fourth media in transition conference

abstracts and papers

[arranged alphabetically by author's last name; click on linked abstract titles for a PDF of the full text of the paper]

Intermedia Narratives: European Cinema Militans
Lanfranco Aceti, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
This paper will introduce the concept of intramedia derived from Virilio and Baudrillard's analysis of the contemporary cultural context and social frameworks. This new concept will be informed by Manovich and Wilson's definitions of media and information arts. The conclusion will attempt to establish that cinema, and the avant-garde in particular, have crossed new boundaries requiring the narrative to respond to the organic and/or technological relationships established by a new "physiological" media context of interactions.

First-Person Access to the Unknowable: The Impact of Video Games on the Narrative Structure of the Contemporary War Story
Jacob Agatucci, Central Oregon Community College
This paper explores the connection between the contemporary war story and the WWII first-person shooter (FPS), a video game sub-genre. The developers of games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty strive for realism and authenticity in their rendering of the combat experience. Such motives require a re-exploration of whether narrative can reliably represent the reality of war as well as the consequences of creating a narrative space from which such accessibility to the combat experience seems possible.

"The Hero's Journey" Paradigm: Significations, and Transformations in the Media Culture of the New Century
Lily Alexander, Hofstra University
The Hero's Journey is one of the key formulas in the culture of humankind. Campbell popularised the hero's journey formula, making it accessible to the reading public. Not coincidentally, George Lucas invited him to serve as a consultant for the Star Wars series. Evidently, the formula has tremendously enriched American film, videogame industry and new hybrid media forms relying on storytelling. My presentation addresses its function and meaning in culture, and the paradox—why this ancient formula remains so fertile inspiring new and newer stories within the contexts of emerging media technologies and historical change.

The Migration of The Emigrant: "Moberglands" in Media and on Both Sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Peter Aronsson, Linkping University, Sweden
The social memory of Swedish emigration has been molded more on the authorship of Vilhelm Moberg than research or politics. From the first novel published in 1949 (The Emigrants), the movie released in 1971 to the musical by ABBA producers in 1995, the impact on various audiences has been tremendous. How was the story of migration transformed to localized stories of a Swedish Mobergland in the southeast of Sweden and an American Mobergland north of Minneapolis?

"Late Nineties Bedroom Rock for the Missionaries": Queer as Folk, Music, and Sonic Definitions of Sexuality
Ben Aslinger, University of Wisconsin, Madison
I examine Queer As Folk’s deployment of popular music in the show’s soundtrack, and the impact music has on the way this program’s narrative articulates gay male sexual performance. How does the translation of this program from the British to the American context rearticulate sound and sexuality? Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick and critiques of mainstream GLBT activists’ elaboration of “visibility,” I argue for a consideration of the constitutive role sound plays in gay male cultures.

Visualizing the Story through the Reinvention of the American Scrapbook: A Crafted Narrative
Barbara A. Audet, Auburn University
Digital photography and a resurgence in the role of scrapbooking as an American hobby are a contemporary parallel to the early 20th-century use of scrapbooks and the emerging technology of photography to generate family narratives. This paper addresses, conceptually and historically, scrapbooking and photography where the cohesive and linear oral narrative is influenced and prompted both by memory and by digital image manipulation.

Communicating Truth: Testimonio, Indigenous Agents, and the Rigoberta Menchu Controversy
Roberto Avant-Mier, Boston College
In this essay, the author explores communicative dimensions (textual and contextual) of the Rigoberta Menchu controversy. The paper will first analyze the unique role testimonio plays in Latin American culture(s). The author then analyzes Menchu's claims and how they stand up to the criticism by their principal detractor, David Stoll. Finally, the authors comment on the discursive importance of the Menchu-Stoll controversy, and make a case for the heuristic value of testimonio in future investigations of Latin American work in communication studies.

Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley's Califia
Burcu S. Bakioglu, Indiana University
The malleability that digital platforms afford to texts necessitates a spatial approach in which exploration of the text acquires precedence over plot development. Foregrounding the spatiality of the narrative allows the digital platform to transform the text into an open environment in which the user can enter and explore at her leisure. This paper will examine how spatiality affects narrative development in M.D. Coverley's hypertext story Califia.

The Archetypal Road-Myth: From the Highway to The Matrix
Pavlos Baltas and Nikos Barbopoulos, National Technical University of Athens and Theodoros Chiotis, Oxford
The paper examines the persistence and permutations of the archetypal road myth focusing on the manner the traveller, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift. Pulp fiction and b-movies sharing this theme are examined alongside more recent fare such as the film The Matrix. The paper seeks to elucidate the close linkage between the urban transformations of the western city and the spatial and temporal genealogies of urban mythologies.

Narratives of War, Narratives of the Individual
Gerry Beegan, Rutgers University
This paper examines changing narratives of warfare and focuses on the Boer War (1899-1902), which was the first major industrialized war and also the first media war. The visual reporting of this conflict marked a shift in the representation of battle which continues to inform war reporting today. As warfare became increasingly complex, the media concentrated on the individual soldier. These depictions were inadequate in explaining modern warfare, yet they have persisted and intensified.

Digital Stories of Community: Mobilization, Coherence and Continuity
Ian Beeson and Clodagh Miskelly, University of the West of England
Our research explores Ricoeur's suggestion that stories have the capacity to reflect, unite, and mobilize a community. We focus on the use of computers to make community stories. We are interested in whether it is possible for community groups to create hypertextual forms of story with multiple voices and narrative threads running through them. We use some theoretical perspectives on engagement with technology and on the nature of hypertext to analyze our own work and other community digital storytelling approaches.

Familiarity and Concern in the Radio Voice of a Networked Diaspora Community
Walter Bender, MIT and Carla Gomez-Monroy, Schlumberger-SEED Foundation and Stephen Schultze, Public Radio Exchange
eRadio proposes to increase interaction and reduce alienation in diaspora communities. We report on our holistic approach to interactive radio production (including audio production, Internet exchange, and radio broadcasting) intended to foster participatory community self-discovery, identification, and assimilation in a community dispersed between New York and Mexico. Our hypothesis is that speaking with familiarity and concern to a dispersed audience of hometown folks and their descendents can strengthen the community’s oral culture and identity.

The Family Slide Evening
Julie Benjamin, University of Auckland, NZ
35mm slide photography was the popular visual medium for storytelling in New Zealand from the 1950s onwards. Many New Zealand children were brought up on slide evenings as a part of their family entertainment before the advent of television. By examining seemingly unrelated colour slides taken by serious amateur photographer Gladys Cunningham, I will analyse how visual and verbal narratives at a slide show offered clues to Gladys’s life, but also represent New Zealand social history.

Telling Stories That Aren't There: Don DeLillo's Running Dog and The Problem of Missing Film
Paul Benzon, Rutgers University
This paper considers the role that the absence of film plays in Don DeLillo's Running Dog. I suggest that by centering Running Dog’s narrative around a missing film and ultimately delivering that film to the reader through a sort of narrative playback, DeLillo stages the novel as a mediating technology within a shifting environment of reproduction, transforming the narrative and ideological stakes of that mediation beyond abstract intertextuality towards an interrogation of the modes of reproduction, perception, and possession present across different media.

Human Nature and Kafka: Issues of Commercial Cinema and its Relation to Political Agendas and the Avant-Garde
Cristiani Bilhalva, University of Southern California
Human Nature (2001) — a film directed by Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman, and produced by Spike Jonze — reflects the negotiation not of the avant-garde with mainstream cinema, but of the mainstream with the avant-garde. Taking Kaufman's Human Nature and Kafka's Report to an Academy as case studies, I'll be looking at certain subversive narrative strategies not only as a renovation source for mainstream cinema, but also as a political tool in the cultural contexts that shape the processes of storytelling.

Wild Style/ Style Wars: Same Story, Different Style
Marnie R. Binfield, University of Texas
Both the "fiction" film Wild Style and the documentary film Style Wars represent a version of hip-hop's birth that hip-hop fans accept as "real," the highest of honors in the hip-hop community. Nonetheless, Wild Style echoes throughout hip-hop culture, while Style Wars remains a largely "insider" text cited mainly by graffiti artists. This paper explores the storytelling style of each film and considers the films' roles in shaping the cultural memory of the story of the birth of hip-hop.

Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database
Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser University
Films such as Rashomon, Time Code, and Memento have a database-like structure which supports a narratively rich multi-linear viewer experience. These films organize narrative components into contending yet highly parallel plot structures. Run, Lola, Run is a rigorous example of this database narrative form. Its tightly ordered set of parallel story components forces a consideration of the constant play of chance and choice within our everyday lives. This implicitly interactive viewer experience anticipates the development of explicitly interactive narrative works.

Narrative and Micronarrative as Components of Game Experience
Jim Bizzocchi and Douglas Grant, Simon Fraser University
Why do game producers strive to incorporate narrative? What does it add to player experience? We apply these questions primarily against first-person shooters because while it appears difficult to make narrative arguments there, such underpinning is fundamental to them. Shooters stripped of narrative would be the Matrix uncloaked: extremely sparse, not very interesting spaces for play. We describe the minimal or "micronarrative" forms that enrich games through genre evocation, and support our psychological engagement within the game world.

The Story the Consultant Told: Visualization and Storytelling in Management Consulting
Mats Bjorkin, Goteborg University
“Storytelling” has been frequently used by organizational consultants for communicating change, identity, visions and strategies within organizations. Technologies of telling and visualizing stories within organizations have also changed; business intelligence systems and other decision support systems as well as internal communications systems have made it easier to disseminate stories to specific employees, but also made it more important how to tell stories. This paper discusses how different stories can change while moving between different business media systems.

Revitalizing the Hai Ba Trung Heroes' Legend
Marie-Eve Blanc, University of Montréal
This paper will talk about the Trung sisters' legend. This legend speaks about the genie of the village and famous national female warriors and heroes' legend and worship. We will demonstrate how a worship practice changes through the influence of the State and Confucianism and how the population in a context of social change (revolution, renovation) uses it and revitalizes it. It aims to analyze the process of genie/hero production in a country at the crossroads between China and South-East Asia.

Television Stories in the Making
Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University College
Against the background of the spreading of commercial television in Europe this paper discusses transformation of narrative structures in live television programming: the increased presence of documentary forms within fictional productions, and the increased emphasis on narrative forms from entertainment television in factual television. The paper seeks to understand these new generic forms and narrrative structures with the main examples taken from the Swedish live entertainment show Bingolotto, and the live broadcasts of national election night coverage and other live factual broadcasts.

Story into Short Story: Cultural Roots and Cultural Work
Melissa Bostrom, University of North Carolina
Most critics agree that the short story is descended from storytelling, a fact which positions the genre at the intersection of orality and literacy while maintaining its vexed relationship to history. This paper will demonstrate the way in which the short story’s storytelling ancestry shapes the kind of cultural work it is capable of doing and suggest the role of the short story in the contemporary United States.

Fiction's Work in the Story of Radical Radio
Martin Boyden, University of Rochester
Fiction's role in recovering radical radio practices, telling the story of what radio could be, is demonstrated through a relatively contemporary and geographically relevant example: the Madame Psychosis Radio Hour broadcast by a fictional MIT radio station in David Foster Wallace's novel, Infinite Jest. Preserving a style of wee hours radio found fleetingly in most American broadcast markets, including college radio in the Boston area, Wallace's fiction challenges the radio medium's more well-known story of frustrated radical promise.

Storytelling and the Visual Arts
Bonnie Bracey, Thornburg Center
Digital storytelling is about using art and related visual imagery in storytelling while strengthening technology skills through electronic media. Every aspect of storytelling — structure, plot, character, pace, voice, timing, and setting — have the potential to be artistically morphed into new forms using digital tools. This presentation will explore the connection between storytelling and learning and examine the ways in which learners can use art objects with storytelling activities in the classroom.

Complexity Soap: Tales of Globalization in René Pollesch's Tent Saga
Claudia Breger, Indiana University
René Pollesch is arguably the most interesting director in contemporary German-language theatre. While his work is generally praised for replacing "narrative" with critical "discourse," Pollesch's 2003/2004 globalization tetralogy Zeltsaga (Tent Saga) puts nostalgia for narrative at center-stage. My paper investigates the role of these stories, and more generally narrative, in a theatrical world that seems to be beyond the reach of its sense-making capacities.

Reconfiguring Zapotec Stories: Media Transfers, Historical Perspectives
Anna Brigido-Corachan, New York University
This paper examines the uses of the novel and video as alternative vehicles for the preservation of native (hi)stories in Oaxaca, Mexico. Zapotec stories tracing historical accounts have traditionally circulated in an oral form — storytelling, song — but also through pictoideographic writing. By appropriating contemporary venues to transmit their history, Zapotec artists rearticulate the lives of stories, traditional and new; they create alternative sites of enunciation that reinforce the language, identity, and social practices of their communities.

Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle
Robert Buerkle, University of Southern California
Looking at Max Payne as a case study for approaching the modern video game and the narrative functions at work within, this paper considers the options offered to the player in traversing the text, as well as the constraints of identification and psychological development.

