Digital Storytelling: how Technology is shaping the Future of Urban

Literature

By

Dr Anna Notaro

Email: a.z.notaro@dundee.ac.uk

Personal homepage: www.notarofam.com/annawork

1

Digital Storytelling: how Technology is shaping the Future of Urban

Literature

Je voyage pour connaître ma géographie.

(W. Benjamin)

Every story is a travel story.

(M. De Certeau)

city as text and text as city.

Every journey constructs a narrative.

(W. J. Mitchell)

This paper’s theoretical framework is twofold: on one hand it is rooted

in classic theories of urban representation, on the other it shows a

constant preoccupation for contemporary debates about what is generally

known as the ‘digital revolution’. Computer and software development

have given birth to a whole new field of digital texts, which are not

bound to the book as a medium. These texts can be read from computer

screen or, increasingly, from different reading devices, so called e-

books. It is my contention that digital textuality1 opens an infinite

field to expand literary expression, especially when it comes to the

city - urban metaphors are not surprisingly abundant when describing the

Internet. Often digital textuality is seen as an alternative medium for

2

literature, there is, however, literature which uses digital textuality

much more effectively. They integrate aspects of digital dynamics as

part of their signifying structure and widen the range of literary

expression. I am referring to ‘digital storytelling’ which brings

together the ancient art of storytelling and multimedia technology. This

essay argues that, contrary to Benjamin’s prediction regarding the

demise of ‘storytelling’ in the media culture of the twentieth

century2, such a type of narrative has recently known a revival which

has taken different shapes: in some cases hypertextual narrative

structures bring about an interbreeding of literary genres and visual

arts, in others - the ones I will focus upon - the impact of the

geographical ‘locale’ and of a well-established trope, ‘the city’, make

them hybrid texts, occupying a new space between printed text and

multimedia presentation.

The problems of representing the city

Never confuse the map with the Territory

(J.G. Ballard)

Derrida has taught us long ago that failure is in the nature of

representation and yet debates over the ontological status of the city

and its ‘representability’ are still raging. In an interesting article

entitled “A Guide to Urban Representation and What to do about it:

Alternative Traditions of Urban Theory”, Rob Shields argues that when we

classify an environment as a city we also reify it.3 The city becomes a

‘thing’, so the notion of ‘the city’, the city itself, is a

3

representation which rests on the self evident assertion that a given

environment is ‘a city’. As an object of research, Shields states, the

city is aporetic, it is a ‘crisis object’, which destabilizes our

certainty about ‘the real’.4 Its status as a ‘crises object’ far from

lessening our efforts, should make a stronger case for the role of

representation to be re-examined. Shields warns us against the dangers

of representations, which he calls ‘treacherous metaphors,’ in that by

summarizing the complexity of the city in an elegant model, they are

metonymic in their tendency to displace the city completely so that the

physical level of direct social exchange is eclipsed in favor of a

surrogate level of signs.5 If there is any truth to be told about cities

it is to be found, according to Shields, in the following oxymoron: ‘the

city is a…concrete abstraction’, in other words it is an abstract form

which has concrete implications.6 A cautious course of action at this

point calls for the dismissal of two opposing tendencies: on one side

what he calls ‘a simple empiricism’ which accepts the city as a reality

and not as representation and, on the other, ‘the cynical idealism’

which considers with disdain the ‘equivalent to real’ status of

representations of the city. What we are left with is a rather slippery

notion of the city which ‘slides back and forth between the abstract and

the concrete, between the universal and the particular’.7 It is as if

representation were plagued by an internal instability which makes any

attempt at representing the city ‘always a paradoxical project

undertaken on shifting ground’.8

4

I personally embarked on a similar paradoxical project when I joined the

‘3Cities’ research project team at the University of Nottingham (UK) in

1997. The project was an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the

iconography, spatial forms and literary and visual cultures of New York1 I am calling here for a flexible model of textuality, similar to the one

advocated by David Bakesley and Collen Brooke in “Introduction: Notes Towards

Visual Rhetoric.” They argue that ‘Rather than removing textuality from our

model of the visual, we should be more careful (and more flexible) about the

model(s) of textuality we have in mind. More importantly, we might explicate

textuality on a model of visuality, seeing visuality and textuality not as

isolated phenomena, but as sharing at a deeper level some common roots in

perceptual and linguistic processes.’ Enculturation 3, 2, (Fall 2001). Available at

<http://enculturation.gmu.edu/3_2/introduction.html>.

2 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)

[1929-1940], 87. Benjamin argues that the decline is due not to the excessive

knowingness of modern times but that 'the epic side of truth – wisdom – is dying

out'. Benjamin also sees the rise of the novel and its 'dependence on the book'

as evidence of the decline of storytelling. The whole thing is 'concomitant of

the secular productive forces of history – a symptom that has quite gradually

removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making

it possible to find a new beauty in what is vanishing.'

3 In Anthony D. King ed. Re-presenting the City (London & NY: MacMillan, 1996), 227.

4 Ibidem.

5 Ibidem, 229.

5

City, Chicago and Los Angeles in the period 1870s to 1930s (project’s

web site http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/) and one of its aims was

to produce an Electronic Book on the American city in the modern

period.

