Digital

“Breathe” is Pullinger’s second novel for mobile phones, and is browser-based. It tells the story of Flo who has the ability to talk to ghosts. Using mobile phone affordances, in “Breathe” Pullinger again refreshes the genre of a ghost story and offers readers a personalised reading experience in which they, likely to the protagonist of the story are haunted.

“Jellybone” is the first of Pullinger’s smartphone novels. It’s a ghost story focused on a London Gen Zer, Florence Evans, who communicates with the dead through her phone. The story is told in 10 episodes, each taking ten to twenty minutes to read. The first-person narrative is combined with text, audio and video messages that arrive on the reader’s phone and Flo’s public journal in the form of an Instagram account. With the technology enabling readers to receive messages from ghosts on their own phones, “Jellybone” was a highly immersive work, drawing readers into the story by blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. Oolipo’s Dorothea Martin summed it up, claiming they were “breaking the fourth wall”.

“Letter to an Unknown Soldier” is a participatory writing project created by novelist and theatre-maker Neil Bartlett in collaboration with Kate Pullinger. They described the project as “a new kind of memorial, one made only of words, by thousands of people”. It was commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, along with other 107 projects realised by 420 contemporary artists in more than 220 locations across the UK. “Letter to an Unknown Soldier’ was inspired by the statue of the unknown soldier holding a letter in his hand that stands on Platform One of Paddington Station in London, created by Charles Sargeant Jagger. Pullinger and Bartlett invited people to stop for a moment and think about WW1, asking: “If you were able to send a letter to this soldier, a man who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?”.

“Memory Makes Us” was a travelling live event organised by if:book Australia, in which writers were challenged to create a story by collecting inspiration from memories submitted by the general public. The project was realised during 2013-2015 in Australia and the United States. Participants could submit their memories online or in person, typewritten or handwritten on paper with the project logo or on a simple sticky note. Authors worked on the text during all-day events in public, using submitted materials. The results were published in real-time on the website project and visible on a big screen in the event space.

“Duel” is a digital fiction thriller created by Pullinger in collaboration with Andy Campbell (as designer and producer). It is an advanced multimedia, non-interactive project created in Flash, described by authors as a work of digital fiction that “uses text and open source multimedia technologies to tell a story”. It is strongly related to some other Pullinger’s print and digital writings. The story follows Harriet and Jack, her teenage son, two characters from Pullinger’s “Landing Gear” print novel, a digital antecedent of which was “Flight Paths: a networked novel”, which Pullinger co-authored with Chris Joseph and other participants. “Duel” focuses on the moment when mother and son are in a car, pursued by a psychotic driver linked to the woman’s past. The full version of “Duel” was not created due to funding constraints, although fragments were presented at conferences and festivals.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“Flight Paths: A Networked Novel” is a web-based project created by Kate Pullinger in collaboration with Chris Joseph and an international group of participants. It tells the story of Yacub, a young Pakistani man, whose life collides with Harriet, a middle-aged woman in London. The story was inspired by an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who falls from the sky. “I’m continuing to develop the story that begins in Flight Paths on other platforms” – she explained on her blog in 2012, mentioning “Duel” and print novel “Landing Gear”.

“A Million Penguins” is a wiki-novel project launched in 2007 by Penguin Books and De Montfort University in collaboration with a group of MA students that Kate Pullinger led with Prof Sue Thomas. The project asked the question ‘Can a community write a novel?’ Pullinger described the project as ‘chaotic and exhausting but also exciting.’

The collaborative novel project was open to anyone with access to the internet who wanted to help write it and was created on MediaWiki. A team from De Montfort University, including students from the Online Master of Arts in Creative Writing and New Media program, coordinated it. The project was alive for 5 weeks in February-March 2007 and nearly 1500 people contributed.

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. 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.

“The Breathing Wall” is a PC multimedia murder mystery and ghost story, to be read while wearing a headset with earphones and microphone, with the microphone positioned beneath the reader’s nose (these inexpensive headsets could be ordered with the work which was published on CD). “The Breathing Wall” tells the story of Michael, a young man accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Lana. She communicates with him through the walls of his cell in prison, sending him clues about who killed her. A considerable part of the story is told in 5 so-called day-dreams, relatively non-interactive multimedia fragments created in Flash by Chris Joseph. Those are interwoven by 4 hypnotic night-dreams, using video and audio and realised with the Hyper Trance Fiction Matrix (the Breathing Book system) developed by Stefan Schemat. This technology, inspired by biofeedback systems used in psychotherapy, synchronises the readers’ physiological response (breathing) with the story – the more relaxed the reader is, the deeper they can be immersed in the story.

“Branded”, co-created by Pullinger with Talan Memmott, was her first digital storytelling collaboration. It was developed during the “Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen” project at trAce Online Writing Centre and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Innovation Award Scheme. “Branded” tells the story of 21-year-old James, accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Lana. In prison, he hears the dead girl’s voice.

“Branded: Typing Version” (a working title) is the first of Pullinger’s e-literary texts published online and the only one which she coded herself, using JavaScript. It was created during the author’s fellowship at trAce when she was learning the basics of HTML and exploring hypertext structure as a literary tool. Pullinger made the work public on 31st May 2002 in her online “Transition Journal” (also coded by herself), describing it as “a little hypertext” based on the story of “Branded”. In all of her subsequent digital works, she collaborated with designers and programmers in order to focus on the writing of the text and how to use new media tools to augment the story instead of dealing with coding and visual design herself.