Digital Storytelling: New Literacy, New Audiences
Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and John Hartley
Digital storytelling fills a gap between everyday cultural practice and (professional) popular media that was never adequately bridged during the broadcast era. Digital stories are simple but disciplined, like a sonnet or haiku, and anyone can learn how to make them. They reconfigure the producer/consumer relationship and show how creative work by non-professional users adds value to contemporary culture. The paper examines what is needed to bring out their potential, discusses some of the emerging initiatives that aim to increase their reach, and includes examples.

Modern Messages: Contemporary Tellings of Old Tales for the Very Young
Margaret Bush, Simmons College
Which "traditional" tales are most often told for today's pre-reading audience? What happens in the reduction of these tales for very young children? This study examines the folk/fairy tales frequently published as board books, picture books, and story collections for pre-school children in the 21st century. Considering traditional tales and storytelling as building blocks in literacy development, it compares the presentation of characters, dilemmas, lessons, language and visual portrayals in the translation of old tales into modern nursery literature.

Responsa Literature, Partial Responses to Scattered Letters
J.R. Carpenter, new media artist
Throughout the post-Talmudic period, the great distances that separated Diaspora Jewry from the scholars of Babylon necessitated the evolution of responsa literature, a type of question-and-response lawmaking. Montréal poet Anne Carson has written: “People in exile write so many letters.” What part does letter writing play in maintaining or altering the narratives of families separated by divorce, emigration, or economic migration? As letter writing re-emerges, in the form of email, how does the new immediacy of this ‘question and response’ mode of communicating affect the interpersonal narrative of writer and reader?

Telling Stories of Violence: The Troubling Violence Performance Project
M. Heather Carver and Elaine J. Lawless, University of Missouri
(with performers Sadie Chandler and Shelley Ingram)
This presentation will focus on the work of Elaine Lawless (folklore studies) and Heather Carver (performance studies) in their collaborative work on the "Troubling Violence Performance Project" — a troupe of students who "perform" monologues of women's experiences with violence. In addition to this work, we have written a play about women incarcerated for allegedly killing their abusive partners.

Covering Terrorism: 911 Versus 311 in American and Spanish Newspaper Front Pages
Angel Castanos and Amor Munoz, Universidad Cardenal Herrera CEU (Valencia, Spain)
The criteria to choose images and headlines in the newspapers front pages leads to different ways to tell a story, as we can observe in the coverage of the terrorist attacks of New York and Madrid in American and Spanish dailies. US and Spanish media used the Twin Towers to globalize the 911 attack, while after the Madrid bombings both of them focused on individuals. Although cultural background determines the policy of not printing disturbing images in the US, some of the American papers showed hard pictures taken in Spain, an approach we don¹t find in most September 12 covers.

The Muslim as Other in Hindi Cinema: Exoticized, Marginalized and Demonized
Kalyani Chadha, University of Maryland
While Indian society has been the site of frequent communal differences, Hindi cinema, one of its principal cultural forces, has traditionally appeared to be an arena that has resisted Hindu-Muslim separatism, the representation of Muslims in Hindi films has received little attention. This paper traces the portrayal of Muslims within mainstream Hindi films from the 1950s to the current period, and finds that Muslims have been variously "othered" through their exoticization, marginalization, and their demonization in Hindi films.

Property Stories
Anthony Chase, Nova Southeastern Law Center
The story of property as a historical and legal phenomenon is told differently depending upon motive and audience. There is a dominant or master narrative that is animated by a basic contradiction between the idea that private individuals should be able to use their property any way they wish versus the notion that there are always fundamental duties toward others, obligations that necessarily impinge upon one's own property use. How have Hollywood motion pictures told this particular story?

Women Warriors in the Shadow Play, Reunion of the Five Swords
Fan Pen Chen, SUNY Albany
I propose to discuss the women warriors in the eighteen-volume Reunion of the Five Swords, the most popular shadow play in Hebei and Northeastern China. The unusual sensitivity to the "barbarian" women warriors in this play suggests a closer and more complex relationship between the various ethnic groups in this region. Indeed, the ingenuity and complexity of Reunion's women warriors may have contributed to its enduring popularity in a locality where the Han people, Manchus and Mongols co-exist.

Telling Stories Through LiveJournal: xf_journals and Fan Fiction
Bertha Chin, Cardiff University
Livejournal.com has allowed fans to experiment with creating personal journals written in the name of the various characters from The X-Files, gathering them under an umbrella community, xf_journals where plots can be discussed together. This paper will explore the storytelling possibilities that exist within the space of LiveJournal.com, as it seemingly appears to operate independently from the general X-Files fan fiction fandom but at the same time expands on the creative world of fan fiction production.

The Archetypal Road-Myth: From the Highway to The Matrix
Theodoros Chiotis, Oxford University; Pavlos Baltas and Nikos Barbopoulos, National Technical University of Athens
The paper examines the persistence and permutations of the archetypal road myth focusing on the manner the traveller, who after getting in touch with the unknown in his wanderings, experiences a mythological and ontological shift. Pulp fiction and b-movies sharing this theme are examined alongside more recent fare such as the film The Matrix. The paper seeks to elucidate the close linkage between the urban transformations of the western city and the spatial and temporal genealogies of urban mythologies.

Applying Oral History to Media Research
Steven Classen, California State University, Los Angeles; Devorah Heitner, Northwestern University; Mark Williams, Dartmouth College
Three scholars who have completed, or are in the process completing, major research projects in television studies that utilize oral history will make short presentations on use of oral history in their own research. They will then conduct a discussion about the use of oral history to study media audiences, media producers and media memory. Among the issues addressed: the capacity or potential for oral histories to produce new and unanticipated research topics and lines of inquiry; and the special responsibilities and ethics of oral history and the interpretive challenges of using oral history to build a historical narrative.

The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence
Roderick Coover, Temple University
With special attention given to the ethnographic image, this paper rethinks the storytelling traditions of nonfiction film through the concepts of emergence and multilinearity. The paper synthesizes ideas offered by Steven Johnson, David MacDougal and others in an examination of nonfiction methodology and new media. The paper points to recent works like those of The Labyrinth Project to ask how new kinds of storytelling are emerging through tools of digital media and the metaphors that these new tools provide.

Death Is Not the End: Apocalypse and Self-Sacrifice in The Seventh Sign
Laura Copier, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
In my paper, I will analyze the migration of the traditional biblical theme of the apocalyptic end to secular Hollywood cinema. My particular focus will be on certain cinematic strategies of narrative construction, and the denouement of the story. I will contend that The Seventh Sign is an example of secular apocalypse, a reworking of a traditional story into a new medium.

Articulating or Performing the Populist Consensus About Corrupt Politics?: Two Political Scandals in Hungary
Peter Csigo, Budapest University of Polytechnics
The media representation of politics as corrupt and immoral has often been criticized for its alienating effects. However, condemning 'corrupt politics' has become such a routine and widespread media practice that it has lost most of its (dis)engaging power. Thus, the basic representation of politics as corrupt has to be dramatized and performed as a unique story for re-gaining meaning and triggering people's imagination. The ultimate importance of narrativization will be demonstrated by exloring why two otherwise rather similar political scandals had such different results: one marginalized, the other heavily influencing the results of Hungarian parliamental elections.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Election:
The Making of Jon Stewart
Joe Cutbirth, Columbia University
Surveys show Americans increasingly get political information from late-night television. So what would someone who relied only on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have known about the 2004 presidential campaign? A synopsis of the campaign constructed solely from 128 segments of the show, interviews with political consultants, journalists and other comedians and theories by James Carey, Todd Gitlin and Kathleen Hall Jamieson isolate Stewart's stories and examine their cultural impact.

Television: A Creative Industry?
Maire Messenger Davies, University of Ulster
The paper draws on interviews with television creative workers to examine what has been characterized pejoratively as an "industrialized" form of storytelling - the production of scripts for a weekly TV drama series (in this case, Star Trek, but with reference to other shows). The interviews raise questions about quality and cultural value, as well as the relationship of individual agency with the economics and technologies of television production. It asks: Is the term "creativity" appropriate when applied to TV storytelling?

Plotting the Story and Interactivity in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Drew Davidson, Art Institute of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
This paper analyzes the experience of the videogame, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, by using two diagrams. The first is a classic literary plot diagram. The second is a diagram developed by the author illustrating stages of interactivity. A close reading of the game from these two perspectives enables an exploration of how the game's story relates to the interactive elements of its gameplay.

Reality TV and the American Dream: a Cautionary Tale
June Deery, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
This paper examines the increasingly conspicuous narrative of “the makeover,” particularly as played out on reality television. Comparing the now routine dramas of spectacular personal and home makeovers reveals much about contemporary forms of commodification and suggests a shift in meaning between having and being. The marketing of previously unmediated subjects also makes the makeover show in many ways the quintessential reality TV format. Moreover, the paper argues, the makeover is the quintessential tale of late capitalism, a tale with a didactic intent.

Once Upon Right Now: The Transformation of Disney Theme Park Narratives
Andy Dehnart, Stetson University
Disney theme parks have always excelled at offering immersive, narrative-driven, hyperreal experiences. But the newest attractions represent a fundamental shift in the way guests experience Disney's three-dimensional stories. Narrated journeys are being replaced by immediate sensory experiences in which the story takes a back seat. This essay explores the narratives of Disney's theme park attractions and their subtle but significant shift from narrative-driven explorations to immediate experiences that are supported by stories.

Storytelling Between Content and Connectivity: Mapping the Potential
Mark Deuze, Indiana University
The impact of Internet on the professional identity of media professionals whose work is defined by creative storytelling - whether in advertising, journalism, public relations or related fields ­ is the theme of this presentation. The central question raised is to what extent storytelling can be content- or connectivity-based, and what level of participation is included in the narrative experience. This presentation features examples and analyses of contemporary media work between content versus connectivity, and between moderated versus unmoderated participatory communication.

Once Upon a Time in Chinese Film: Meta Narratives of Authenticity
Kimberly DeVries, MIT
With the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and In the Mood For Love during 2001, many commentators predicted that a wave of Chinese films and actors was poised pour into American cinemas. This forecast has been overly optimistic, but an increasing number of Chinese films have been picked up by American distributors and released in American theaters and video rental outlets. This paper addresses how "China" is constructed by contemporary film-makers and then packaged by distributors in a deliberate attempt to communicate with global, especially American, audiences. In particular, I consider how different genres of contemporary Chinese film each present a distinct vision of China containing implicit, or sometimes explicit assumptions about China's position in relation to the West, and about the makeup of American audiences

Comics Journalism: Truth and Subjectivity in the Work of Joe Sacco
Joellen Easton, MIT
Comic artist Joe Sacco has in the last decade earned critical acclaim for his visceral depictions of life in regions scarred by ongoing conflict particularly in Israel's occupied territories and in Eastern Bosnia during the Bosnian Civil War. This paper examines the traditional journalistic ideal of objectivity in the context of Joe Sacco's work, and explores how Sacco fuses the comics medium with a journalism that aims higher than just reporting the news.

From Jungle Book to Jungle Fever — Unchanging Stories of Racial Interaction
Suzette Ebanks, University of London
Stories about race in present-day popular culture often bear a resemblance to generations-old narratives on the same subject. In both news footage and literature, there are such intriguing similarities in the past and present attitudes about miscegenation that it becomes clear there is a narrative framework of racial interaction embedded in the British national consciousness. It is this story I propose to unearth.

Performativity, Cultural Capital, and Total-Makeover Television
Nathan Scott Epley, University of North Carolina
Total-makeover reality television is less about celebrity than about class. In series like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Faking It, and Date Patrol, the made-over are coached in multiple aspects of their everyday lives: not just what to wear, but how to wear it, how to move, how to talk, how to eat. This paper promotes understanding total-makeover TV in terms of performed, embodied cultural capital and interrogates the sub-genres articulations to whiteness and straightness.

Transformative Television: on Song Contests, Fairy Tales, and Visions of Europe
Staffan Ericson, Sodertorns University College, Sweden
This paper is about The Eurovision Song Contest; the annual, live broadcast, in which European nations compete for the best popular song. Recently, the televoting audience has unexpectedly given a series of victories to countries preparing to enter the EU Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Ukraine). Arranging in 2002, Estonia organized the broadcast as a modern fairy tale, representing the nation's development into a free, European state. The paper will look at the symbolic strategies involved, relating them to Dayan & Katz' (1992) work on transformative media events, and Couldry's (2002) work on media rituals.

Janet Malcolm: Constructing A Journalist's Identity
Elizabeth Fakazis, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
In 1983, New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm wrote a profile of psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, who had been fired from his post as the director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London. When the profile was published, Masson sued Malcolm for "making up quotes" that she had attributed to him. Malcolm insisted that she hadn't made up quotes and that she had followed narrative techniques that had long been standard in journalism. The case lasted 13 years. I will use the Malcolm case to explore how stories about storytelling function within the journalism community to defend or challenge boundaries of legitimate narrative practice within the profession, and to define "legitimate journalist."

Techno-Nationalist Tales of Glory and Failure: Writing the History of Inventions in Early Film and Television
Andreas Fickers and Frank Kessler, University of Utrecht
In our paper we wish to argue that recurrent elements can be found in narratives on inventors and inventions in media technologies such as cinematography and television. Looking at accounts on the work of the Lumiere and Skladanowsky brothers, on Edison, Friese-Greene (film), Baird, Nipkow, Barthelemy and Fransworth (television) we shall analyze the narrative patterns structuring the tales of glory and failure, especially with regard to the inherent nationalist dimension.

