[Commlist] Cfp: Interactivity and Virtual Reality

*/Journal of the New Techno Humanities/***

*Call for Papers*

*Title: New Media, Interactive Audiences, and the Virtual.  Next 
Generation Narratives *

*Short title: Interactivity and Virtual Reality ***

*Guest Editors*

Keyan G Tomaselli: (keyant /at/ uj.ac.za)

University of Johannesburg

Dr Keyan G Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor, Humanities Dean’s 
Office, University of Johannesburg, a Laureate Fellow of the 
International Communicology Institute, and a member of the Academy of 
Science of South Africa.  He is editor of /Critical Arts/ and founder 
and co-editor of /Journal of African Cinemas/.

Damien R Tomaselli: (damientomaselli /at/ gmail.com)

Dr Damien R Tomaselli is a postdoctoral fellow at the Visual Identities 
in Art and Design (VIAD), based at the University of Johannesburg. He 
works as a cinematic transmedia storyteller and is a Fellow of the 
International Communicology Institute. His Ph.D. thesis is entitled, 
‘/Cosmology of the Relativistic Multi-Modal Chronotope. A metaphysical 
lens on how creators may rhetorically embed fictional spacetime into 
various story-world configurations for dramatic narratives/.’ He is also 
co-founder of an international storytelling association for professional 
practitioners involved with emerging narrative forms, called /The 
Cauldron/ 
<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enterthecauldron.com%2F&data=04%7C01%7Ckeyant%40uj.ac.za%7Ca0da4a4bbb264aab2dd008d8d8d66598%7Cfa785acd36ef41bc8a9489841327e045%7C1%7C0%7C637497762710113261%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=j0m0ptXxpEubibCe8%2BkFCKDUNJh%2F0JjWHNruDkrT4SI%3D&reserved=0>.  
He is also managing editor, /Communicare: Journal for Communication 
Sciences in Southern Africa/.

**

*Background*

This new journal targets at the creative aspect of the humanities still 
to be fully recognized in the established classification and methodology 
of disciplines. By embracing the practical extension of the latest 
scientific and technological methods, the journal aims to provide a 
forum for transdisciplinary discussion and in-depth analysis on the 
nature and development of humanities, as well as the latter's interface 
with other disciplines.

The journal welcomes contributions from the pragmatic and experimental 
approaches by employing new technological methodologies, such as 
computational methods, visualization, data archives, processing and 
interaction, or surveys. The journal also welcomes philosophical, 
hermeneutic, critical, rhetorical, and historical approaches to 
interpretations of scientific and technological phenomena, focusing on 
their ontologies, nature, histories, methodologies and prospect of 
development.

*/New Techno Humanities/**  will *publish original research articles, 
review articles and book reviews on the topics including, but not 
limited to Methodology, Authorship attribution/ stylometry/ stylistics, 
Modelling, digital visualization, Digital cultural heritage, Digital 
cultural heritage, Data visualization, statistical analysis, big data, 
Semantic web technology, network theory, Translation studies with 
technological methods, Corpus analysis, and Textual analysis.

*Motivation***

In 2017 Klaus Schwab, chairperson of the World Economic Forum, described 
the fundamental changes brought about by the expansion of digital 
domain, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (among other 
developments) as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. He describes a 
world where individuals move between digital domains and offline reality 
with the use of connected technology to enable and manage their lives. 
This is significantly different to previous social and economic regimens 
in terms of its velocity, scope, and systems impact, and “it is 
disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and 
depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of 
production, management, and governance”. In this arrangement, knowledge 
workers provide focus, creativity, and leverage in using those 
investments to achieve the organization’s objectives more efficiently. 
In other words, knowledge is an integral part of total management and 
cuts across functional boundaries.

Much of what has been developed in the realm of 4IR is driven by 
advances in science, technology and software development.  These are all 
essential components for the comprehension of phenomena; however, the 
content of software and creative outputs and manner in which people, 
both as creators and consumers, interface with the content, is often 
neglected.  This special issue is intended specifically to focus on the 
aspect of the narrative in digital audio-visual formats, including 
gaming, motion books, virtual and augmented reality forms.  It further 
aims to develop methods of visually representing the progress of 
narrative in these ‘new’ modalities, specifically in terms of its 
space-time compression and dilation.  The value of the research is to 
shift the discussion of 4IR from the predominantly technicist to a more 
interdisciplinary and holistic dialogue of content, form and narrative 
that was available during the previous period of analogue media.

