Book 2.0 - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2020

In this article, I propose the concept of hyperparatextuality as a way of looking beyond the digital paratext to consider the distributed state of immersive reading in digitized and read-in-browser environments. Beginning with a look at the history of the paratext and its relevance in the digital age, this article considers the hyperparatexts of the HathiTrust reading panes in particular to explore the relationship between digitized texts and the platforms that house them. The concept of paratext and its evolving meaning in the digital age has intrigued researchers for decades as literary production, circulation and consumption responds to digitization and digitalization. Digital paratexts might include fan communities, digital editions to material books in the form of official and unofficial content, Goodreads and other reading-related and review websites, and Kindle highlighting tools. However, digitization introduces new reading materialities, interfaces and frames with buttons, links and hypertextual content. These 'read-in-browser' environments, websites through which we access digitized literary works, introduce new paratexts into the reading experience and require different concepts to understand them. When digital paratexts are also hypertextual, they operate differently. This article proposes some ways of thinking about this.

This article investigates how creative fiction writing has responded to the problem of representing the multimodal landscape of digital culture in young adult literature (YAL). Twenty years ago, Dresang’s theory of Radical Change presented a new breed of digitally engaged YAL that addressed changes in thinking about digital technologies and how young people interacted with them. Nikolajeva predicted the phenomenon three years earlier arguing for YAL coming of age as a literary form. In this article, I argue for the necessity of this work to continue, from the perspective of author-practitioner, and for the importance for authors to develop an expanded writing practice that foregrounds formal experiment that both reflects and critiques the thematic concerns and practices of digital culture. I begin by presenting some context for the work, in the form of a brief discussion of formal experimentation within selected YAL, and then go on to discuss my methods and approaches. This creative writing practice research has been undertaken during the course of Ph.D. study that has explored combining dramatic and multimodal writing techniques into a traditional prose fiction text, in this case a novel, aimed for YAL readers.

In this contribution, we draw attention to prevailing issues that many speakers of Indigenous North American languages face when typing their languages, and identify examples of typefaces that have been developed and harnessed by historically marginalized language communities. We offer an overview of the field of typeface design as it serves endangered and Indigenous languages in North America, and we identify a clear role for typeface designers in creating typefaces tailored to the needs of Indigenous languages and the communities who use them. While cross-platform consistency and reliability are basic requirements that readers and writers of dominant world languages rightly take for granted, they are still only sporadically implemented for Indigenous languages whose speakers and writing systems have been subjected to sustained oppression and marginalization. We see considerable innovation and promise in this field, and are encouraged by collaborations between type designers and members of Indigenous communities. Our goal is to identify enduring challenges and draw attention to positive innovations, applications and grounds for hope in the development of typefaces by and with speakers and writers of Indigenous languages in North America.

Since its conception in 2017, the Global None in Three (Ni3) Research Centre for the Prevention of Gender Based Violence (GBV) has been working to collect real stories about people’s personal experiences of GBV from both victim and perpetrator perspectives. Led by a team of experts from across the globe, these real-life experiences have been used to inform the development of a series of serious, prosocial computer games whose narratives, in-game dialogue and characters are based around this empirical data. This article discusses the translation of these stories into the games’ digital narratives, and explores how their re-telling is fundamental to the success of the games as educational tools for increasing empathy in players and, ultimately, for changing attitudes and behaviours towards GBV. In doing so, it explores the coexistence and fluctuating relationship between digital narratives and the spoken word – whose significance might be seen to book-end the None in Three project as a whole, in its development of the game and in the dissemination of its message about preventing gender-based violence.

As a lecturer in computing at Moray College UHI, and having recently rekindled my passion for branching narrative and particularly gamebooks, when an opportunity arose to conduct the ‘Digital Futures’ research project, I was able to merge my interest in software development with an exploration of digital tool use in writing branching narrative. The aim of the research is to enhance the employment opportunities of creative writing students by potentially developing pathways into authoring gamebooks, digital games, televisual media or theatre productions. I conducted a background study examining the historical and current state of branching narrative and conversed with gamebook authors about the software tools they used and their world-building and publishing experiences. Similar conversations were held with games writers/developers and an interactive theatre producer. This article presents the key elements of that background study and conversation highlights, along with an evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of using digital tools to develop branching narrative.