W eblink City Sites e-book

The e-book, a collection of ten e-essays by American and European urban

scholars, was devised as a web based presentation, however – in keeping

with the notion of a book format – it existed as a finished structure,

within which users experienced considerable freedom of movement but also

extensive guidance and signposting to orient them within the book’s

complex structure. Our e-book was above all a hybrid text, occupying a

new space between paper text and multimedia presentation. The essays,

rich in visual material, developed new ways of studying urban culture

6 Ibidem, 231.

7 Ibidem, 235.

8 Ibidem, 246.

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through interactive engagement with images, through the use of ‘live’

bibliographical links to external web projects, through supplementary

material such as maps, charts, statistics and through the use of moving

images and sound. The project’s underlying philosophy was to consider

the formations and functions of the illusory power of representation.

The city, we realized, is inseparable from its representations, but it

is neither identical with nor reducible to them – and so it poses

complex questions about how representations come to be negotiated

between physical and mental space and render the city legible,

responsive to our desires to read and see it. What we did with our e-

book was not to propose that the generative relations between space and

representation could be typologized, rather that they could be brought

under analysis, with the understanding that representation provides us

with a partial and provisional framing of the city as a legible space.

Questions of legibility have long stimulated efforts to ‘plan’, ‘map’ or

‘read’ the city; to render it legible has also meant to make it coherent

and knowable, integral and governable. Literature, film, architecture,

tourist guides, postcards, photography, city plans - all provide

selective representations of the city and shape the metaphors,

narratives and syntax through which the experience of urban living takes

on meaning. They illuminate transitions in the development of the urban

environment, they produce a sense of place for urban dwellers, they map

boundaries of communal identity, they mediate desires, fears and

fantasies about urban existence. As a space of representation the city

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is simultaneously real, imaginary and symbolic; it exists as material

environment, as visual culture and as psychic space.9

A correspondence between geographical space and the human psyche has

long since being acknowledged. Giuliana Bruno in her article “Thing as

Feeling: Emotion Pictures” sees the origin of ‘a fluid, emotive’

geography which associates ‘the local and topographic to the personal’

in the Carte de Tendre (1654) by Madelein de Scudéry. The Carte de Tendre

‘part map, part veduta,’ as Bruno describes it, ‘established an entire

trend of emotional cartography’ of which the Guide psychogéographique

(1957) by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn is only one of the best known

examples.10 In the 1960s the Situationists developed psychogeography,

the science of the dérive, the drift. These dérives were not random, but

9 Credit for formulating City Sites’ theoretical overview, from which the above

comments originate, lies with Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy. The other two

members of the ‘3 cities’ team were Douglas Tallack and myself. City Sites is freely

available at <http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/citysites/>.

8

allowed the psychogeographer to use his or her imagination to experience

the urban surroundings in a new way.11

Questions of legibility, as it has been pointed out above, have been

crucial to our endless attempts at understanding the city. As Henri

Jenkins acutely notes in his “Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban

Imagination Through Hollywood Film,” there is a passage near the end of

The Image of The City ‘where Lynch tries to imagine an alternative form that

might preserve his own sense of the multiplicity of urban meanings and

experiences while achieving the legibility and clarity that was central

to his aesthetic conception of the city.’ As Jenkins puts it, Lynch

imagines ‘a multilinear and polysequential form … something akin to

hypertext’12:

Intuitively, one could imagine that there might be a way of

creating a whole pattern, a pattern that would only

10 In Cynthia C. Davison ed. Anything (Anyone Corporation, 2001), 146. Among the

precursors of what came to be known as psychogeography is the nineteenth century

opium eater and obsessive drifter Thomas de Quincy. The Surrealists in the 1930s

and the Lettrists in the 1950s also elaborated on this urge by transforming it

into a systematic practice. The Lettrists, in particular, fused poetry and

music in their attempt to transform the urban landscape. In 1953 they mapped out

the ‘psychogeography’ of Paris by walking through the city in a free-associative

manner, or ‘drifts’.

11 On Situationist cartography see Thomas McDonough “Situationist Space,”

October, 67 (Winter 1994): 58-77.

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gradually be sensed and developed by sequential experiences,

reversed and interrupted as they might be. Although felt as

a whole, it would not need to be a highly unified pattern

with a single center or an isolating boundary. The principal

quality might be sequential continuity in which each part

flows from the next -- a sense of interconnectedness at any

level or in any direction. There would be particular zones

that for any one individual might be more intensely felt or

organized, but the region would be continuous, mentally

traversible in any order. This possibility is a highly

speculative one: no satisfactory concrete examples come to

mind.13

As we shall see below, Lynch’s approach is not unique in being compared

to a hypertext.

12 "Tales of Manhattan: Mapping the Urban Imagination through Hollywood Film,"

in Lawrence Vale and Sam Bass Warner, eds., Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New

Directions (Cambridge: CUPR Press, 2001). Available at

<http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/manhattan.html>.