An Act of Resistance and the Representational Aftermath: From "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" to Come and Take it Day
Dora Fitzgerald, University of the Incarnate Word and James Fitzgerald, St. Philips College (both San Antonio, Texas)
This paper is an analysis of Jim Mendiola’s 2001 film Come and Take it Day, which works to resurrect the story of the mythical Gregorio Cortez as well as to construct a parallel story of how the deviant label is inappropriately applied to a modern subject. In this story the past is the present. The visual and aural storytelling strategies Mendiola employs to articulate his vision speak to the fragility of identity for oppressed people, then and now.

Conditions of Narrativity
Kianga Ford, University of California at Santa Cruz and Occidental College
In the shadow of history, there are millions of tiny stories negotiated in the everyday. The Story Project solicits and produces these tiny stories as an ongoing series of installation works. Displaced from the page into the arena of the visual arts, The Story Project endeavors to address narrative as a condition, as a facilitator and filter of interactions between people and their environments.

Copyright Law and the Story of the Author
Martin Fredriksson, University of Linköping
Apart from regulating the use of other stories, copyright laws can also be regarded as stories in themselves. Stories depicting the rights and obligations of actors involved in the production and distribution of texts. My presentation will consist of a comparative analysis of copyright acts. The main purpose is to examine how the role of the author is articulated in these texts and how the story of the author is affected by changing forms of cultural production and circulation.

Using Folkloric Conventions to Construct Student Narratives
Sean Galvin, LaGuardia Community College
This paper will demonstrate how the use of folkloric materials — riddles, proverbs, puns, foodways, legends, and their analysis — are just a few of the folkloric devices we utilize to construct or deconstruct narratives, whether literary or traditional. Using these conventions for non-native English speakers can often be as or more important than teaching business or technical writing. The ability to present these materials as personal web pages or in BlackBoard has brought these courses into another dimension.

Socrates Meets Borges: Telling Digital Stories Around the Virtual Liberal Arts Campfire
Barbara Ganley and Hector Vila, Middlebury College
In this paper, two Middlebury College professors will argue that the synthesis of web authoring with digital storytelling recreates dimensions of extended and enduring connectivity, privileging the importance of story to community, to advocacy and activism, to education and to a sense of personal efficacy. Digital storytelling, in particular, asks practioners to reconsider the role and form of stories in academic discourse and in their own creative and intellectual investigations.

The Is No New Media: A Narrative of New Media
Bernard Michael Geoghegan, Northwestern University
Editors of new media anthologies find themselves in an uncomfortable position: the designation “new” or “emerging media” suggests indeterminacy, yet their projects are committed to producing something that resembles a distinct, defined field with its own disciplinary interests and needs. I examine how scholars “tell stories” that forge the imaginary identification known as “new media," while their pedagogical practices simultaneously disrupt this story and suggest a more compelling basis for “new media studies.”

Parmalat: A Study in Fractured Narrative
Dawn Gilpin, Temple University
Multiple and in some cases conflicting accounts originating from a single source may be described as "fractured narratives," which uphold the standards of current public relations theory but which can also produce striking dissonances. To explore this phenomenon, this paper traces the different self-narratives produced by Italian multinational Parmalat in its relations with various internal and external stakeholders during the year leading up to the discovery, in December 2003, of $10 billion in "missing" declared corporate assets.

Stories about Computers
David Golumbia, University of Virginia
Computer scientists often write about or advocate for particular directions in future computer design, and only very few of these have turned out to be accurate. At the same time, computer narratives in SF fiction and media often turn out to correctly predict the shape and function of digital technology. This paper analyzes works by computer scientists and SF writers to see what role narratives and their reception play in the construction and definition of digital technology and its culture.

Familiarity and Concern in the Radio Voice of a Networked Diaspora Community
Carla Gomez-Monroy, Schlumberger-SEED Foundation; Walter Bender, MIT; Stephen Schultze, Public Radio Exchange
eRadio proposes to increase interaction and reduce alienation in
diaspora communities. We report on our holistic approach to
interactive radio production (including audio production, Internet
exchange, and radio broadcasting) intended to foster participatory community self-discovery, identification, and assimilation in a community dispersed between New York and Mexico. Our hypothesis is that speaking with familiarity and concern to a dispersed audience of hometown folks and their descendents can strengthen the community’s oral culture and identity.

Old Stories in New Dresses?
Babette Grabner, independent scholar
In western cultures, there hardly exist storytellers in the traditional sense anymore. The question that arises from that is where the stories have moved to. Is it possible that people of the 21st century do not need stories any more, or has another medium taken over the function of storytelling? I want to look at the processing of stories in film, and address the question: are the new stories in cinema merely old stories in new dresses?

Storytelling Across the Media
Michael Grabowski, College of New Rochelle
In an environment in which industries are increasingly dependent upon multiple media, too many courses focus on only a single medium. Integrating the work of scholars who explore media theory (Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman), this presentation will explore how to engage students within a production course in order to assess how the biases of each medium influence the stories they tell.

Narrative and Micronarrative as Components of Game Experience
Douglas Grant and Jim Bizzocchi, Simon Fraser University
Why do game producers strive to incorporate narrative? What does it add to player experience? We apply these questions primarily against first-person shooters because while it appears difficult to make narrative arguments there, such underpinning is fundamental to them. Shooters stripped of narrative would be the Matrix uncloaked: extremely sparse, not very interesting spaces for play. We describe the minimal or "micronarrative" forms that enrich games through genre evocation, and support our psychological engagement within the game world.

Whose Story Is This? Resurrecting the TV Author
Jonathan Gray, University of California, Berkeley
The author, we have been told, is dead. Turning specifically to television, the medium's oft-communal model of creation also fits with the idea of an absent author. However, in recent years, television has witnessed a concentrated return of the author, or what Foucault calls the author-function, with the likes of Matt Groening, David Chase, Alan Bell, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Greg Berlanti, Aaron Sorkin, J. J. Abrams, and others becoming common names spoken of by viewers, often in reverential terms. This paper studies what role authors now play, and what roles they are asked to play as go-betweens for producers and audiences, networking notions of textual ownership, diegetic creation, fan identification, and viewer rights.

Okonkwo and the Storyteller: Death, Meaning, and Accident in Achebe and Benjamin
Jonathan Greenberg, Montclair State University
This essay seeks to explore the concept of accident in Chinua Achebe' s Things Fall Apart by juxtaposing this foundational Nigerian novel with two disparate texts: Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" and Aristotle's reading of Sophocles' "Oedipos Tyrannos" in the Poetics. All three texts afford complementary angles on the question of whether, or how, the representation of death bestows meaning on a literary text and indeed on the process of history itself.

Passion[ate] Storytelling: Transmedia Versions of The Crucifixion
Alison Griffiths, Baruch College
This paper investigates Medieval cathedrals, the 1895 Cyclorama of Jerusalem panorama, and Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ as distinct but related ways of experiencing one of the world’s most memorable (and politically charged) stories, namely, the Crucifixion. Inscribed in each of these historically diverse and medium-specific ways of re-telling this ur-narrative of Christ’s death and resurrection is a notion of the “revered gaze,” a way of encountering and making sense of images that are intended to be spectacular in form and content.

What Happens Next?: Strategies of Improvisational Storytelling
Jessica Hammer, Columbia University
Interactive narrative is a tricky beast. How can we create stories that are genuinely responsive to user input and interaction, but that still make sense as good old-fashioned narratives? This presentation examines some of the strategies and techniques of interactive storytelling that are used by folk practitioners such as role-players and improvisational comics. It also explores the lessons these storytellers have for technologically-mediated interactive narratives.

Fireworks in Film and TV
Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona
Film and television use specific attributes of fireworks to complement the stories being told. Fireworks contribute contemporary or historical realism to the culmination of civic celebrations and sports. In romance mise-en-scene, fireworks are a lingering motif; the couple literally "sees stars" as they embrace. Comedy exploits the explosive nature of fireworks, turning the danger of unstoppable sequential firing into slapstick. Avant-garde film explores the streaming forms and sounds of fireworks. This paper explores the various ways that display fireworks are used in screen storytelling.

Blogging and Journalistic Standards
Christopher Harper, Temple University
A decade ago, the word "blog" didn't really exist. Today, however, Web logs, or blogs, have had a profound impact on the storytelling of the World Wide Web. This presentation will analyze how bloggers have used the Web as a means to step outside of the traditional journalistic standards of objectivity, balance, and fairness to return to perhaps a mixture of the partisan press during the 18th and 19th centuries and the muckrakers of the early 20th Century.

The Alien Logic of White Noise
Justin Hayes, Quinnipiac University
DeLillo’s White Noise shows how America is re-mythologized through the transition from print to electronic culture. Television generates a total-field awareness, which foregrounds the discourse of print, closing its open network of signs to form an iconic structure. This changes words from signs to symbols, meaningful for their direct effect on the psyche. Narratives thereby come to operate as the myths pervading popular culture as tabloid stories.

Hoaxing the “Real”: On the Meta-Narratives of Reality Television
Alison Hearn, University of Western Ontario
This paper will explore hoax reality shows, such as Joe Schmo, and My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, arguing that they function as meta-narratives of the spectacle, telling stories about the challenge of their own construction. In these shows, the established conventions of reality television become the narrative ground, the participants’ desire to "be on TV" becomes figural, and audience pleasure derives from witnessing contestants’ eventual "capture" inside a cultural logic they wish to be a part of but ultimately cannot control.

Old Images and New Stories in Indigenous Cinemas
Joanna Hearne, University of Missouri, Columbia
This paper explores contemporary indigenous film and digital video productions that re-assess prior systems of Western image-making. Filmmakers such as Victor Masayesva, Chris Eyre, and Zacharias Kunuk engage with the history of Indian representations in documentary and Western genres by using discontinuity editing, film clips, photographs, and — especially — oral storytelling and song through voiceovers, interviews, re-enactments, and sound bridges. Contemporary indigenous cinematic “repatriations” re-integrate archival footage into community tribal identities and change the stories that give meaning to images on screen.

Publishing Poverty: Contemporary Narratives of Social Suffering
Sarah J. Heidt, Kenyon College
This paper explores collections of case studies or transcribed interviews of social suffering produced since the early 1990s, including Bourdieu's The Weight of the World and Shipler's The Working Poor. Using recent auto/biography theory, I analyze textual attempts to characterize experiences of poverty and ask how efficacious they have been in giving voices to the voiceless and making those voices audible. I also explore how the Internet has made individuals'experiences of working poverty legible without utilizing commercial presses.

Applying Oral History to Media Research
Devorah Heitner, Northwestern University; Steven Classen, California State University, Los Angeles; Mark Williams, Dartmouth College
Three scholars who have completed, or are in the process completing, major research projects in television studies that utilize oral history will make short presentations on use of oral history in their own research. They will then conduct a discussion about the use of oral history to study media audiences, media producers and media memory. Among the issues addressed: the capacity or potential for oral histories to produce new and unanticipated research topics and lines of inquiry; and the special responsibilities and ethics of oral history and the interpretive challenges of using oral history to build a historical narrative.

Cognitive Approaches to Stories and Storytelling
David Herman, The Ohio State University
Because of the range of artifacts and media falling under their purview, their richly interdisciplinary heritage, and the varying backgrounds and interests of their practitioners, cognitive approaches to narrative at present constitute more a set of loosely confederated heuristic schemes than a systematic framework for research on stories. Working toward an integrative model, this paper surveys a number of cognitively oriented paradigms for narrative analysis, exploring how the field has been shaped by ideas from structuralist narratology, artificial-intelligence research, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology.

Narrative Archaeology: Reading the Landscape
Jeremy Hight, new media artist
GPS has been used for military weapon tracking, for navigation and mapping, but it and wireless are now able to be used to set locations as triggers in physical space for narrative segments that build as one moves across the city space. The act of reading/ interacting with technology and nonlinear narrative now moves from the isolation of individuals and their computers to a new sense of community as the work is to be experienced in groups and in the city at large. A writer can set scenes in physical locations but now can also use narrative segments to tell of unseen layers of architecture, history, ethnography and other areas where the person can read the places in city. There will be anthologies, not in books on shelves, but laid out in physical space as artists explore linking areas with locative media-driven narratives across city spaces.

Memory Work: Narrating Media Experiences
Brigitte Hipfl, Klagenfurt University (Austria)
This paper will address “memory work” as a means to explore the readings of popular stories in film and television. Short autobiographical narratives regarding media experiences are seen as ways in which people position themselves in relation to dominant discourses and ideologies. Analyzing the narratives will give us insights into how authors constitute themselves as social subjects. This will be demonstrated by focusing on reading of films like Amalie as well as popular TV programs.

Microlearning and Narration
Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck
Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and short-term-focused activities. The paper presents a special concept, Integrated Micro Learning (IML), based on a patent-pending technology. This approach supports repetitive learning through embedding the learning process into the daily routine by making use of communication devices. Through this method new learning spaces emerge and become available for life-long learning. In this context, the role of narrations and storytelling for the designing of “micro units” and didactical arrangements will be explored.

