CFP for an Edited Collection on Interactive Digital Narrative Syllabi with a Global Focus

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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 (XR), 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.

Submit Your Syllabus

Please review the sample syllabus chapter, template, and reflection document. Fill out the templates and submit them to your regional representative or upload them at: https://forms.gle/esbib3eZSWRkXU536

Please submit the documents in English and their original language. The editors can help with translations.

You will be asked to upload at minimum four documents. A .Doc (.Docx) and a PDF of your syllabus chapter and reflection.

A Discussion that Forms the Discipline

To realize our vision of a truly global and transnational perspective, we will ask you to comment on other syllabi and reflections in the summer of 2023. We hope this grassroots approach will help us put different intellectual traditions and voices into the conversation.

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