Where text-based film theorists prevailed during the 20st century,  now 
in the 21st it is software programmers, gamers and media agencies who 
are driving both practice and theory.  They are simultaneously 
relocating the interpreter (viewer) of new media from being a spectator 
to being a co-author of plot outcomes. The late 1980s saw a ‘theoretical 
turn’ towards the concept of the ‘active audience’, arguing that savvy 
media audiences do not receive information passively, but are actively 
involved in the sense-making of messages within the contexts of their 
social, class and personal experiences. The ‘interactive’ nature of 
digital media has extended this notion: not only do audiences make sense 
of what they consume, they actively co-create meaning.  This is most 
clearly seen in gaming, in which the ‘story line’ is determined by the 
choice of the player’s moves to shape the outcome of the narrative in 
various directions.  Games and gamification are becoming a popular field 
of research, which New Techno Humanities will study.

The new theorists of the virtual (the new media) are addressing issues 
of multi-dimensional multi-platform interaction, and multi-media real 
time spectatorship that includes virtual-enabled interactions of various 
kinds. The issue here involves next-generation narratives, immersed 
audiences** and interactive experiences with content enabled by new 
technologies. These are generated by cross-platform experiences that 
anticipate new types of audiences searching for deeper access to the 
minds of characters they encounter in the digital media, but also how 
they can shape narrative digestion.

A key question is:  is the idea of spectatorship still relevant, or 
should it be reformulated in a loose Boalian performative sense of 
spect-actor where spectators become involved in the shaping of narrative 
outcomes?     Normative theories can be no longer automatically applied 
in the body-less, borderless, immersive dynamic intertextual media age, 
that is taking shape in the 4IR era. In semiology, film theory is 
treated as a language while in Peirceian semiotics visual narrative 
theory is treated as a conversation between participant and text. New 
kinds of multi-faceted narrative arise out of these kinds of virtual 
relations that displace spectators from cinema seats into a networked 
world that involves spect-actors from anywhere.

A second research question thus concerns how individuals appropriate and 
use such technologies in their own lives. Thirdly, how can the**content 
they create benefit to re-balancing society in terms of both message 
making and product delivery? For instance, the infancy of intellectual 
property crypto currency solutions driven through blockchain such as 
Etheruem based Singles tokens and the Unlock protocol, instigate the 
roots for a potential democratization of an artist first-rights 
management system that significantly undermines the status quo of the 
current entertainment economy.

As a practitioner who can execute 'future' narrative forms, as well as 
an academic who specializes in the theoretical discourse of various 
forms of narrative execution, the digital creator’s ability is of 
storyform to develop a craft-first theory in the climate of the 4IR  
‘digital area/canvas'. Where software companies are tech oriented, there 
is a need for associated critical analytical study of the sector and how 
it is applied, by who, with what effects.**

The purpose of the special issue is the exploration of systems of 
representation that will allow us to model, or ‘see’ the warping of time 
and space in relation to a specific narrative output.  This process 
merges metaphysics with narrative architecture and visual and other 
representations of spatial-temporal signification.  This aspect of 
visualizing digital narratology, including quite specifically virtual 
reality and enhanced reality, is key to providing tools to understand 
the ways in which the content of 4IR is understood.

Bakhtin’s chronotope legitimizes the idea of the space-time meaning 
within the literary realm. However, in in this number of JNTH we want to 
include visual representations (models) of concrete visual narratives 
with the specific focus on space-time as the primary organizer of 
meaning, as well as an anchor of dramatic unfoldings (diegesis) or 
analysis of ‘fabric’ within narrative.  This fabric is of course 
metaphysical, rather than material. In a metaphorical manner it 
manifests itself as solidified, concrete expression of the space-time 
narrative. This is because in the case of digital texts, a trail of 
information is able to be indexed as a result of the digital pipeline 
through which the visual representation must occur. This information 
includes colour, light, narrative density among other indices.

This visual representation, or mapping, of space-time within a 
narrative, is dependent on a dialogue between metaphysics, visual 
representation, space-time rhetoric, trails of digital information, 
narratology and the configuration between audience and the represented 
fictional world to which the audience is potentially immersed.  These 
concepts are understood as metaphysical, rather than material 
manifestations, and are not necessarily bound to any specific narrative 
form, since any form of narrative is chronotopic in nature.

**

*Submission timeline*

**

Submission of Abstracts:  30 April 2021

Invitation to write a full article or commentary: 15 May

Submission of completed articles:  30 October

Peer review process:  6 months - estimated

*Submission guidelines *

Kindly submit your paper to the Special Issue category through the 
online submission system 
(https://www.editorialmanager.com/techum/default.aspx 
<https://www.editorialmanager.com/techum/default.aspx>) of New Techno 
Humanities. All the submissions should follow the general author 
guidelines of New Techno Humanities available at 
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/new-techno-humanities/2664-3294/guide-for-authors 
<https://www.elsevier.com/journals/new-techno-humanities/2664-3294/guide-for-authors>


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------