The Use of Unconscious Reflexivity in Contemporary Film Narratives
Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta
This presentation makes the case that there is an increasing number of films that introduce a ‘doubled reflectivity’ into the narratives. In addition to the self-reflectivity of the actors themselves, or the self-reflectivity of the story, an unconscious dimension to the characters is explicitly shown. This playfulness of time, where the usual "tenses" of language no longer hold true illustrate what Deleuze called "time cinema." Through a number of recent films I intend to demonstrate this current postmodern twist in cinema narratives.

Just Men in Tights?: What Genre Theory Can Teach Us About the Persistence of Superhero Comics
Henry Jenkins, MIT
The American comic book represents a rich case study for thinking about genre: once most works operate in the same genre, the role of genre in managing difference starts to break down. Previous writers have celebrated one or moments of revisionism during which comic book auteurs rethought or reworked basic building blocks, often with the goal of offering an ideological critique of the whole tradition. Yet, revisionism has been part of the way the superhero gernre oeprated from the beginning, part of an ongoing process of renewal and differentiation sustainging interest among maturing readers. This paper examines a range of different strategies including gender mixing, "elseworlds," global hybridity, moral inversion, and the mainstreaming of alternative comics artists, which keep this genre fresh for contemporary comic readers.

Our Violence, their Violence: Exploring the Emotional and Relational Matrix of Terrorist Cinema
Vamsee Juluri, University of San Francisco
This paper explores, from the perspective of Gandhian nonviolence, the representation of violence in popular Indian films about terrorism such as Mission: Kashmir (Hindi) and Khadgam (Telugu). On the basis of postcolonialist critiques of modernity and studies of the epistemic politics of cultural reception in India, it outlines an emotional and relational framework in the terrorist narrative of Indian cinema that may offer insights into a popular sensibility about ahimsa, or nonviolence.

Fandom@net: Changing Relationship between Media Consumers and Producers
Inkyu Kang, University of Wisconsin at Madison
My paper explores how the Internet has changed fandom culture. The Internet has made a successful alternative medium in Korea, but it is also changing media industry practices from casting for soap operas to financing and promoting big-budget films. Based on specific case studies, my paper argues for the contingency of fan culture, offering a critique of a free-floating theorization of fandom.

Four Narrative Styles in Transmedia Storytelling
online version
Julia Evergreen Keefer, NYU
Inspired by film, the Internet, particle physics, psychoanalysis, Berber and Bedouin storytelling and environmental science, I will use four narrative styles — recursive, pass-the-ball linear, tandem-competitive, and conglomerate or layered — in four different works of fiction, analyzing the way time, space, point of view and language change with the different perspectives, and how the narrators color the content.

One Hundred Years of Cisco, Zorro, and Other Latina/o Good Bandits
Gary Keller, Arizona State University
Beginning in 1904, Cisco, and then Zorro and other Latina/o bandits have been the subjects of a media cycle that continues unabated into the 21st century. This paper will review the salient aspects of the Cisco and Zorro cycles including the following: their relationship to actual historical or quasi-historical social bandits of the 19th century; the evolution of these cycles into the world of mass media and mass culture including film, television, comics, games, puzzles, and pastimes; and the emergence of Hispanic female counterparts to Zorro and Cisco.

Everything’s Not Comin' Up Roses: Cultural Conflict and the Hollywood Musical
Kelly Kessler, CUNY Queens College
"Everything's Not Comin' Up Roses" focuses on the ways in which chnages in American Culture ultimately led to the rewriting of the American Hollywood musical. Whether by reflecting an apathy or pessimism toward romance (Sweet Charity, All That Jazz, At Long Last Love), an acknowledgment of racial or sexual difference/ strife (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hair, Zoot Suit), or a generalized sense of unrest (Jesus Christ Superstar, Pennies from Heavan, Tommy), the stories told by such films rework one of the most culture-affirming genres of the classical Hollywood period to suit contemporary experiences.

Interrogating the Women Warrior: War, Patriotism and Family Loyalty in Lady Warriors of the Yang Family
Poh Cheng Khoo, independent scholar
In this paper, I look at the trope of the woman warrior as depicted in the Singapore-Taiwan-China joint production of Lady Warriors of the Yang Family (2001). A modern re-interpretation of a traditional Chinese mythic historical tale of patriotism and family loyalty, the serial's multi-dimensional treatment of the woman warrior figure is an exercise in interrogating the popular but often controversial issue of women in positions of power. I argue that this particular enactment of the Yang Family story effectively champions the transformational role of women warriors and its relevance in an age of moral ambivalence and socio-political transition.

The Uses of Fairy Tales in Psychotherapy
Bette U. Kiernan, psychotherapist (Palo Alto, CA)
The contributors to psychoanalysis looked to mythology to understand the psyche. A look into mythic and fairy tales patterns can still yield insights and clinical directions for contemporary psychotherapists. Fairy tales help develop reframes, have existential messages, and images to transform pain into creativity. This presentation integrates knowledge from psychoanalysis, systems theories, and cognitive psychology to demonstrate the link between fairy tales and spirit. The patterns encoded in myths that transcend suffering will be defined.

Media Stories: Murder, Motives and Moralities
Madeleine Kleberg and Ester Pollack, Stockholm University
In this paper, we'll analyze two stories of murder: one from 1932 and 2004. What can they tell us about social order and the role of journalism at the time? Is there a classic storytelling of crime and murder? We analyze how crime and perpetrators, their motives and victims are represented in leading Swedish newspapers; and how, especially in editorials, moralities about the misdeeds are framed into each period with its prevailing criminal policy and with its ideological-political interpretations of a society in "modern times."

"Do it First, Do it Yourself, and Keep on Doing it": The Persistence of the American Dream in the Gangster Film
Amanda Ann Klein, University of Pittsburgh
This paper investigates how gangster films retell the story of the American Dream across different social and historical periods. This story of an individual striving for success only to be punished for this desire can be traced to early 1900s robber barons whose meteoric rise to wealth and power embodied the belief that hard work, no matter how unscrupulous, is rewarded. The gangster film's fundamental structure of individual desire versus communal needs is replayed throughout the genre's history; its changes highlighting public views of who or what constitutes the Public Enemy.

Narrativity and Narrativism as Important Factors in Modern Journalism: Storytelling in Appropriate or Exaggerating Ways?
Sebastian Koehler, Leipzig University (Germany)
I focus on the increasing role of a particular kind of storytelling, which I call "narrativism": Narrativity is an integral part of modern journalism, as long as it is one part beside other modes of journalistic communication in all their diversity of content, form and perspective. Problems arise if narrativity becomes exaggerated, one-sided and displacing - in particular problems of over-simplification and excessive emotionalisation. Accordingly, I analyse the audiovisual storytelling of two events during the Iraq-War 2003: The coverage of the "saving" of Jessica Lynch in April 2003, and the coverage of the "capture" of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.

Retelling 9/11 on American Television: The West Wing and Ally McBeal
Jaap Kooijman, University of Amsterdam
The two 9/11 episodes of The West Wing (3:1, NBC, October 2001) and Ally McBeal (5:7, Fox, December 2001) are similar in that they show how America as a collective (should) deal with such a catastrophic experience. Both function as building blocks of the American "imagined community" (Benedict Anderson). However, while The West Wing explicitly treats 9/11 as an international issue, Ally McBeal only implicitly refers to 9/11 by presenting fictional accounts of local and personal tragedy. In this way, Ally McBeal personalizes and de-politicizes 9/11.

The Power of Stories to Build Solidarity Across Difference
Sara Koopman, University of British Columbia
How is a white middle class U.S. woman so moved by the story of an indigenous massacre survivor from Guatemala that she does 6 months of prison in protest? Many who do civil disobedience to close the School of the Americas, of the U.S. army, are motivated by stories of survivors of torture at the hands of graduates. How does connection across difference happen through stories? A case study and discussion of empathy vs. sympathy. Includes brief performances of stories.

Arab Reality Television: An Alternative Story to Arab Reality?
Marwan Kraidy, American University
This paper will explore how the stories told by Arab reality television articulate the social, political and economic realities of the Arab world. Based on five months of fieldwork in the Arab world in 2004 and textual analyses, it focuses on public discourse — on Arab-Western relations, male-female dynamics, etc. — surrounding Star Academy, a Fame-meets-Big Brother French reality television format, and the most popular and controversial program in the history of Arab television.

Digital Storytelling at the National Gallery of Art
Joe Lambert, Center for Digital Storytelling and Julie Springer, National Gallery of Art
This presentation will review the goals and results of the digital storytelling tutorials for K-12 teachers that took place at the National Gallery of Art's Teacher Institute in the summers of 2003 and 2004. The value of digital storytelling will be addressed through the perspectives of the organizing museum educator and the digital storytelling coach. Select digital stories—powerful 3 to 4-minute movies about art made by teachers participating in the program—will also be shown.

David Lynch and Robert Wilson: Contemporary Surrealist Storytellers
Kurt Lancaster, Fort Lewis College
In the films of David Lynch and the stage work of Robert Wilson, we can see how both of these directors -- working in different media -- blend the surrealistic forces of internal and external reality into stories that define their style and mark them as progenitors of a contemporary surrealistic movement. I will examine their work through the lens of Breton's lecture, "What is Surrealism?" and place these contemporary directors in context of the postmodern movement.

The Little Match Girl in America: Hans Christian Andersen and the Topos of the Dying Child
Henrik R. Lassen, University of Southern Denmark
Hans Christian Andersen's short tale "The Little Match Girl" (1845) relies on the depiction of the moment of a child's death presented interdependently with a set of complex traditional expectations, a topos well loved by nineteenth-century readers. By the 1860s, Andersen's original contributions to the standard topos had become fully integrated in American popular tradition as an acceptable variant of the "dying child" topos, and to this day the story may be seen to perform important cultural functions in America.

Telling Stories of Violence: The Troubling Violence Performance Project
Elaine J. Lawless and M. Heather Carver, University of Missouri
(with performers Sadie Chandler and Shelley Ingram)
This presentation will focus on the work of Elaine Lawless (folklore studies) and Heather Carver (performance studies) in their collaborative work on the "Troubling Violence Performance Project" — a troupe of students who "perform" monologues of women's experiences with violence. In addition to this work, we have written a play about women incarcerated for allegedly killing their abusive partners.

Political Discourse in Film: Pierre Falardeau, His Works, and the Independence Movement in Quebec
Julie LeBlanc, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Controversial film director, Pierre Falardeau, is renowned for his works and activism relating to the independence movement in Québec. The director's personal, uncensored political messages are transmitted in his films with raw and direct criticism. With the use of published interviews and personal discussions with the film director, this paper explores how political manifestos are present in films describing and interpreting historical and fictional narratives about the state of Quebec, its people, and its possible independence.

QuickTime Technology and the CD-ROM: The (Retro)Future of Storytelling?
Bruno Lessard, University of Montreal
This presentation examines the future of storytelling in two seemingly passé visual environments: the QuickTime movie and the CD-ROM. Striving to overcome and yet to retain, and reinvent cinema, this counter-history of visuality implies that to go beyond cinema is, paradoxically, to use outmoded engines of visual storytelling such as the panorama and early film. The temporality of these visual technologies, when considered in the CD-ROM environment, seems to be anachronistic: it evokes and repeats the aesthetics of early cinema and yet points to the future of cinema with its "interactive" moments and its digital treatment of images.

Re(ap)proaching Linearity: The Postmodern Disintegration of Narrative
Marc Leverette, Rutgers University
For the purposes of this discussion I shall consider postmodernity only as it relates to the realm of linearity and storytelling in the age of digital media. I will look historically at structural linear narrative and its relation to communication media, how particular scholars have approached the phenomenon of disintegration media ecologically, and its cultural implications. Additionally, I will examine how the gnomic style of the symbolist movement (which is both modern and postmodern in its sensibilities) might be the most apt comparison to contemporary digital mediation, which follows not a continuous, linear, or unbroken line of thought, but rather creates a tessellated pattern of ideas (“probes” to use McLuhan’s phrase), each tile in the mental mosaic just one particular facet of the overall pattern.

Shadows from Another Place: Transposed Spaces
Paula Levine, San Francisco State University
Distances and differences often diminish the impact of traumatic events, such as war, upon other lives being lived in safety. But what if the safety of distance between foreign and domestic territories collapsed, and impact of foreign events could be seen,
“experienced” and grounded in local terms? This paper presents "Shadows from another place," a web-based Global Positioning System (GPS) project that employs mapping as a narrative device to dissolve the distinctions between foreign and domestic, and create new narrative contiguity.

The Sound of Silents: Representations of Speech in Silent Film
Torey Liepa, New York University
The mid-1910s saw the establishment of the feature-length film as the standard form of filmmaking. As these movies became increasingly respected by middle-class audiences, film producers realized the potential, yet relatively untapped profit to be made from entertaining these groups. Through their desire to reach this large body of consumers, American filmmakers attempted to tell different kinds of stories; complex, psychologically motivated stories that were driven by character. This paper explores how and why silent American cinema of the 1910s incorporated character language, in the form of dialogue intertitles, as a means to deepen character psychology.

The End of the World as We Know It: Narratives of Environmental Apocalypse in Contemporary Literature and Other Media
Anthony Lioi, MIT
This paper will examine the transmission and refiguration of traditional narratives of apocalypse in contemporary American environmental literature, television, and film. Examples to be considered include: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring; Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; Don DeLillo, White Noise; The X-Files; Buffy theVampire Slayer; the Godzilla films; The Day After Tomorrow; and Spirited Away.

