Skip to main content

Choosing Software for Digital Fiction: Intro

I love Spring Break. No teaching. No office hours. No meetings or training sessions. No having to talk to people.

I just get to sit in my home office, make my list of tasks for the day, and work on ticking them off one by one. If only I could get paid for such endeavors, I'd have it made.

Anyway...

This time has allowed me to make some decent progress on my research. I'm super excited. Without much effort, I've managed to track down the software packages that deliver EXACTLY what I've been thinking I want for my digital fiction.

A few months ago, I was despairing, because the few sites I've seen with all the functionality I want have been high-profile places, complex and huge, far beyond what little html-building knowledge I have. I figured I'd have to purchase some fairly hefty software packages, which was terrifying, considering the peanuts they throw into my pen for teaching all the classes I'm teaching.

Today it's a totally different story, one I'm going to try to lay out as succinctly as possible (which for me isn't very); this entry should eventually lead to a full chapter or two of my dissertation, so I'm going to be a bit thorough in my next few posts. I'll talk about the major steps I took to deciding on a technology for building my digital fiction.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did Somebody Offer a Challenge?

Bruce Sterling over at Wired.com posted eighteen of them for Contemporary Literature. It's a skeletal overview: a list of statements without background or exploration of any. I'd like to offer a few brief thoughts on the list, just for my own brainstorming sake. Who knows; there may be eighteen papers in here somewhere. 1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot. "Contemporary society" is a pretty big blanket, there, Bruce. I think you might mean "contemporary digitally literate culture" - after all, it's only in the Westernized world that we are beginning to share our language and culture through global media such as Facebook and mobile phones. This also assumes a very strict definition of literature: that which is published in print form, presumably a book. 2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed tex
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take on Specifications Grading (or, How I Learned to Not Spend My Weekends Marking)

I’ve been proselytizing this method for a while now, and have used it in a range of creative writing and publishing modules. It’s been wildly successful for me (though of course I’ll continue tweaking it), and enough people have asked about it that I thought I’d put it together into an overview/summary resource. It should probably be an actual paper one of these days, but that would require time and research and motivation. Natch. My teaching model is based on Linda Nilson’s Specifications Grading  (she’s also got a great intro article on Inside Higher Ed ), just so the original genius can get plenty of credit. My motivations are these: I came a hair’s breadth from burning out entirely. I went from teaching creative writing classes with 7-10 students on them to massive creative writing modules with 80+ students on them. Marking loads were insane, despite the fact that I have a pretty streamlined process with rubrics and QuickMarks and commonly used comments that I can cut and past
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts on @dreamingmethods Digital Writing Workshop

I'm on the long train(s) ride home from Kent after a one-day digital fiction workshop with Andy Campbell ( Dreaming Methods ).  It's the first time I've met Andy IRL - great to put a face to the name & works. The workshop itself was set up by Peggy at East Kent Live Lit , funded by the Kent Arts Council, and she was graceful enough to let a non-Kent-resident such as me sit in.  Most of the attendees were not necessarily new to digital fiction, but new to building it.  They were writers, musicians, installation artists, and sometimes a combination of the above.  Almost everyone save me and one other had been able to make the Friday evening session, which was an overview of digital fiction and some of Andy's background. The morning session covered a few examples of dig-fic (from the Poole Literary Festival New Media Prize ), recommended software (more on this in a minute), and resources for media files (more...).  The afternoon session was more hands-on building of di
1 comment
Read more