13 Ibidem. Frederic Jameson defines the aesthetic of the new cultural form of

postmodern space as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping. He refers to Kevin

Lynch's study The Image of the City, as showing that the alienated city is above all

a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own

positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves. Postmodernism, or

The Culture Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

10

As far as more ‘conventional’ literary representations of the city are

concerned, in 1981 Burton Pike in what was to become a classic study,

The Image of the City in Modern Literature, explored the ways urban culture is

reflected in literature and how the ‘literary city’ or ‘the word city’

expresses the underlying social psychology of the city’s people. Not

surprisingly, the image of the city appears ambiguous and contradictory

since ‘the word-city leads a double life, evoking deep rooted archetypal

associations while its surface features reflect changing attitudes and

values.’14 In Pike’s view the inhabitant or visitor experiences the city

as a labyrinth. ’He cannot see the whole of the labyrinth at once,

except from above, when it becomes a map. Therefore his impressions of

it at street level will be fragmentary... such impressions are primarily

visual, but involve the other senses as well, together with a crowd of

memories and associations.’15 De Certeau, in his essay, "Walking in the

City," albeit fascinated with the false sense of totality created by the

panoramic perspective, notes how often what gets lost in a panorama is

the particularity of individual experiences.16

So, similarly to other concepts which are too hastily presumed to be

self-evident, the idea of the 'city' is nothing of the sort, hence it

14 In Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds. The City Reader (London & NY:

Routledge), 248.

15 Ibidem 245.

16 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1984) chapter VII.

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is unsurprising that its treatment in literature should frequently be

characterized by complex layers of representation, artifice and vision.

In this respect, Calvino's Invisible Cities represents a perfect example

since it is precisely about the impossibility of completely knowing a

city; or, more accurately, of the impossibility of completely knowing a

city solely through its representations. In typical postmodernist vein

this, of course, has a metafictional resonance, for the representation

of the city is precisely the endeavour upon which Calvino is engaged,

entering into dialogue with the reader. Similarly to Lynch’s The Image of

the City, the metaphor of the hypertext is evoked in relation to Calvino’s

work. In the words of Christine Boyer: ‘Invisible Cities represents a network

much like the matrix of a hypertext, in which the reader can select

multiple routes and draw a variety of conclusions.’17 For Calvino, the

city is not a static entity or institution, but rather organic and

changeable, and in a constant state of invisibly-ordered flux - a far

cry from the classic totalising modernist image of the city.

The modern(ist) urban novel has received massive critical attention over

the years, one of the most interesting studies to date is City Codes.

Reading the Modern Urban Novel. by Hana Wirth-Nesher. As an anonymous

reviewer poignantly puts it, the eight 20th century urban novels

considered,

17 Christine Boyer, Cybercities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996),

142.

12

are seen as imaginary strategic devices to create a spatial

matrix for the creation of an urban mapping process in order

to come to terms with an often inconceivable or even

unbearable city... She is not nostalgically looking for a

lost unified city or a total urban vision, but for the

13

different textual means through which modern subjects with

great creative fervour reconstruct the space to which they

belong over and over again, seeing the city as the place

that makes this process of permanent recoding both necessary

and possible.18

18 Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes. Reading the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996) reviewed in the Proceedings of the XI International

Comparative Literature Association/ Literary Research, Roseann Runte ed. (Toronto: Victoria

University Press, Spring-Summer 1997). Available at

<http://vicu.utoronto.ca/ailc/nesher.htm>. The urban literary tradition of the

American city is represented in works such as: David Weimer ed. The City as Metaphor

(New York: Random House, 1966); Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill & Peter C.

Bunnell eds. The City: American Experience (New York: Oxford UP, 1971); Adele Ster, The

City, America in Literature (New York: Scribner’s 1979); Peter Conrad, The Art of the City

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robert A. Gates, The New York Vision:

Interpretations of New York City in the American Novel (Boston: America University Press,

1987). For a theoretical analysis of the relationship between urban spaces and

urban texts see Wendy B. Faris, “The Labyrinth as Sign” in City Images: Perspectives

from Literature, Philosophy and Film, Mary Ann Caws ed. (New York-Philadelphia: Gordon &

Breach, 1991). On the extensive topic of urban literature see also Michael C.

Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts eds. Literature and the Urban Experience (New Brunswick, NJ:

Rutgers University Press, 1981); Peter Preston, Paul Simpson-Housley eds. Writing

the City: Literature and the Urban Experience (New York & London: Routledge 1994); Carlo

Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1998); Peter Brooker, Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban

Formations (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Desmond Harding, Writing

14

Although the term hypertext is not explicitly mentioned, the terminology

adopted – matrix, city codes, recoding – is an apt substitute. As for

the urban mapping process, its connections with the world of literature

have been frequently acknowledged, nowhere more explicitly than in

Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900.19 Here Moretti discusses

both the distribution of literary forms over geographical space as well

as the effect of space in literature. To him ‘geography is not an inert

container, a box where cultural history 'happens', but an active force

that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth.’20 Moretti is

convinced that geography determines the literary form, so much so that

‘without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply

impossible.’21 Geography is the informational space that structures the

the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (London & New York: Routledge 2003); Robert

Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven: Yale

University Press 2005).

19 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London & New York: Verso

1998) (Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800-1900 Torino 1997). Compare with Malcolm

Bradbury ed. The Atlas of Literature (New York: De Agostini Editions 1996), also

consider Moretti’s most recent Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History

(London: Verso 2005).

20 Quoted. in the review by Arie Altena in Mediamatic Magazine 9, 4 (1998).

Available at

<http://web.archive.org/web/20070810134854/http://www.mediamatic.nl/magazine/

previews/reviews/altena/altena_moretti.html>.

21 Ibidem.

15

narration and programs the plot's possibilities. Moretti's attention to

maps differs from that of literary theorists, who consider a map as a

text that can be interpreted in the same way as a literary text. He is

interested in maps because they change the way we read novels.