Hollywood’s Romantic Comedy: Formula and Gender Dynamics
Leah Lowe, Connecticut College
Formulaic romantic comedy provides a forum for the exploration of gender dynamics and gender norms within specific cultural and social historical contexts. This presentation focuses on the historical evolution of romantic comedy’s cinematic narrative and its treatment of gender by comparing the conventions of gender representation associated with classical Hollywood screwball comedy of the 1930s and early 40s (It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve) with representational conventions of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Runaway Bride).

Story Telling and the Politics of Representation
Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, Suffolk University
This paper analyzes the contribution of the film Circle of Dreams (Israel, 2000) to a new form of story telling about Mizrahim (Oriental Jews) in Israel. The film, written and directed by Beni Torati, a Persian-Israeli, represents a new cultural and political form of story telling. On one hand, it empowers Mizrahim by shattering images and stereotypes of Mizrahim in Israeli media (Shohat, 89). On the other hand, it demonstrates the political power of self-representation.

Storytelling, Technologies and Traditions in Italy: Storie Mandaliche
Erica Magris, Scuola Normale Superiore and University Paris III
Storie Mandaliche is a cyber-storytelling conceived as a work in progress in 1998 by Andrea Balzola and Giacomo Verde, based on the combination of the digital technology with the mandala archetype and with the Italian folk practice of oral narrative. This paper discusses first the cultural syncretism of the tale, the connection between said words and FlashMx animations, and, secondly, the position of the public, called to choose which story to listen to, thus becoming not only audience, but also an active player.

Dead Stars and Film Form
Neepa Majumdar, University of Pittsburgh
At the apocryphal origin of film stardom lies the story of the rumored death of actress Florence Lawrence in a street accident. This paper takes the recurrent fascination with stories of dead and injured stars as its starting point to examine the impact of photographic indexicality and cinema's dialectic of presence and absence on the textual form and reception of films whose stars have died during production.

Memories through Multimedia: Documenting our Lives
Atteqa Malik, digital artist
The neurotic compulsion to collect memories using images and videos is taking on epidemic proportions all over the world. Exposure to media persona has resulted in "camera awareness" among individuals by affecting the way they conduct themselves at recorded events. How are physically recorded memories overlapping with subconscious ones to create new twists in the stories of human lives? An observation of Karachi’s urban culture, that filters out the attitudes defining this new human condition, will be the essence of my paper.

Cyberaesthetics, Bioethics, Digital-Autopsies: Involution, Extramodernity, Compressionism
Robert "Ouimette" Martinez, European Graduate School (Saas-Fee, Switzerland)
In this presentation, I analyze an installation artwork by Teiji Furuhashi, titled Lovers (Dying Pictures, Loving Pictures) (1994). I contend that this work of art represents a digital narrative involved with an appearance of cyberspace, an ethics of life signified by love, and an extramodern problematic that contests a Western centered historical subject. Furthermore, I analyze this installation in order to see how compressed narratives regarding contemporary concepts of the "naked" and the "nude" are related insofar as death and causality imply theories about life and structure, respectively.

Tuberculosis Narratives: (Im)Patient Stories from a Culture of Writing and Curing
Jean Mason, Ryerson University
This presentation examines how the migration of patients' tuberculosis narratives across history, culture and media creates a multi-perspectival approach to illness that is essential to accurate historical documentation, and beneficial to practitioners and patients who look to these documents for medical knowledge. Data is drawn from the principal investigator's four-year study of TB narratives written by patients at North America's premier sanatoria in Saranac Lake, New York, prior to effective drug therapy (1884-1954). The presentation will focus on specific archival material. The related theoretical intersections of narrative medicine, pathographic writing, and expressive writing will provide the theoretical framework for discussion.

Glocalized Narratives: Nostalgic American Images in Japanese Print Advertisements
Michael L. Maynard, Temple University
Glocalization theory interrogates the degree to which the local accommodates to the global. Textual analysis of three Japanese ads aimed at Japanese teens finds that nostalgic images of America are interwoven into narrative sales copy for domestically produced products: a pick up, a motorcycle and a supplement bar. Glocalized narratives include a romanticized story of Route 66, encounters with Native Americans in Montana, and Norman Rockwell-like representations. Contrary to assumptions that global images are imposed on resistant cultures, this study finds that "foreign narratives" are appropriated into local narratives to the extent that the process creates glocalized narratives.

Flâneurs Savants: A Stroll Through the Marais Neighborhood of Paris
Andrea McCarty and Rekha Murthy, MIT
Emerging mobile computing technologies enable new storytelling practices that rely on physical place as well as traditional narrative forms. Flâneurs Savants is a portable, digital walking tour that tests these possibilities in an urban environment. Narrative in this context is multi-layered: The narrative of geographical progression through the Marais streets, that of a particular location, or even the narrative formed by relationships between different locations along the route. The (hi)stories included are recent and ancient, and encompass many interests and walks of life.

Basketball Stories
Thomas McLaughlin, Appalachian State University
Basketball is a rich and complex practice in which a culture is produced by the players in the moment of play at the local level. Any basketball game develops a distinctive ethical, aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional style that reflects the players' histories and social identities. Basketball is also an important media spectacle, covered endlessly on television and often taken up as the subject of feature films. This paper argues that television coverage, because of its rigid technical and rhetorical formulas, fails to capture that cultural practice, and that feature films, because of their tradition of cinematic realism, do provide an accurate representation of basketball culture.

Spike Lee: Avant-Garde Filmmaker
Ayana McNair, University of Southern California
Filmmaker Spike Lee has reached iconic status as a mainstream storyteller. However, in light of his subject matter and filmmaking style, I argue for the acceptance of Spike Lee into the Avant-Garde canon. I compare and contrast Lee's filmmaking styles and themes with those of the Los Angeles School, Black filmmakers accepted into the Avant-Garde canon for their bold and in-depth meditations on Black life. While ensconced in the mainstream, Lee's explorations of Blackness are truly avant-garde.

"Doesn't It Look Like a Happy Place to Live?" The Stories Embedded in Today's Model Homes
Ellen Menefee, University of Delaware
Professionally furnished model homes are primary marketing tools of the contemporary housing industry in America. These walk-through displays offer narratives of potential lifestyle and stand as key promoters of idealized middle-class values. This study is a consideration of the stories model homes tell. Drawing on theories of symbolism embodied in objects of everyday life, this study illuminates participatory and coercive elements in the design, presentation, and reception of middle-class single family housing.

Using Hip Hop Pedagogy in Language Arts
Trudy Mercadal-Sabbagh, Florida Atlantic University
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing field of Hip Hop pedagogy. The Hip Hop art movement is a uniquely African-American genre born in the inner cities. As such, rap's message is often community-oriented and celebratory, calling for pride, political liberation, and social justice. I share herein my experiences teaching in an alternative school for inner-city at-risk students. Using the medium of Hip Hop music and storytelling to build with students, in a dynamic process, the skills required by language arts traditional curricula has proven to be a successful, rewarding, and enriching experience for students and educators alike.

Pornography, Political Corruption, and the Colonial Narrative
Ruth A. Miller, University of Massachusetts, Boston
The starting point of this paper is the supposed "corruption eruption" of the mid 1990s, a period during which nearly every international aid agency identified corruption as a major threat to developing democracies. I hope to explore in my presentation the various narratives of corruption that emerged over this period, and to discuss how these narratives have helped to reinforce neo-colonial structures.

Digital Stories of Community: Mobilization, Coherence and Continuity
Clodagh Miskelly and Ian Beeson, University of the West of England
Our research explores Ricoeur's suggestion that stories have the capacity to reflect, unite, and mobilize a community. We focus on the use of computers to make community stories. We are interested in whether it is possible for community groups to create hypertextual forms of story with multiple voices and narrative threads running through them. We use some theoretical perspectives on engagement with technology and on the nature of hypertext to analyze our own work and other community digital storytelling approaches.

Locating Story
Clodagh Miskelly, Kirsten Cater, Constance Fleuriot, Morris Williams, Lucy Wood
We consider the role of story in a local community project where location-sensitive technology was used to produce and locate “mediascapes”. Older learners recorded and located sound and images based on local knowledge and memories. These were triggered by maps, photographs, conversations and by walking through the area. This project led us to consider how, why & where story was located within this production, the different aspects of located media as story and the potential of community-based located storytelling.

Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television, Part 2
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
This paper argues that recent developments in fictional American television have led to a form of narrative complexity unique to television, marked by interwoven serial plots, genre mixing, reflexivity, and explicit authorial presence. The presentation outlines this mode¹s formal qualities, briefly tracing its emergence through institutional, technological, and artistic practices.

Spoils of Conquest: Gender, Race and War Stories
Sujata Moorti, Middlebury College
Examining American television news coverage of the wars in/on Afghanistan and Iraq, this paper examines the particular modalities through which gendered stories of war are produced and reproduced by mainstream media outlets. The paper underscores the manner in which war and conflict continue to be masculinized and racialized stories offering women and feminized subjects emaciated (and stereotypical) narrative locations. The essay will highlight the manner in which the interlocking categories of gender and race confound newsworkers' ability to produce coherent stories about women's presence in conflict zones.

The Politics of Parody on the Contemporary Television Sitcom
Joanne Morreale, Northeastern University
The essay examines the parodic comic narrative on American television. Like traditional sitcoms, these parodies take social norms and conventions as their subject matter, either pointing to the absurdity of the everyday, or poking fun at conventional wisdom regarding "appropriate" behavior. Unlike traditional sitcoms, they call attention to the artifice that is inherent in social conventions as well as the forms and genres of television itself. Parody can either reaffirm or undermine social norms, values, and conventions. I suggest that sitcom parodies use a rhetoric of subversion that ultimately reaffirms a conservative politics.

Covering Terrorism: 911 Versus 311 in American and Spanish Newspaper Front Pages
Amor Munoz and Angel Castanos, Universidad Cardenal Herrera CEU (Valencia, Spain)
The criteria to choose images and headlines in the newspapers' front pages leads to different ways to tell a story, as we can observe in the coverage of the terrorist attacks of New York and Madrid in American and Spanish dailies. US and Spanish media used the Twin Towers to globalize the 911 attack, while after the Madrid bombings both of them focused on individuals. Although cultural background determines the policy of not printing disturbing images in the US, some of the American papers showed hard pictures taken Spain, an approach we don¹t find in most September 12 covers.

Flâneurs Savants: A Stroll Through the Marais Neighborhood of Paris
Rekha Murthy and Andrea McCarty, MIT
Emerging mobile computing technologies enable new storytelling practices that rely on physical place as well as traditional narrative forms. Flâneurs Savants is a portable, digital walking tour that tests these possibilities in an urban environment. Narrative in this context is multi-layered: The narrative of geographical progression through the Marais streets, that of a particular location, or even the narrative formed by relationships between different locations along the route. The (hi)stories included are recent and ancient, and encompass many interests and walks of life.

Why the American “Free World” Doesn’t Seem Counter-Intuitive: Continuity Editing, Televisual Form, and the Cogency of the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Alan Nadel, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
I am interested in how a cultural narrative acquires cogency, in other words, in the process by which, as Roland Barthes put it, nature and history are confused at every turn. Specifically, I want to discuss how the formal process of cinematic representation and televisual representation—i.e., the process of continuity editing and of television commercial editing—imply a set of stories that, through their iteration, lend cogency to the narratives of the “free” market and of the “free” world.

Inscrutable Reality: The Literate Contours of Art-Cinema
Narration
Sheila J. Nayar, Greensboro College
This paper contends that art-cinema narration has been fundamentally shaped by the noetic processes and expectations engendered by literacy. Methodologically, the paper will make its case by accounting for absence as much as presence, particularly the wholesale absence of such traits in conventional Hindi films, which, as I have elsewhere shown, have been significantly contoured by the psychodynamics of orality, and the narrative and performative attributes of orally transmitted narrative.

A Place at the Hearth: Storytelling, Subversion and the U.S. Culture Industry
Caren S. Neile, Florida Atlantic University
Storytelling is, arguably, the most potentially subversive of art forms. With few exceptions, therefore, the U.S. culture industry has marginalized adult performance storytelling since the art form's resurgence in the 1970s, to the benefit of the cultural and political hegemony. This paper (1) Explores the evolution and marginalization of adult performance storytelling in the U.S., (2) Evaluates the role of storytelling in an increasingly profit-driven, technology-based culture industry, and (3) Outlines an alternative course for the future of adult performance storytelling.

Albert in Africa: Online Role-Playing and Perceptions of Fun
Ken Newman, Griffith University (Australia)
Role Playing Games and improvisational theatre both require the participants to work together in real-time to construct dynamic narrative elements. A well-accepted principle of improvisational theatre is to consider communication in terms of ongoing narrative contracts (offers, acceptances, blocks, counter-offers). In this study, subjects' individual predispositions, and their responses are correlated with their narrative contracting activity. From this emerges a view of the complex interactions that make up the simple universal construct of fun in an RPG environment.

