducted two of them). Various digital platforms and tools were used to support and enable the creation process, e.g. Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube, Audiboo, and individual stories and poems as well as more considerable collaborative outcomes (e.g. the newspaper) were created, all set in the Suffolk location. On the project website, they were characterised as “eclectic and exciting, limited only by the creativity and imagination of the pupils”. The final results were put together on the project website created by Andy Campbell, who was also one of the workshop leaders.

The Department for Education funded the project under the Independent/State Schools Partnership Scheme.

“Luke’s Message” was created for the if:book schools project MOFOHOB (Museum of the History of the Future of the Book). Pullinger and Joseph, along with other acclaimed authors, e.g. Naomi Alderman, were commissioned to write “literature of the future” for children. The project, led by Chris Meade, offered year 8/9 students examples of writing in various times and media (past, present and future) in order to encourage them to think about the role of literature, communication and books. The project included around 50 multimedia works; “Luke’s Message” and an animation of a Shakespeare sonnet were the most discussed. However, “Luke’s Message” (like other pieces created within the project) was mostly used in schools during workshops linked to the MOFOHOB project and has never been known to a wider public.

Pullinger and Joseph’s story is set in AD 2500, in a world “where there are no books, no paper in fact, no pens, no printers” and “only a few clunky old people who work in museums” know how to read. Its main protagonist, a boy named Luke, discovers how difficult it can be to send a message in a world where no one reads.

When the work was almost finished Pullinger advertised it on her blog: “it’s a cracker!!”.

The “Inanimate Alice” series, which started in 2005, is an award-winning ongoing interactive multimedia project that tells the story of a girl growing up in the early years of the 21st century and dreaming of becoming a game designer. The reader first meets her when she is 8 years old and, in five subsequent episodes published between 2006 and 2016, accompanies her on her way to becoming more involved in the gaming industry. The technology used to tell Alice’s adventures matures with her alongside her own game design abilities; while the first episodes were created with Flash, the latest ones used more advanced technology, including virtual reality. While the series is produced and owned by Ian Harper and the Bradfield Company, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph created the first episodes on their own; later others, such as Andy Campbell, joined the Inanimate Alice team. Pullinger was the primary story author for all the main episodes, taking on the role of the story consultant in some of the additional projects, like the VR episode created by Mez Breeze. For many, “Inanimate Alice” is the most awarded and well-known example of e-literature for children (in 2023 it was awarded ISTE Seal), although initially, it wasn’t conceived as a text for younger readers.

A multitude of paratexts were created to accompany the original “Inanimate Alice” story, as it was easy to write stories that continue the original plot. Good examples are “Alice Adventures in Australia”, produced by Australian pupils and devoted to time between the first and second episodes, or travel journals from Alice’s gap year that describe the time between the fifth and sixth episodes (Lori Hopping created these). Additionally, the character Pullinger created had its own life: Alice Field has had accounts on many social media (Facebook, Instagram, Everloop) and published blogs or development journals linked to games she created.These elements combined to make “Inanimate Alice” a true example of transmedia storytelling and spreadable media practices and an excellent resource for teaching digital literacy. The series has been acclaimed as a “pedagogical blockbuster”, it was the first digital text officially listed as a recommended text in the Australian and Portuguese curriculum guidelines and is still frequently used to teach digital literacy in various countries, supported by multiple translations. With time, additional teaching materials and teaching licences for “Inanimate Alice” episodes were offered by its publisher, the Bradfield Company.