Moretti’s stimulating, albeit rather deterministic views of the

relationship between geographical space and literature, will come useful

later on when discussing Mr Beller’s Neighborhood web site, in the meantime

there is another piece that needs to be added to the theoretical

framework which makes up the first part of this essay, that is the

connections between (cyber)space and ‘the city’ trope. Such connections

seem to emerge since cyberspace was first defined in William Gibson’s

words as:

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by

billions of legitimate operators... A graphic representation

of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the

human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged

in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of

data. Like city lights, receding…[ellipses original] 22

Since Gibson’s formulations we have developed the habit of thinking of

computers as machines that take us into a separate reality conceived in

terms of spatial metaphors, a virtual domain which consists of places

(the pages of a virtual book?) and roads (the links), as viewers/readers

22 William Gibson, The Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books 1984) 51.

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we can either stay put ‘on the road’ assigned or wander off-road to

explore new places, the digital variant of the urban flânerie.23 And it is

just as well that it is the city, the ‘aporetic’ crisis object, the

‘concrete abstraction’ in Shields’ definition, that has become the most

common tool for thinking about the virtual world. The reified view of

the city as a physical entity helps shape our conception of what this

new world should be like; using the metaphor transfers the (allegedly)

concrete meaning of ‘city' to the abstract virtual environment.

Metaphors, as we know, are useful cognitive tools for thinking about

abstractions, whether they are adequate it’s another matter.24 What is

certain is that virtual cities, cybercities, cybervilles or cybertowns,

as they are often called, keep springing up and not just in SF novels,

there are in fact, a growing number of avatar worlds, which are shared,

graphical spaces.25 Equally interesting is the fact that, as Maurie-

Laurie Ryan notes in her electronic piece “Cyberspace, Cybertexts,

Cybermaps,” Eastgate Systems named its pioneering hypertext writing

software ‘Storyspace’, and hypertext itself has often been described by

using the urban metaphor of the labyrinth. 26 Such crucial links between

storytelling, hyperfiction and the urban experience are precisely the

focus of the next section.

Digital Storytelling & the Urban Experience

The city is a writing

17

(V. Hugo)

That which is written is like a city,

to which the words are a thousand gateways.

(W. Benjamin) 

The prophecy that electronic writing will transform the nature of

literature is one that is now heard with increasing frequency. Its

advocates argue that computer technology for transmitting or

representing texts within the medium of hypertext will allow us to bring

these processes a major step nearer to the activities of actual readers.

This in turn is revolutionizing understanding of the nature of

textuality itself, in line with the claims of postmodern theorists. If

this is true, the shift in the domain of the literary will be somewhat

analogous to that brought about in the visual arts by the invention of

photography and film. The essays published in the collection The Future of

the Book in 1996 discussed a set of similar questions. 27They were mostly

concerned with what O'Donnell calls the ‘reconstruction of our culture’

by computers. This revolution can radically alter the concept of the

book as a legal, even sacred, object, undermining current concepts of

authorship and readership as well.28 It has the potential to disrupt

established publishing and distribution methods for texts. It can

decentralize control and access of information currently dominated by

the government, universities and libraries, not to mention the threat

18

posed to the same nature of texts and, more importantly, the nature and

function of language.

Personally, I think that even if this was a valid description of the

overall cultural situation it would not mean that language as such has

lost its power to evoke worlds. The visualisation and spatialisation of

hyperfiction does not imply its merging into virtual reality - text may

maintain its status alongside visual information and in a new symbiotic

relation to it. As Katherine Hayles notes in her “Bodies of Texts,

Bodies of Subjects,” ‘print and electronic textuality are in dynamic and

robust conversation with each other…in a process that Jay David Bolter

and Richard Grusin have called remediation, print recycles the visual

tropes and design practices of electronic texts even as electronic texts

recycle the tropes of print.’ 29 This does not entail, in Hayle’s

opinion, that both print and electronic text require the same mode of

description. Literary studies must in fact realize that the

‘materiality’ of the signifier (something Saussure openly ignored) has

now come to the forefront, ‘in electronic text’ she argues’ ‘the

materiality of the signifier becomes very important. Instead of being a

flat durable mark, it is a chain of codes correlated precisely through

correspondence rules. 30

No matter the status of the signifier, what is certain is that

electronic literature, cyber literature, web specific writing, or New

Media Literature, as it has come to be known, is here to stay and has

19

already generated over the years a wide range of literary projects which

make an interesting use of the ‘city’ metaphor. What such projects have

often in common is a varying degree of collective authorship and/or

collaborations between authors and designers and authors and readers.

The literary project Aliento

(http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/5025/frame.html) is an example of

multiple authorship where three authors work together to create a

narrative network of stories related to significant places of a

fictional city. Other projects such as Snowfields by Josephine Berry and

Micz Flor (http://www.art-bag.org/snowfields/theory.htm) involve even

stronger forms of collaboration, in that it consists of a database in

which the user can input texts, to be later re-combined. Navigation is

made possible by a map of East Berlin, segmented into squares, within

which a certain story takes place. If one clicks on a square one gets an

automatically generated text. This the user/reader can alter or she can

write a new one, which is again automatically segmented and re-combined

by the software where - based on the concept of soap operas - different

stories related to various topographical parts of Eastern Berlin shall

be developed.

Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs (http://www.eastgate.com/MS/Title_184.html)

also allows the user/reader to add her own words to the hypertext and

send additions back to the publisher to be included in subsequent

editions. This literary hypertext explores the lives of women in a

Colorado ghost mining town. Here the reader navigates the text by

20

navigating the map of the town or the map of the cemetery. If she clicks

on a house on the city map, she gets a poem that relates to its female

inhabitants; if she clicks on a gravestone on the cemetery map, she gets

the inscription. On the map of Marble Springs, each house, each grave

holds a link, just as highlighted words do on a textual screen. All such

projects point to is a concept of the literary text as an ‘open work á la

Eco.31 In other words, the future of constructive hyperfiction lies in

the proliferation of computer networks where many readers/writers

collaborate on projects made open-ended by virtue of their virtual

existence as malleable data in cyberspace. We will explore in more

details in the next section some of the ways in which the (urban)

geographical map and the text work together, what the literary projects

mentioned so far show is a ‘digital revival’ of the ancient art of

storytelling. Such a revival takes different shapes: in some cases

hypertextual narrative structures, informed by rhizomatic thinking, tend

not to reproduce, but aim at generating reality, in others - the ones

this essay is concerned with - the impact of the geographical ‘locale’

and of a well-established literary trope ‘the city’ make them hybrid

texts, occupying a new space between printed text and multimedia

presentation. Their transitional status makes such narratives

particularly interesting and opens challenging questions, not least

whether they represent the hope that after the collapse of the so-called

’grand narratives’ new forms can be found with which to render

narratives viable once again or, to quote Söke Dinkla’s words, ’whether

21

they represent a step back in time to the era prior to post-modern

criticism and before widespread questioning of representation as an

acceptable means of reflecting reality.’ 32 Dinkla traces the origin of

contemporary hypertextual storytelling to the early 1980s and identifies

as the artists’ main motivation that of generating reality rather than

representing it, hence: ’The new dimensions of the real that emerge

thereby are not fixed but in motion and can continually change their

constellations. A space ripe with possibilities opens up—a space for

playing with potential, with virtual narrations’.33

But what do we mean today by ‘digital storytelling’ and how easy it is

to create and share stories in a digital environment? In a nutshell,

digital story telling uses the basic tools of multimedia (photos, video

clips, music, voice, and text) for little productions of variable

length and easily downloadable with a decent computer. Several products

on the market allow users to ‘become storytellers,’ to create stories

whenever they wish and wherever they are. One such product is StoryCast,

‘an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their

camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly

share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of

narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller's voice.’34

32Söke Dinkla, Virtual Narrations From the crisis of storytelling to new narration as a mental

potentiality <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/narration/

1/> 1.

33 Ibidem, 19.

22

The research challenges for StoryCast include: ‘Developing and evaluating

a new medium to easily capture, create and publish experiences in the

form of short stories’ while ‘lowering the technological barrier.’35

Organizations like the Digital Literature Institute also aim to help individuals

and organizations archive and share their stories through the use of

multimedia tools, only that the DLI is a nonprofit public benefit

corporation. Its mission is ‘to help raise awareness of digital

storytelling and support the development of literary works, business and

family histories, e-learning programs and other applications utilizing

digital media.’36

Another nonprofit organization is the California based Center for Digital

Storytelling, whose motto reads: ‘listen deeply, tell stories,’ next to the

logo of a tree whose roots are exposed.37 The image clearly echoes the

idea of storytelling as a deep-rooted, primeval human activity and the

obvious point that a willingness to listen is the sine qua non for any

(story)telling. The Center’s Newsletter, dStory News of September 20th 2000

includes an article entitled “Has Digital Storytelling Succeeded as a

Movement? Some Thoughts by Joe Lambert, Co-Director The Center for

Digital Storytelling” that offers an insight into the Center’s history

and aims.38 In Lambert’s words it all started in a rather understated,

almost conspiratorial manner:

34 <http://web.archive.org/web/20060426234957/http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/

storycast/>.

23

In 1994, a group of us sat around the table at Joe's Digital

Diner (real space: part of an artist-run center based in San

Francisco and focused on new media and storytelling) talking

like a bunch of conspirators about what it would mean if

Digital Storytelling ‘got big’. "Big" meant popular in both a

societal and commercial sense, although none of necessarily

defined our terms. It was more Dylanesque, "Something is

happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr.

Jones?" We felt wind gathering in the sails of our little

boat and we knew that this would effect careers, make money,

and a few of us thought, change the world. 39

From the very beginning Digital Storytelling is characterized as a

movement, whose ideological roots, at least in its most populist

aspects, lie in the American counter culture of the 1960s. As Lamberts

puts it:

I always thought of our work in Digital Storytelling as what

we used to call, "movement building." That is, we wanted to

motivate people to change their behavior, to change policy,

to change the distribution of power and resources. As such,

Digital Storytelling for us was more of an idea than a

product, more effecting social behavior than consumer

behavior. Not that the two are inseparable, quite the

opposite, but the emphasis, for us, was on a simple notion -

24

The tools of digital technology should be used to

democratize voice and therefore empower more people than the

prior set of analog tools in contemporary communication. 40

Let’s not forget that the early Internet culture of the 1990s was a

culture that ‘had at its core a utopian premise; a new age of

decentralized many-to-many distribution of information that was to

conquer the dominant culture of media owned and distributed by the few

controlling the information available to the teaming masses.’41 Over the

years the most idealistic aspects of the Internet have found themselves

under constant erosion, and the question of whether or not Digital

Storytelling has become a movement has become irrelevant, what really

matters is that:

the notion of story, transformative reflection, and the

capacities of computing machine being forged together into

some sort of new life management process is catching on with

people. The core value of this work is taking the time to

make a story. Undoubtedly more people are telling their

story because of digital technology, but their reasons for

doing it, and the way they use the stories in their lives,

may only have slightly been altered by the

opportunities/advantages of digital appliances. 42

41 Ibidem.

25

According to Lambert, Digital Storytelling has still got a role to play

in the contemporary media landscape, ‘We still have to imagine a future

where people value their own lives stories more than the constructed

lives of sixteen faux "survivors" on an island in the Pacific. In other

words, the movement has just begun.’43

Significantly, the Center has received increasing recognition in

educational institutions. It became involved in UC Berkeley's College

Writing Program, where it offered a special section of College Writing

that focused on the use of multimedia in narrating personal stories.

This is hardly surprising since educators have been fast in realizing

the potential of digital storytelling as a medium of empowerment, a

system of representation, and a pedagogical tool. ‘Digital Storytelling.

The Queens Experience: An Experiment in Identity, Place and Community’

is the name of a pilot project initiated by Edward Lenert and hosted by

the Webcasting Education Center at Queens – City University of New York

(CUNY). The project targeted diverse, urban neighborhoods in Queens, New

York, where there are large ethic communities with rich cultural

traditions. One of the goals was to use Internet technologies to enhance

a sense of community by drawing upon the methods and traditions of

storytelling to foster a sense of neighborhood belonging and to connect

people to each other via technology. The main aim was to link place,

identity and story and to see whether a sense of community could be

built.44 The ‘neighborhood’ is a potent metaphor and a useful vehicle

26

for fostering a sense of community based on locality. The scope of the

next section will be to explore how such themes are played out in the

Mr Beller’s Neighborhood’s web site where, by the touch of a button, everyone

can enter the virtual neighborhood and ‘tell Mr Beller a story’.

Tell Mr Beller a Story

Digital storytelling seeks to engage its audience

in narrative as a thoughtful, intimate, emotional,

and meaningful experience.

J. Lambert (co-director, Center for Digital Storytelling)

The city is the expression of the human experience

it embodies, and this includes all personal history.

(S. Bellow)

Manhattan has been a muse for countless novelists, artists, musicians

and filmmakers. Now, as several recent projects demonstrate, New York is

also inspiring digital artists, who are using the Web's multimedia

capabilities to combine text, graphics, audio and video into interactive

cityscapes. This section will focus on Mr Beller’s Neighborhood, a web site

that brings together the literary tradition of storytelling and

multimedia technology by using a virtual map of New York as a navigation

device. Mr Beller’ The web site is based on satellite photographs of

27

Manhattan. As we read in the “Notes on the map images” section of the

site: ‘These images were taken by a plane flying over the island. Every

dozen blocks or so, another picture was taken. This is what accounts for

the odd, patchwork look of the Hudson and East River on the main map.”

45 Thomas Beller’s own impressions of such images are rather mixed: ‘The

main map, showing most of the island, is oddly beautiful to look at. The

more detailed neighborhood maps, are downright disturbing after a while.

You see Manhattan from a distant yet oddly intimate perspective… From

this angle (and perhaps only from this angle) Manhattan looks like a

benign place.’46 The view from above even conjures up a touch of

nostalgia: ‘Seen from above, you see how densely packed together it is,

tighter than it ought to be, self-regarding, almost haughty. But there

are also spaces and valleys and all sorts of incredible looking crevices

that immediately evoke Manhattan of days gone by. Its many previous

incarnations somehow shine up at the viewer above.’ 47Still, the focus

shifts soon back to the here and now, to somehow more disquieting

thoughts, ‘The map is in black and white, so it has an odd surveillance

feel to it.’ Only that on the neighborhood maps, ‘you can examine,

peruse, be specific. Find places. If you are intimate with a single

building in Manhattan, you'll probably be able to locate it on the

map.’48 In other words, surveillance becomes less threatening, even

acceptable if it is instrumental in locating one’s own personal history

within it.

28

On the web site’s main map the city has been divided into nine sections,

and each neighborhood has red dots marking specific locations that are

linked to stories by Beller and others about events connected to each

spot. A great feature, if one uses the sidebar story list, is that every

story has a link at the top that centers the map frame on the location

involved. Interestingly, prior to the launch of his site in May 2000,

Beller maintained that: ‘Launched is not the right word... It suggests

up and out, a rocket ship going into space. My direction is the

opposite. I'm burrowing, digging, dusting off. … Mr. Beller's

Neighborhood' is an archaeological site as well as a Web site. It's a

narrative that sprawls in many directions, and it is a work in

progress.’ 49

weblink Mr Beller’s Neighborhood

What is interesting in the above quote is the use of the verb ‘to

sprawl’, typical of urban discourse with reference to cities like Los

Angeles, rather than the orderly grid-based New York. In a recent

29

email exchange, once again, Beller defines the site as ‘a kind of

narrative quilt whose story extends in many directions, the narrative

version of a sprawling unplanned city’. 50 So, it would seem that

although the site is anchored by geography, intimately tied to the

physical relationship of buildings, streets and people, its narrative

is not entirely determined by it. Contrary to Franco Moretti’s

conviction that geography determines literary form, in the case of

Beller’s site while the maps provide focus, it is the breadth and

23 The cybercartographers Dodge and Kitchin - relying on observations by P. Adam

- observe that ‘cyberspace is replete with the vocabulary of place—nouns such

as rooms, lobbies, highway, frontier, cafés; and verbs such as surf, inhabit,

built, enter.’ Quoted in Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps.”