Terminal Moves: Network Television and the Limits of Interactivity
Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, Depauw University
This paper addresses the increasingly complex impact of interactive technologies on network television through a close analysis of two relatively early examples of cross-platform storytelling produced by NBC: Second Shift (1998), and an installment of Dateline (2001). These two examples highlight several important issues with regard to interactive narratives and network television: the changing approach to interactivity in tightly controlled commercial environments; the persistence of traditional genres in "new media" forms; and the expanded potentials for rationalizing viewer/user distinctions along technological/economic lines.

“Everyone Neat and Pretty”: Mickey Mouse Mediocrity
Sarah Nilsen, University of Vermont
This paper considers how early children's television negotiated the boundary between childhood and adulthood for its viewers. Walt Disney's immensely popular The Mickey Mouse Club was exceptional for its audience, and exceptional in terms of earlier Walt Disney productions, because of its celebration of the unexceptional. Belonging to the club meant being part of a community that praised the average, the anti-intellectual, and the mediocre. The show foregrounded the smallness of the medium, creating the first generation of viewers that would turn to television to help cross the bridge into maturity.

From Story to Space: Combining Linear Content and Spatial Design for Mindstage
Michael Nitsche, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Paul Richens
A principal problem of interactive 3D VE is the tension between a linear content and the interactive accessibility inside the VE. Addressing this problem the Mindstage project mapped a lecture of the highly acclaimed film designer Christopher Hobbes onto an interactive multi-user VE. The story (our lecture) had to be included in its entirety and be accessible to groups and students for individual study. This paper addresses how we applied spatial design to approach the task and developed the prototype.

Narrativity Across Media
Siobhan O'Flynn, University of Toronto at Mississauga
The idea and function of “story” are of central concern in recent critical writing on narrative in new media. The predominant focus of criticism has been the opposition of story/plot and/or narrative/database (Manovich). Through an examination of a range of traditional and interactive “texts" (literary, cinema and new media), this paper explores the issue of narrativity in the fragmented work, attending to other elements such as the use of repetition and theme.

New Media and the Fostering of the Hyperconscious Narrative
Kim Owczarski, University of Texas at Austin
This paper investigates how the BMW Film Series, titled The Hire, foregrounded the changes taking place in the entertainment industry with regard to narrative and new media. The series quickly inspired discussion about the nature of 'advertainment' for its unique blend of advertising and entertainment not only in the films themselves, but also in the very design of the Website. The Hire serves as an excellent case study of how contemporary entertainment narratives are redefined within the terms of interlocking media, particularly cinema, advertising, and the Internet.

Reader Response, Gender and Hypertext Narratives
Ruth Page, University of Central England
This study is a gender-oriented extension of Douglas's (1992) work on reader response and hypertext narratives. It is based on the reading logs and creative writing of 70 readers as they interacted with a transitional hypertext. I am interested in the strategies of narrativity employed by the readers, indicated through the pathways navigated and the storyworlds subsequently created. Findings suggest a contrast between inner directed readers and those who relied on traditional narrative structures. These were related to the gender of the reader in a complex way, interconnected with the influence of academic disciplines and a more general expectation of hypertext's potential.

Dual Effects of Digital Texts
Ana Pano, University of Bologna
The nature of fictional narratives or stories, as a series of narrated events and characters, is not altered when stories migrate from print to electronic hypertext. However, a hypertext story can be read on two separate levels. Here I argue that story fragments on the one side, and links on the other, create two complementary or contradictory versions of the same story that may be interpreted separately.

Media Framing of Policy in Ambiguous Wars: A Case of Privacy Policies
Yon Jin Park, University of Michigan
The media are the central storytelling apparatus for generating a certain meaning of policy, far from reflecting what is available to citizens as the best policy option. I unlock this arbitrariness of policy construction. I compare the Patriot Act of today's War Against Terror with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the Cold War era. The two wars build upon ambiguous enemies: terror and ideology. I argue that the notion of enemies is reinforced through socio-psychological construct of 'fear and humor' — ancient storytelling devices that prevail in news magazines throughout the 70s and today.

But What about the Genre Film? Press and Industry Constructions of American Independent Cinema in the 1990s
Alisa Perren, Northeastern University
In this paper, I explore how, in the process of constructing narratives about American independents, journalists privileged certain types of films and neglected others. Most frequently overlooked was the “genre film” – a specific type of low-budget film that was a direct descendent of exploitation cinema. I argue that we need to reconsider the importance of the genre film to American independent cinema during the 1990s.

The Murdered Sweetheart: Child of Print and Panic?
Tom Pettitt, Universityof Southern Denmark
At the intersection of the perennial media themes of love and crime lie the English news ballads on the "Murdered Sweetheart": the pregnant girl killed by her seducer when she demands marriage. The original texts, composed and distributed as broadside ballads (ca 1650 - 1850) can be juxtaposed both with their sources in journalistic prose accounts and with their derivatives in folksong tradition, effectively revealing the impact of migration across media systems. The genre itself may result from the interference of market-oriented cheap printing with traditional forms of femicidal narrative, in the context of the seventeenth-century moral panic on gender relations.

Mickey Mouse Chivalry: The Chivalric Romance Narrative of the Theme Park
Deborah Philips, Brunel University
This paper will argue that the spaces of the contemporary theme park are structured around literary genres, and focus on the use of the narratives derived from Chivalric Romance in the theme park and fun fair. There is a consistent use of chivalric stories and of heraldic iconography in American and European fairgrounds and theme parks; The paper will argue that the employment of Arthurian Romance is a construct of medievalism, and one that derives from nineteenth century versions of the Chivalric, which had been popularised through the work of Walter Scott. The impact of Scott's work can be traced through design, theatre and popular fiction, to structure a familiar set of signifiers and stories which invoke Chivalric Romance.

Media Stories: Murder, Motives and Moralities
Ester Pollack and Madeleine Kleberg, Stockholm University
In this paper, we'll analyze two stories of murder: one from 1932 and 2004. What can they tell us about social order and the role of journalism at the time? Is there a classic storytelling of crime and murder? We analyze how crime and perpetrators, their motives and victims are represented in leading Swedish newspapers; and how, especially in editorials, moralities about the misdeeds are framed into each period with its prevailing criminal policy and with its ideological-political interpretations of a society in "modern times."

Rahman Online: Notes on Film Music and Fan Collectives in an Age of Convergence
Aswin Punathambekar, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Film songs and fan practices have been extremely crucial dimensions of Indian cinema, yet there have been no focused efforts to examine how they shape film culture in India and abroad. The first section of the paper will map the convergence of new media and Indian cinema, examining how cinema-related content has been critical to the success of every ‘new’ medium in India. In the second section, I seek to understand ways in which A. R. Rahman (as the first "national" music director), his music, and his fans worldwide constitute an "adda," a public/popular
site wherein questions of regional, linguistic, religious, national, and trans-national identity are negotiated.

Digital Photographic Storytelling
Heli Rantavuo, University of Art and Design Helsinki
In my paper, I will discuss storytelling that is related to everyday digital photography. Documenting personal everyday experiences by digital photographs increases as digital pocket cameras and mobile camera phones are carried along everywhere. This documentation often finds the form of a story. I will explore digital photographic storytelling as a cultural and media technological phenomenon through empirical data collected in 2004 in Finland and Japan on the use of digital cameras and camera phones.

Late 18th / Early 19th Century Harlequinades: A Migration from Stage to Book
Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Bishop's University
In late 18th century England, popular drama was a common cultural experience. This paper considers one cross-over text from stage to book, the harlequinade. First appearing around 1770, it can be seen as an instance of migration of characters, conventional plot form and design features from popular drama to
the moveable (children’s) book. In the pantomimes, the action moves largely by spectacular changes called transformation scenes which are represented in the books through the flap opening on a window. Since the narrative only makes sense when the reader/viewer/user manipulates the flaps the books are a type of interactive text.

From Story to Space: Combining Linear Content and Spatial Design for Mindstage
Paul Richens, Martin Centre CADLAB, and Michael Nitsche
A principal problem of interactive 3D VE is the tension between a linear contentand the interactive accessibility inside the VE. Addressing this problem the Mindstage project mapped a lecture of the highly acclaimed film designer Christopher Hobbes onto an interactive multi-user VE. The story (our lecture) had to be included in its entirety and be accessible to groups and students for individual study. This paper addresses how we applied spatial design to approach the task and developed the prototype.

The West Wing: Television, New Media Culture, and the Polyvalent Narrative
Vincent F. Rocchio, Northeastern University
This paper reexamines the concept of the polyvalent narrative byanalyzing the hegemonies at stake in the narrative strategies of"The West Wing" and how they are organized to produce multiple andcontradictory ideological modes of address. These strategies can be seen to function within a broader social impulse towards niche marketing and what can be described as "virtual individual address" and the blurred boundaries that occur within the information relativism of New Media Culture.

“I Have a Face”: The Illegal, the Real and the Digital in Michael Winterbotton’s In this World
Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega, New York University
Michael Winterbottom’s In this World (2002) recounts the hazardous journey of two Afghani refugees from Pakistan to London. The film exposes the insufficiency of a clear-cut differentiation between documentary and fiction through the use of non-professional actors, the employment of the immediate texture of the digital image, location shooting and direct sound recording. Recounting the two Afghanis’ pilgrimage through the wasteland of illegal border crossing, Winterbottom points to the defining politics of exclusion that characterizes the misleadingly labeled “global era.”

Telling America's Civil Rights His(Story): USIA's Efforts to Reframe U.S. Race Relations to the Dutch Public in the 1950s
Marja Roholl, Rotterdam University
Although welcomed to Nazi-occupied Europe as a liberator and proponent of democracy,the American military also embodied the contradiction of racial discrimination and segregation. During the post-war period of political realignment, the left andSoviet-aligned constituencies seized upon America's civil rights record as a powerfulweapon. The Office of War Information and the USIA reposnded with a multi-media campaignto reshape opinions and the image of American race relations, in the process recastinghistory. This case study examines the deployment of that campaign together with American efforts to gauge its effectiveness in the Netherlands in the 1950s.

Eternal Recurrence: How to Will a Stylish Narrative of Suffering
Melinda Rosenberg, University of Tampa
The purpose of my paper is to explore the relationship between narrative identity and Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of "eternal recurrence." If I feel that I can indeed will eternal recurrence, this means that in affirming the joys I have encountered, I must also affirm the miseries. Perhaps we would be more amenable to willing eternal recurrence if we were given the option of excising the losses that have befallen us. According to Nietzsche, this option is not available. What is critical to our personal narratives is every single event that has unfolded. My personal narrative comprises the person that I have become.

Continuing Sagas: Where Supernatural and Reality TV Meet
Sharon Ross, Columbia College (Chicago)
In this presentation, I will explore two current patterns in TV storytelling that speak to each other: supernatural sagas and reality sagas. Using Buffy, Joan of Arcadia, and American Idol as examples, I look at how these shows are connected in such a way that we might begin to consider a common thread of oral culture and what I describe as "tele-participation" linking fantasy and reality TV. These shows prompt "gossip," speculation, and prediction that expands beyond the scope of the shows' surface narrative topics to examine larger contextual topics.

Thumbing the Membrane: Doom and the Tension Between Discursive Form and User's Choice in Interactive Media
Jeff Rush, Temple University
Using Doom as his example, Espen Aarseth argues that interactive media dispenses with a discursive narrating layer, because there is "no such thing as the unfolding of a predetermined story." This paper will challenge Aarseth's position, suggesting guidelines for developing a model of discursive narration for interactive media. Rather than proposing that it escapes mediation, I will argue that interactive media integrates user control and story representation, while building on the membrane-like translucency already inherent in narrative discourse.

Online Narratives and Network Resistance: A Case Study
Adrienne Russell, American University of Paris
Construction of narrative today occurs increasingly through the use of new mobilized media. Nowhere is this process more apparent than in the anti/alternative globalization movement. Unlike past social movements, which depended on mainstream media to construct and deliver narratives to the larger public, today's largest global protest movement is using new technology to build alternative networks of communication. This analysis of alternative media websites examines the ways several key anti/alternative globalization narratives help structure relationships among diverse members of the movement.

Retelling the Epic: Gladiator (2000) and the Revival of the Historical Epic Film
James Russell, University of East Anglia (UK)
In the 1950s and 1960s, historical epics were a central feature of Hollywood’s film output. The form then virtually disappeared for almost three decades, but since 1990 Epics have reappeared. This paper, which is ostensibly focused on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, looks at this recent revival of historical epics and
asks why it is that such films, and indeed such stories, suddenly seem to have connected with audiences again after such a long period of dormancy.

Narrative and Mobile Media
Scott Ruston and Jen Stein, USC
What features of the mobile phone can be used for narrative purposes, and what happens to the form and structure of the narrative experience as it transitions to this new media platform? By primarily focusing on mobile, locative narrative and game-like projects, we aim to highlight the transmedia qualities of this mobile form of storytelling and explore the opportunity to transport stories out of the movie theater, living room or library and combine them with our lived and networked experience.

The Seductive Storyteller: Authorial Decentralization and the Questionable Invitation to Play within Contemporary Narratives
Jon Saklofske, University of Manitoba
Authorial responsibility has been increasingly decentralized by the collective manipulation of media parameters. While this encourages a sense of freedom for those exposed to such narratives, participation in narrative realization and a lack of interpretative dislocation can actually impair a reader. To demonstrate how excessive mediation can liberate or limit an audience, this paper will compare how William Blake’s "The Fly" and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas differently enable and disable the authority and agency of storytellers and readers.

