Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

10 June 2020

International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2020: Call for Papers, Posters and Interactive Creative Works

It has been heartening to see many joyful responses to our recent post featuring The British Library Simulator; an explorable, miniature, virtual version of the British Library’s building in St Pancras.

If you would like to learn more about our Emerging Formats research, which is informing our work in collecting examples of complex digital publications, including works made with Bitsy, then my colleague Giulia Carla Rossi (who built the Bitsy Library) is giving a Leeds Libraries Tech Talk on Digital Literature and Interactive Storytelling this Thursday, 11th June at 12 noon, via Zoom.

Giulia will be joined by Leeds Libraries Central Collections Manager, Rhian Isaac, who will showcase some of Leeds Libraries exciting collections, and also Izzy Bartley, Digital Learning Officer from Leeds Museums and Galleries, who will talk about her role in making collections interactive and accessible. Places are free, but please book here.

If you are a researcher, or writer/artist/maker, of experimental interactive digital stories, then you may want to check out the current call for submissions for The International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), organised by the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives, a community of academics and practitioners concerned with the advancement of all forms of interactive narrative. The deadline for proposing Research Papers, Exhibition Submissions, Posters and Demos, has been extended to the 26th June 2020, submissions can be made via the ICIDS 2020 EasyChair Site.

The ICIDS 2020 dates, 3-6 November, on a photograph of Bournemouth beach

ICIDS showcases and shares research and practice in game narrative and interactive storytelling, including the theoretical, technological, and applied design practices. It is an interdisciplinary gathering that combines computational narratology, narrative systems, storytelling technology, humanities-inspired theoretical inquiry, empirical research and artistic expression.

For 2020, the special theme is Interactive Digital Narrative Scholarship, and ICIDS will be hosted by the Department of Creative Technology of Bournemouth University (also hosts of the New Media Writing Prize, which I have blogged about previously). Their current intention is to host a mixed virtual and physical conference. They are hoping that the physical meeting will still take place, but all talks and works will also be made available virtually for those who are unable to attend physically due to the COVID-19 situation. This means that if you submit work, you will still need to register and present your ideas, but for those who are unable to travel to Bournemouth, the conference organisers will be making allowances for participants to contribute virtually.

ICIDS also includes a creative exhibition, showcasing interactive digital artworks, which for 2020 will explore the curatorial theme “Texts of Discomfort”. The exhibition call is currently seeking Interactive digital art works that generate discomfort through their form and/or their content, which may also inspire radical changes in the way we perceive the world.

Creatives are encouraged to mix technologies, narratives, points of view, to create interactive digital artworks that unsettle interactors’ assumptions by tackling the world’s global issues; and/or to create artworks that bring to a crisis interactors’ relation with language, that innovate in their way to intertwine narrative and technology. Artworks can include, but are not limited to:

  • Augmented, mixed and virtual reality works
  • Computer games
  • Interactive installations
  • Mobile and location-based works
  • Screen-based computational works
  • Web-based works
  • Webdocs and interactive films
  • Transmedia works

Submissions to the ICIDS art exhibition should be made using this form by 26th June. Any questions should be sent to [email protected]. Good luck!

This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom

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