Available at <http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2004/1-Ryan.htm>.

24 For the cognitive role of metaphor see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,

Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980); for a semiotic

and philosophical approach see Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Stephen Johnson in recalling

Aristotle’s definition of the metaphor (as the act of giving the thing a name

that belongs to something else), acutely observes that ‘The crucial element in

this formula is the difference that exists between the thing and the something

else.’ In other words, ‘What makes a metaphor powerful is the gap between the

two poles of the equation.’ In Interface Culture (San Francisco: Harper Collins

Publishers, 1997) 58-59. Johnson’s comments are a useful reminder, particularly

with reference to the familiar metaphorical relationship between the city and

cyberspace.

30

diversity of Manhattan's population that provides the site's sprawling

variety of writing. At most, the external familiar landscape of New

York City works as a device to organize the internal and often

unfamiliar emotional landscapes of the City dweller. As one

commentator aptly put it, ‘the subject of the site — Manhattan —

allows it to be geographically anchored without being shackled’.51

25 One example is Cybertown, a virtual community on the Internet. Cybertown is

known as the ‘Civilization for the Virtual Age’ - a futuristic, immersive

community where citizens use personalized 3D avatars to represent themselves and

they can own free personal 3D homes with virtual pets, hold jobs, form clubs,

shop in the virtual mall, dance in the nightclub, play games in the Casino and

Arcade etc. More at <http://www.cybertown.com/main_ieframes.html>.

Virtual communities have been object of scholarly enquiry since Howard

Rheingold’s study of 1993, The Virtual Community. Available at

<http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/>. A selected bibliography includes: Steve

Jones, Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety (London: Sage 1997); Sorin

Matei “Virtual community as rhetorical vision and its American roots,” in M.

Prosser & K. S. Sitaram eds., Civic Discourse: Intercultural, International, and Global Media

(Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing 1998), 45-59; M. A Smith and P. Kollock eds.

Communities in Cyberspace, (London: Routledge 1998); Jennifer Preece, Online

Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability (Chichester, West Sussex: John

Wiley & Sons 2000); K. Ann Renninger, and Wesley Shumar eds., Building virtual

communities: learning and change in cyberspace (New York: Cambridge University Press

2002); Sorin Matei “From counterculture to cyberculture: virtual community

discourse and the dilemma of modernity” Journal of Computer Mediated Communication Vol.

10, 3 (2005). Available at <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue3/matei.html>.

31

Maybe in order to determine the role that the geographical map plays

in the Beller’s site it is useful to remind ourselves of De Certeau’s

distinction between maps and tours. For De Certeau maps are abstracted

accounts of spatial relations, whereas tours are told from the point

of view of the traveler/narrator.52 Tours, in other words, are the

subjective, personalized experiences of the spaces described

26 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps” (2004). The Eastgate

catalogue of Hypertext Fiction is available at

<http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html>.

The labyrinth is one of the oldest urban metaphors, hence it is not surprising

that, having established an interrelationship between the urban and the world of

cyberspace and digital textuality, its presence continues to be significant.

See, for example, Ilana Snyder, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (New York: New York

UP, 1996) and the ‘Labyrinth Project’, an Art Collective and Research Initiative

on Interactive Narrative conceived and directed by Marsha Kinder

<http://college.usc.edu/labyrinth/>.

27Geoffrey and Patrizia Violi, eds., The Future of the Book (Nunberg, Berkeley and Los

Angeles, CA: University of California Press 1996). On this topic see; Sven

Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett

Columbine, 1994); Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

(New York: Free Press 1997); Priscilla Coit Murphy “Books Are Dead, Long Live

Books” 1999 available at <http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/index_murphy.html>;

Clifford Lynch, “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital

World” 2001 available at <http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_6/lynch/>.

See also the papers proceedings of the “Transformation of the Book”

32

abstractly in maps. Geography itself is not the protagonist; rather,

the protagonist's experience of geography structures the narrative.

But what type of ‘spatial stories’ are the ones published on the Mr

Beller’s Neighborhood web site? According to the site’s guidelines

they should be ‘Based on personal New York City experiences, the

International Conference, MIT October 24-25, 1997 available at

http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/conferences/book/index_papers.html; Ted Stripas “Book

2.0” Culturemachine (13 August 2003). Available at

<http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j005/Articles/Striphas.htm>;

The Salon Collection of articles on e-books at

<http://www.salon.com/books/special/2000/03/29/future/>; Bill Cope and Angus

Phillips eds. The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (Oxford: Chandos Publishing Ltd

2006) Jeff Gomez, Print Is Dead: Books in our Digital Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan

2008); and the sixth International “Conference on the Book,” Washington, DC 25-

27 October 2008  <http://book-conference.com/>. For a multimedia project on the

future of the book see The Book after the Book by the digital artist Giselle

Beiguelman <http://www.desvirtual.com/thebook/>. On the general topic of

electronic literature useful resources are the Electronic Literature

Organization at <http://www.eliterature.org/>; Trace Online Writing Community

<http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/>; Writing and the Digital Life, a discussion list managed by

Sue Thomas <http://jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html> and

blog <http://www.hum.dmu.ac.uk/blogs/wdl/>; The New Media Poetry, Hypertext, and

Experimental Literature Bibliography compiled by Eduardo Kac

<http://web.archive.org/web/20060622012153/http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/

Leonardo/isast/spec.projects/newmediapoetry.html>; The MIT Hypertext Theory

Links <http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/online_hypertext/reading_list.html>; The

33

submissions should be ‘be reasonably short, vivid, specific, and true.