The Shifting Advertising Paradigms of Broadcast Television
Kevin Sandler, University of Arizona
Audience erosion, cable competition, growing production costs, digital video recorders, a declining international marketplace, and a weak off-net syndication landscape have led to a breakdown of the advertising paradigms of broadcast television. To keep production costs down and deliver audiences to advertisers outside the traditional 30-second spot, broadcasters have repshaped mise-en-scene, characterization, editing, and conflict resolution in their shows. This paper will demonstrate how product integration and partnership have shaped the storytelling aesthetics in Las Vegas, Medical Investigation, and Joey.

Storytelling for a Nation: Spielberg, Memory and the Narration of War
Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark
In Schindler's List (1993) and Band of Brothers (2001) Steven Spielberg uses historical fragments (documentary elements) to recreate WWII and tell it as a story. German philosopher Odo Marquard calls such reactivation of the past adaptational hermeneutics: the past becomes "alive" for present and future action. With a hermeneutical approach (Marquard, Dilthey, Ricœur) this paper analyzes how historical fragments transform memories of the past into modern storytelling of war.

Familiarity and Concern in the Radio Voice of a Networked Diaspora Community
Stephen Schultze, Public Radio Exchange; Walter Bender, MIT; Carla Gomez-Monroy, Schlumberger-SEED Foundation
eRadio proposes to increase interaction and reduce alienation in
diaspora communities. We report on our holistic approach to
interactive radio production (including audio production, Internet
exchange, and radio broadcasting) intended to foster participatory community self-discovery, identification, and assimilation in a community dispersed between New York and Mexico. Our hypothesis is that speaking with familiarity and concern to a dispersed audience of hometown folks and their descendents can strengthen the community’s oral culture and identity.

"I'm Telling You Stories, Trust me": The Ethics of Faking in Photojournalism
Claudia Schwarz, University of Innsbruck
Pictures have been a central means of communication throughout human history. The narrative power of imagery is particularly important when it comes to journalism. Photographs do not only help us understand and grasp information, but make it seem more reliable and trustworthy. With examples of "faked images," this presentation discusses the ethics of storytelling in connection with photojournalism. I will argue that journalism is a creative, sometimes even artistic, process, in which the boundaries between representation and symbolization are constantly challenged.

Tempests of the Blogosphere: Presidential Campaign Stories that Failed to Ignite Mainstream Media
D. Travers Scott, University of Washignton
Bloggers challenging CBS News in 2004 finally garnered them wide recognition as an influential political communications medium. But what of blog failures? Many relevant and engaging stories whipped online muckrakers into a frenzy without achieving commensurate prominence in mainstream media. Using a content analysis of four leading political blogs during the last four months of the election, this paper examines blogs' original newsgathering, fact-checking of other sources, and popular topics to identify stories that failed to ignite mainstream media.

The Clichés We Live By. Negotiating Groups-Identity in Everyday Stories: Israelis Tell How (Other) Israelis Behave Abroad
Rakefet Sela-Sheffy, Tel Aviv University
This paper examines the negotiation of Israelis’ self-images and sense of belonging or exclusion through stories Israelis repeatedly tell about Israelis’ bad behavior abroad. It analyses talk-backs to Internet news items dealing with the subject, which make up a local "folkloric" discourse. Ranging between a total personal alienation, patronizing attitude, denial, and a provocative identification with "authentic Israeliness," this discourse creates a tension between mainstream and marginal groups, mobilizing the conflicting evaluative perspectives of "local patriotism" vs. "European civilizedness."

Kinetic Interactive Narrative: The Aesthetics and Practices of Transmedia Storytelling
Simone Seym, American University
This paper examines Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run as an unbeatable kinetic interactive narrative, and discusses his spinning camerawork in the frame of its mix of animation, fast-speed footage and still photography. I propose to juxtapose this visual storytelling with the different levels of reality, and facilitate a look as it crosses language barriers and foreign settings. Finally, the paper explores Tykwer's use of transmedia storytelling, and organizes the evolving stories in the context of being referees to the kinetic narrative.

The Narrative Construction of Leadership: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Appeal to White America
Nick Sharman, University of Melbourne
The paper considers Martin Luther King Jr.’s construction of a narrative of his own life — his intellectual origins, family life and his reasons for taking on a role as a civil rights leader — aimed at appealing to liberal whites. King achieved this goal by including in his written work and speeches stories that would help establish his credentials as the respectable and moderate face of black America whilst omitting or reconstructing those stories that diminished that aim.

"The vulgarity of it is so unnecessarily incredible": The Role of the Story in Teaching Cultural Consumption Before WWI
Shawn Shimpach, New York University
This paper focuses on the short story as both a commodity and a pedagogic tool deployed by the magazine industry of the nineteen-teens to help negotiate transformations in technology, cultural institutions, and the nation. Specifically, a story in McClure's magazine is examined for its utilization of normalizing tropes of gender, class, and nation to instruct its middle-class readers to appreciate formally and narratively unsophisticated motion pictures at the very moment the movie industry was emerging as a significant culture and storytelling industry.

Treading the Borderline Between Realism and Virtual Reality: The Films of Lars von Trier
Jan Simons, University of Amsterdam
In transitional periods, practicioners of "old media" sometimes explore formats that will later be seen as typical for new media genres. The films of Lars von Trier, from Element of Crime to Dogville, can best be approached from the perspective of computer games. Narrative structure, narrational devices, camerawork and editing techniques explore a "virtual realism" that is closer to Deleuze than Bazin or "virtual reality."

Exploit Yourself: Just Meta-Communicate it! A Reading of the Danish Writer Claus Beck-Nielsen
Rolf Sindoe, University of Southern Denmark
Working at the crossroads of autobiographical, fictional and meta fictional writing, Claus Beck-Nielsen is spearheading a trend in Danish literature: Intermedial meta fiction. His work embraces almost every art form and includes non-artistic objects and private matters. By publicly exploiting his private life, Beck-Nielsen may have found new ways to probe the effects of media exposure and at the same time to tell new stories.

The Journalist in the Machine: The Sequel to the Fourth Estate
Stephen Sobol, University of Leeds
The developing relationship between databases and narratives in the new-media age lies at the root of the systems we design and deploy to order our lives in everything from political representation to car parking. The mediation of information flows in both directions lies in the unseen hands of those who create and maintain the systems that link database and narrative. This paper argues that a balance between narrative and database perspectives is required to sustain communication and deliver the promise of new media as it extends into the fabric of daily life.

Mediated Discourses of Chilean National Hi(stories)
Kristin Sorensen, Indiana University
Interpretations of recent Chilean history are distributed and contested throughout Chile, especially with the assistance of different types of media. Oftentimes, how these stories/histories (in Spanish, the word historia means both story and history) get told is determined by who gets to tell them. In the last few years, a larger number of voices have had the opportunity to communicate through the media, but some media are more open to these voices than others.

In the Bubble: A Case Study in Popular Comedies
of Elizabethan England and the Clinton-Era United States
John-Paul Spiro, Villanova University
My paper addresses popular comedies in England, 1590-1603, and America, 1990-2001. These two periods, with their relative
tranquility; cultural, political, and economic expansion mixed with uneasiness about the future; and general speculation about the sex life of the ruler and his/her associates, fostered interest in comedies that idealized romantic union as the only means to human fulfillment and asserted that a small circle of close friends is the only defense from the strange, hostile world outside of one’s private world.

Digital Storytelling at the National Gallery of Art
Julie Springer, National Gallery of Art; Joe Lambert, Center for Digital Storytelling
This presentation will review the goals and results of the digital storytelling tutorials for K-12 teachers that took place at the National Gallery of Art's Teacher Institute in the summers of 2003 and 2004. The value of digital storytelling will be addressed through the perspectives of the organizing museum educator and the digital storytelling coach. Select digital stories—powerful 3 to 4-minute movies about art made by teachers participating in the program—will also be shown.

Conspiracy Formulas in Contemporary Fiction and Non-Fiction Films
Janet Staiger, University of Texas, Austin
Within the past five years, several scholars (primarily Jodi Dean, Mark Fenster, Patrick O’Donnell, Martin Parker, Peter Knight, and Skip Willman) have considered the cultural implications of paranoid thinking and conspiracy narratives within contemporary Euro-American society. My paper will summarize their work, reorganize their comments into four basic conspiracy formulas (classical, “postmodern,” contingency, and classical paranormal), and consider the implications for public reception when the various formulas are used in fiction and non-fiction. I will compare briefly the reception of several 2004 blockbusters: the fictional films The Manchurian Candidate and The Bourne Supremacy with the non-fictional Fahrenheit 9/11.

The Production of Urban Space by Mass Media Storytelling Practices: Nowa Huta as a Case Study
Lukasz Stanek, Technical University of Delft (Holland)
The paper investigates the mass media stories concerning urban space of Nowa Huta in Poland -- an industrial city founded by the communist regime in 1949. Particular attention is given to the transitory period after 1989 when the former official stories crashed in the mass media with the former subversive ones. Basing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the paper considers mass media practices of storytelling as practices of social production of space and examines their relationship with other practices of production of space, its experience and use.

Narrating Body and Mind: Visual Hermeneutics in Television Sports
Markus Stauff, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
One of the often underestimated features of television sports is the bundling of popular as well as specialized physiological and psychological discourses, of statistical data and of heterogeneous visualizations. I will show how narrative forms of media sports integrate different modes of cultural knowledge by interpreting body and mind of athletes. The work of stories not only enables but also asks the television audience to decipher the affects, emotions and potential of the athletes and to take them as a naturalized reference point for any discussion of our society.

Narrative and Mobile Media
Jen Stein and Scott Ruston, USC
What features of the mobile phone can be used for narrative purposes,and what happens to the form and structure of the narrative experience as it transitions to this new media platform? By primarily focusing on mobile, locative narrative and game-like projects, we aim to highlight the transmedia qualities of this mobile form of storytelling and explore the opportunity to transport stories out of the movie theater, living room or library and combine them with our lived and networked experience.

"Update": Seriality in Online Media-Based Role Playing Games
Louisa Stein, New York University
Within fan fiction communities, role playing games function as unfolding fiction. Fictional journals create networks of multi-authored storytelling using online journaling tools. Many of these narratives are built on serial fictions in various media, including television, literature, and film. The varying serialities of these source texts intersect with the interfaces of online journals, which facilitate serial narrativizing through the patterns of daily posting. These fan-created narratives thus transform the seriality of the source texts into a new transmedia storytelling form.

From Immigration to Assimilation: The Ragged Seams Between East and West
Janani Subramanian,USC School of Cinema-Television
As various ethnic groups have filtered into the American “melting pot,” they have coped with their collective displacement with stories about being caught between two cultures. A recent manifestation of this tradition has been a slew of films, mostly independent, about East Indians and Indian-Americans finding a balance between Eastern and Western cultures. This paper will explore both the formal elements and cultural significance of these films, which I have deemed “Indian-American transitional films,” and how these recent examples of cultural-conflict films resemble and differ from other forms of subcultural storytelling.

From Storyspace to Storied Places: Producing and Consuming the Machinic Feminine
Jenny Sunden, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
This presentation will be performed in two parts. First, it sets out to explore a digital remediation of Mary Shelley’s (1818) Frankenstein as hypertext fiction. Letting Shelley’s Frankenstein serve as a backdrop, the discussion turns to Shelley Jackson’s (1995) hypertext work Patchwork Girl as an intriguing example of a she-machine. Secondly, in an attempt to fill a previous void in hypertext criticism, this re-reading of the machinic feminine will be put in the broader context of the production and consumption of digital textuality by bringing in the voices from software designers as well as from (other) hypertext readers.

Changing Attitudes in Communication: The Tradition of the Vermittler from Oral to Print to Cyberspace
Donald R. Sunnen, Virginia Military Institute
The concept of the Vermittler is the most problematic aspect when comparing medieval attitudes to modern ones. When the oral tradition gradually gave way to the printing press, the Vermittler could now call himself an author; once his name was attached to the text, the culture of memory had almost no power over him. With the advent of modern technology, the Vermittler is everywhere.

From a Stick in the Sand to a Joystick and a Screen:
Changing Storytelling Practices on the Pitjantjatjara Lands in Central Australia
David I. Tafler, Muhlenberg College
Oral stories recited as part of spiritual business and otherwise, inscribe the history, law, and culture for Anangu (the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara people) on the Pitjantjatjara Lands in central Australia. New media and communication technologies have come in waves and impacted on those storytelling practices. Sitting in the sand remains crucial for the preservation of the traditional storytelling practices. The stories transmitted on the sand will change as the language and experience of storytelling practices evolve across the new media platforms.

Voices from Everywhere
Sue Thomas, De Montfort University (UK)
The trAce Online Writing Centre has been on the web since 1995 and in that time has hosted a compelling series of international writing projects featuring narrative snapshots of everyday life. This presentation will analyse the universality of these voices from everywhere and examine the stories contributors tell about themselves and their everyday lives. See http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/suethomas/voices.htm.

