CFP for an Edited Collection with a Global Focus on Interactive Digital Narrative Syllabi
The Association for Research in Interactive Digital Narratives is working with Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press to publish An Educator’s Guide to Interactive Digital Narrative: Syllabi and Resources From Across the World.
This is a practical edited collection for Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) educators and scholars. It will contain syllabi from a worldwide range of university programs. The collection aims to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of the field of IDN as it solidifies into an academic discipline. The collection’s vision is to establish the next generation of scholarship through the field’s ardent evangelists: its educators.
Our notion of IDN encompasses interactive stories of diverse forms, including interactive documentaries, narrative-focused video games and eXtended Reality, installations, interactive journalism, films, etc. Hartmut Koenitz’s definition of IDN guides us: “narrative expression in various forms, implemented as a multimodal computational system with optional analog elements and experienced through a participatory process in which interactors have a non-trivial influence on progress, perspective, content, and/or outcome” (Koenitz upcoming 2023).
The collection will draw from a wide range of perspectives on IDN in recognition of the field’s interdisciplinary nature. These perspectives include narrative and media studies, interaction and game design, cultural heritage, entertainment, cognitive sciences, journalism, and more. The collection will break down syllabi representing these perspectives into thematic sections based on their curriculum, course goals, and teacher’s intent. The sections are not meant to silo perspectives from one another but to collect and collate the necessary resources, materials, assignments, and pedagogies to support and better inform educators across disciplines.
Upon completion, the collection will be a valuable resource of methodologies and references for teachers of different backgrounds to develop their own syllabi while strengthening and expanding the international IDN academic community.
ETC Press will publish the collection across multiple media formats as a creative commons and open-access publication. Further, ETC Press will index the collection in the ACM Digital Library. Authors retain ownership of their intellectual property.
Indicate Your Participation as a Syllabus Contributor
Currently, we are looking for IDN faculty and researchers to indicate their intention to participate in the collection. Once confirmed, we will send a sample chapter and template that you can use to submit your syllabus in English and your language of instruction. As part of the process, we may ask you to respond to other syllabi in a constructive dialogue.
We are also Seeking Regional Contributing Editors
To realize our vision of a truly global and transnational perspective, we seek representatives from different regions to act as Contributing Editors. These contributing editors will be listed in the collection’s front matter. Primarily, Contributing Editors will contact university and college faculty within their region to source syllabi related to interactive storytelling and IDN.
To indicate participation, please fill out the following form at your earliest convenience.
We hope this grassroots approach will help us elevate marginalized voices, perspectives, and methods in academia. To this end, we are also seeking representatives willing to translate this CFP into their local languages. This work will contribute to establishing IDN as a discipline with a global reach.
We look forward to your participation,
Joshua A. Fisher, Ph.D., Ball State University
María Cecilia Reyes, Ph.D., Universidad del Norte, Colombia
Jonathan Barbara, Saint Martin’s Institute of Higher Education, Ħamrun, Malta