mapping

Monday 20th January 2003 6pm for 6.30pm
Light refreshments will be available before the seminar
The seminar is part of the MA in Writing Monday evening lecture series

New Lecture Theatre 005
Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
Directions (On the map NLT 005 = 21)

Attendance is free and open to the public but please let us know you are coming by emailing Jill Pollicott or phoning 0115-8483437

MAPPING THE TRANSITION FROM PAGE TO SCREEN

What I really want to do is start to create a hyperfiction. I've got the idea bubbling away in my head, but html is in the way. I've got to learn html in order to get my web studio up and running at trAce. So, really, it's like I have to learn a whole new set of rules in order to be able to write once again. When, really, I just want to write the damn thing. But I can't, because I don't know how. How well and truly disorienting.

So began novelist Kate Pullinger’s web journal in March 2002 when she embarked on a year of training and exploration as a Research Fellow with the trAce Online Writing Centre.

Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board and managed by the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University. The project facilitates examination and analysis of a unique body of material alongside a programme of experiential research involving a collaboration between Kate Pullinger, a print-based author keen to investigate the potential of electronic literature; Sue Thomas, originally a print-based author but now working in both media, and the trAce team of specialists. Pullinger's engagement with the project is a combination of training and support as she learns how to read and create works in the digital medium.

This is a snapshot of a very specific evolutionary moment in the history of literature which could be compared to the moment when painters first began to make use of the camera. Although the camera did not come to replace painting, it altered the nature of artistic visual experience. Online writing is poised in a very transitory moment in its own development. It currently stands outside most English Studies and at this point it is not yet known what contribution, if any, it will make to English Literature. Nor is it known how New Media Writing will affect the way writers approach the making of texts, or the way they are read. The area of practice is new, experimental and largely unrecorded. It is hoped that this research project will help promote understanding and appreciation of New Media Writing.

This seminar is an opportunity to discuss the first results of the project and learn whether the web really is changing the future of literature.

Kate Pullinger has been working as a print-based writer since 1988. Her books include the novels The Last Time I Saw Jane, Where Does Kissing End?, and, most recently, Weird Sister, as well as the short story collection, My Life as a Girl in a Men's Prison. She co-wrote the novel of the film 'The Piano' with director Jane Campion. Kate Pullinger also writes for film and television; her feature-length screenplay 'Lily' is currently in development with Box TV. She has lectured and taught widely. In 1995/96 she was Judith E Wilson Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge; she currently teaches at Birkbeck College, is an advisor for the University of Middlesex Creative Writing MA, and is visiting Writing Fellow at The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University. She is a Research Fellow at trAce, looking at forms of online narrative and new media writing.

Sue Thomas is the founder and Artistic Director of trAce. Her books include the novel Correspondence, short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award 1992; Water, 1994, and an anthology of contemporary short stories Wild Women, 1994. In 1994 she developed the MA in Writing at The Nottingham Trent University and during that time she also wrote A Handbook for Creative Writing Tutors. She has been working with the arts and technology since 1986 and has been teaching online since 1996. Her online work includes a web-interpretation of Correspondence at Riding the Meridian; Imagining a Stone at Ensemble Logic and Choragraphy and Lines at Lux: notes for an electronic writing. With Teri Hoskin, she co-edited the Noon Quilt website and book. She recently completed The Virtualist, a meditation of virtual landscapes. Most recently her work has appeared in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture (MIT).