Writing Theory Versus Narrative Theory in College Writing
Stella Thompson, Prairie View A&M University
Patrick Hogan in The Mind and Its Stories and Gian Pagnucci in Living the Narrative Life raise interesting questions regarding student response to the competing voices of academic writing theory and narrative theory. The space created for storytelling in traditional courses may either obscure or enable the construction and interpretation of identity and meaning. Student narratives that survive the academic process are significant texts: indicators of current social practice, cultural artifacts, and political events.

Praxis, Promise, and the Storybody: A Native American Youth Group Documentary Project on "Homecoming"
Tes Eliza Thraves, University of North Carolina
Based on an oral history documentation of an annual "Homecoming" celebration, conducted by a Monacan Native American youth group as part of the Library of Congress Legacy 2000 project, this paper examines the cultural praxis of storying identity. These youths weave together individual and "community" stories, illustrating how tradition and culture are not static, but are rather emergent performances. Their stories become a storybody where literal place and memory come together experientially in a politically charged storying of identity.

Mediating Ordinary Peoples' Stories
Nancy Thumim, London School of Economics and Political Science
"Ordinary peoples'" stories have become a familiar part of the media and cultural landscape in the UK. This paper draws on research carried out in two projects both of which have invited members of the public to represent themselves — BBC Wales' digital storytelling project, Capture Wales and the Museum of London's oral history project, London's Voices — in order to explore some of the processes of mediation entailed in producing such stories for public display.

“Not Buried But Planted”: American Stories and the John Brown Cycle
Zoe Trodd, Harvard University
My paper examines John Brown’s attitude toward story-telling and sketches the relationship between Brown’s sense of self and his actions; his self-presentation to America and America’s response. Hundreds of novels, poems, plays, sermons, essays, and ballads have told his story. Brown morphs into Socrates, Ironsides, Spartacus, Martin Luther, Milton, Cromwell, William Tell, Walter Raleigh, Washington, Garibaldi, Lafayette, Longfellow, Jesus, Moses, David, Paul. I identify four phases in the John Brown story, and trace the process of story-telling to which Brown himself contributed.

It Takes an E-Village: Constructing Narratives in Pregnancy Chat Rooms
Laura Tropp, Marymount Manhattan College
Pregnant women no longer have to rely on just their doctors, family members, and closest friends to share the intimate details of their pregnancies. In chat rooms like Babycenter.com or Ivillage.com, pregnant women can share their stories of their pregnancies with other women. This paper explores how and why these women create these narratives and the implications of this emerging technology for societal notions of private and public, and the pregnant experience.

The Sudwestern Saga: Live Media Between Commedia dell'Arte and Digital Hypertexts
Marina Turco, University of Utrecht
This paper compares the narrative structure of Edgar Pera's multimedia performances, called 'The Sudwestern Saga', with that of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte: the 'canovaccio' (a plot based on stories from the culture of Fado and from the 'Western' genre) is developed on stage by singers and musicians. On the background, the artist mixes images from different sources (real time images, clips from the Sudwestern movie, archive images of previous performances), 'mediatizing' the traditional relationship between plot, characters and improvisation.

Troubadours in New Times: Youth De/Re/construct Stock Stories through Media
Lalitha Vasudevan, Columbia University
What are the stock stories that govern the institutions that youth traverse? And how do youth navigate these institutional discourses in their daily lives? These questions were at the heart of a fifteen-month ethnographic study of the storytelling and discursive practices of a group of five African American boys living and growing up in an urban center. This presentation explores the ways in which they used a range of media and technologies in their storytelling.

Self-Reflections: Virtual Travel in Emerging Media (1900-2000)
Nanna Verhoeff, University of Utrecht
Travel was and is a major preoccupation in both emerging cinema (1900) and today’s digital imagery (2000). With travel as both a narrative and visual trope par-excellence, new media reinvent the relationship between showing and telling. Using examples from both ends of the 20th century, I wish to demonstrate similarities and differences between these visual cultures. My focus is on how virtual travel functions as a trope in, and metaphor for, emerging media by offering a distinctively post/modern mode of experiencing their reconfigurations of time and space.

Mythologizing Blindness: Archetypes of Blindness in Media
Alicia Verlager a.k.a. Kestrell, MIT
The blind bard, the blind seer, the blind swordsman or superhero: these are archetypes which contribute to the mythologizing of blindness. In my paper, I will discuss how these archetypes not only influence ideas about the sensory impairment of blindness but also question some of our cultural beliefs, such as that "seeing is believing."

Vocal Distress on Stage: Voice and Diegetic Space in Contemporary Music Theatre
Pieter Verstraete, University of Amsterdam
I will explore to what extent narrative concepts can be translated to voice and space in contemporary music theatre. The notion of "vocal distress" will highlight the difficulty in pinpointing voices to narrative agents in the context of overstimulation of voices on stage. A small case study will chart the trajectory of the dramatic voice from text to theatrical phenomenon. In particular, seeking the connections with the performative level will challenge the concepts of possible worlds and diegetic space.

Socrates Meets Borges: Telling Digital Stories Around the Virtual Liberal Arts Campfire
Hector Vila and Barbara Ganley, Middlebury College
In this paper, two Middlebury College professors will argue that the synthesis of web authoring with digital storytelling recreates dimensions of extended and enduring connectivity, privileging the importance of story to community, to advocacy and activism, to education and to a sense of personal efficacy. Digital storytelling, in particular, asks practioners to reconsider the role and form of stories in academic discourse and in their own creative and intellectual investigations.

Epic Narratives in Contemporary Indian Soaps, Towards Constructing a Consumer Society
Priya Virmani, University of Bristol, UK
The Indian epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are among the oldest and longest epics ever written. Their storylines are now being repackaged for television soaps for a postmodern Indian television audience. New concepts i.e. of consumerism are being subtly introduced by the medium of the familiar i.e. values extolled by the epics. This paper illustrates how the epics’ ideological apparatus, totally antithetical to that of capitalism is nevertheless being successfully employed to encourage a consumerist society.

Witnessing History: The Changing Role of Testimonies in Historical Documentaries
Frank van Vree, University of Amsterdam
In traditional documentaries, testimonies appear to be completely framed and even limited, serving as arguments in a more or less authoritative discourse. However since the early 1980s, witnesses appear to play a more autonomous role, telling their own stories, displaying emotions and opinions. Obviously, this process has much to do with profound changes in historical culture, media culture and the public sphere in the western world, but also — more specifically — with new technologies and media genres. In this paper, I will explore in detail this shifting role of the witness, drawing on a number of important historical documentaries from the Netherlands and other European countries as well as from the Anglo-Saxon world.

American Media Trinity: The Truth, the News, and the Presumptive Narrative
Peter Walsh, Massachusetts Art Commission
Recent attacks on the American news media have concentrated on factual errors and political bias. In truth, standards of professionalism and balance in American journalism are far higher than they have been in past periods of American history. This paper will point to another reason for the dissatisfaction — story-telling structures that reach back to the origins of American media in the 19th century.

The Narrative Imagination Across Media: Dreaming and Neil Gaiman's Sandman
presentation handout
Richard Walsh, University of York
My paper challenges the strong presumption that narrative, capable as it is of expression in several different media, is constituted by a medium-independent content. I interrogate the role of the medium in narrative, and the foundational narrative concept of the event, and elaborate a concept of narrative as a cognitive faculty, distinct and independent from the linguistic faculty. With reference to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, I reflect upon cognitive research into dreaming, and consider the dream as a proto-fiction.

Indexical Languages and the Historical Film
Frederick Wasser, Brooklyn College CUNY
Gibson’s decision to use two dead languages in The Passion of the Christ (2004) reminds us of Kracauer’s thesis that the historical film has always been an embarrassment in its attempt at realism. The biggest embarrassment is often the dialogue. The Shakespeare film is the only film genre that uses the actual language of the past. My argument is that this has the power to free the historic imagination to treat time as a continuum. I wish to survey recent Shakespeare films, especially Taymor’s Titus (1999) in this light.

Watching Screens: Mixed Media Narratives and the Contemporary Hollywood "Surveillance Film"
Kyle Weise, University of Melbourne
The diegetic incorporation of screens of computer-mediated surveillance is a trope common to many contemporary Hollywood action films such as Enemy of the State and The Bourne Identity. This paper will argue that these surveillance screens are more than just one element among many in the mise-en-scene, and that they occupy a crucial position in the formal and narrative construction of these films, producing particularly spatial effects. These surveillance films exhibit characteristics specific to digital narratives, and analysis of their conceptualisations of space offers insights into the epistemologies that are defining the broader digital reconstruction of cinema.

A Media Event for Multistars
Ann Werner, Linköping University (Sweden)
During the three-hour award ceremony of MTV Video Music Awards 2004, a number of celebrities appeared on stage, to make a musical performance, present someone or hand out an award. The stars popular at the VMAs are characterized by their big commercial potential. My paper examines the stories and narrative of stars and commercialization today in relation to previous writings on stardom, how intersectionalities of gender, class and ethnicity influences these stories and the intermediality of stars moving between genres. The VMAs, a segmented media event, is used as an example.

Applying Oral History to Media Research
Mark Williams, Dartmouth College; Devorah Heitner, Northwestern University; Steven Classen, California State University, Los Angeles
Three scholars who have completed, or are in the process completing, major research projects in television studies that utilize oral history will make short presentations on use of oral history in their own research. They will then conduct a discussion about the use of oral history to study media audiences, media producers and media memory. Among the issues addressed: the capacity or potential for oral histories to produce new and unanticipated research topics and lines of inquiry; and the special responsibilities and ethics of oral history and the interpretive challenges of using oral history to build a historical narrative.

Why FRPGs?
Samuel Willcocks, University of Pennsylvania
The fantasy role-playing game (FRPG, in distinction from computer role-playing games, CRPGs) was characterised from its inception by fantastic elements. Is this merely a quirk of cultural history or are there intrinsic constraints in the FRPG model that force its stories into the fantastic genre? Starting with Dungeons & Dragons and following FRPG design and theory down to the present day, I ask whether this narrative mode can produce in other genres, and what relation games have to more literary modes.

Staring in Horror at the Holocaust: The Languages and Limitations of the Musical Voice in Alain Resnais's Documentary Night and Fog
Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Eastman School of Music
This paper investigates the role of the musical voice in Alain Resnais's Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (1955) and explores how Hanns Eisler's film score influences transmission of the film's historical narrative. Borrowing terminology from prior theoretical studies of cinema, film music, and opera (Kaja Silvermann, Michel Chion, Carolyn Abbate), I identify three musical "voices" in Resnais's documentary that correspond to categories of music established by Eisler and Adorno in their groundbreaking study, Composing for the Films (1949). In each case, I examine how these distinct voices condition and challenge the visual and textual narratives already present in the film.

Doctoral Women's Learning and Identity in the Culture of Engineering: Stories as Situated Retellings
Shaunda Wood, St. Thomas University (Canada)
The participants' stories emerged as a 'reconstruction' of how they came to be doctoral engineers. The tensions experienced by the doctoral women engineers were intertwined and linked to complex relationships that were regulated by cultural, institutional, and historical circumstances and influences. While Women in Science and Engineering [WISE] programs and scholarships have improved the presence of women in faculties of engineering, without structural changes this may not continue.

Narrative Knowledge: Knowing through Storytelling
Sarah Worth, Furman University
This paper deals with the issue of storytelling or narrative as a special form of reasoning. I will suggest a form of narrative reasoning that illuminates a narrative grammar, which will ultimately lead me to describe a form of narrative knowledge. Traditional forms of knowledge (knowing how and knowing that) are not sufficient to cover a third kind of knowledge (knowing what it is like) in the way that storytelling can. I will argue that this latter form of knowledge is under-recognized as an essential ingredient to our humanity.

In Search of Oldton
Tim Wright, Nottingham Trent University (UK)
Tim Wright's "In Search of Oldton" (http://www.oldton.com/) uses texts, images, sounds and found artefacts submitted by the general public to build up a map of the author's lost home town and tell the story of its disappearance. While presenting his project and encouraging contributions to it, Tim hopes to explore what constitutes good "digital writing," showcase various techniques and technologies, and demonstrate the creative (and economic) possibilities for independent writers in an online environment.

Stories of Surveillance: Las Vegas and the Interplay Between Society of Surveillance and Society of Spectacle
Bilge Yesil, New York University
This presentation explores the role and implications of mediated
stories of surveillance, prominently through NBC’s crime drama, Las Vegas. The show, which is about the trials and tribulations of a security and surveillance team in an upscale casino portrays surveillance cameras as effective crime-fighting tools, and thus articulates this increasingly prevalent information and identification technology as commonsensical and unproblematic. Through the prism of Las Vegas, I examine stories of surveillance in mass media, and discuss the interplay between society of spectacle and society of surveillance.

Tsunami vs Tsunami: A Tale of the Neoliberal World
Information Order?
Usha Zacharias, Westfield State College
The displacement of the India plate and the Burma plate in the Indian Ocean has illustrated to us the consequences of the biopolitics of the neoliberal information order. This paper juxtaposes different narratives: scientific narratives (from the Pacific tsunami center and the National Earthquake Information Center); refugee narratives off US media, and the Indian state’s texts drawn from newspaper reports to argue that together, they reveal the basic paradoxes of neoliberal underdevelopment through a crisis of information flow.

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