It can recall a person or a place, or it can recall an experience that

moved you. We're interested in the distant past as much as the

present. A story should be true to the facts.’ Undoubtedly, the 'Tell

Mr. Beller A Story' button is one of the most interesting features of

the site. There is an obvious inclusive and interactive aspect, in

Hypertext Now Journal

<http://www.eastgate.com/HypertextNow/archives/History.html> and the Empyre

forum, particularly the October 2005 discussion of digital writing at <

https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2005-October/thread.html >.

28 An interesting piece on CTheory by Nicholas Rombes, “The Rebirth of the

Author,” argues that the Author is far from dead

<http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=480>. In a similar vein, but with a

focus on the cinematic experience, see my ‘'Technology in search of an artist:

questions of auteur/authorship in contemporary cinema,” The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of

Film and Television Studies 57(2006).

29 In Lauren Rabinovitz and Abraham Geil eds. Memory Bytes (Durham & London Duke

University Press 2004), 279-80. In the same collection see also by Thomas Swiss,

“Electronic Literature: Discourses Commuities, Traditions,” 283-305.

30 N. Katherine Hayles, “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson's Patchwork

Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Postmodern Culture 10(2), 2000.

Available at

<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.100/10.2hayles.txt>.

Hayles has produced a series of excellent books and articles on electronic

textuality, see The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth

34

that by sending a story everyone can ‘enter the neighborhood’, thus

becoming part of the online community of readers/writers, the

twentieth first century equivalent of old literary circles. 53 And it

really seems that everybody has a story to tell, since the stories

published are not just by well known writers - Michael Cunningham,

Jeannette Winterson, Phillip Lopate, Thomas Beller himself – more

interestingly, many are by people who may not even consider themselves

writers. There is a huge variety of narratives: some are serious in

tone, some are humorous, some touched with sadness. Some involve

experiences with which almost all New Yorkers can relate, such is the

case of Beller’s piece “An Interview With Mr. Softee”

Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in

Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Chaos and

Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1991); How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Writing Machines (Mediawork Pamphlet

Series, MIT Press, 2001); My Mother was a Computer (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2005); Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary ( Notre Dame , Ind.:

University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). She has edited Technocriticism and

Hypernarrative , a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall 1997).

31 Umberto Eco, Open Work (Harvard University Press 2005); Opera aperta (1962). See

Deena Larsen’s page <http://www.deenalarsen.net/> for a useful list of hypertext

resources and CityThreads, an interesting students’ project at

<http://192.211.16.13/curricular/panopticon/student_projects/fiction/

thread.htm>.

35

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=25). Beller

tracks down William Conway, the owner and operator of Mr. Softee ice

cream company and discusses with him the upcoming ban of the Mr Softee

jingle proposed by Mayor Bloomberg in the context of new legislation

against noise pollution. Having grown up in New York in the Seventies,

Beller is obviously sad for the imminent disappearance of the jingle

from the streets of his own city. Particularly poignant is “JFK on

Broadway” by Patricia Bosworth

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1605). The

story’s great opening lines set the scene for what is a brief glimpse

into one young woman’s unforgettable experience. On an ordinary

working evening Patricia finds herself in the proximity of the most

loved of American Presidents: ‘Eventually everything is history - even

one's own life. I once caught a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy

in the flesh - and that image, so radiant and energizing - has stayed

with me for over 40 years. I saw him when I was an actress playing in

a comedy called Mary, Mary on Broadway.’ The President was in the

audience of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying running

just next door to her theatre:

I recognized the President sitting amidst a sea of pink

faces in the center of the house. He looked tanned and

incredibly handsome and then he jumped to his feet and was

applauding ... At this point Kennedy seemed enveloped by an

36

absolute roar of love and yearning as the entire audience

rose up and applauded him. The emotional intensity contained

in that theatre was palpable.

The brief moment is particularly poignant as it happened shortly

before JFK’s assassination, ‘a week later I was having coffee in a

Greek diner on West 44th Street when I heard the news that President

John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.’ As always, when a

memorable event takes place, we remember in the minute detail, even

after many years, where we were at the time: private memory, place and

public history intersect in mysterious ways. Maybe this is all part of

the process of coming to terms with what has happened, to cope with

the shock and the sorrow.

On a more humorous note, in “Pizza: An Owner’s Manual” by Iris Smyles

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1608), we are

offered the quintessential tip on how to recognize a New Yorker: ‘You

can tell the New Yorkers from the By-Way-Of’s through a brief

surveying of pizza eating technique; New Yorkers fold.’ How to eat a

pizza is an important social skill, and it is better to learn at a

young age: ‘Hopefully, someone at some point in your upbringing takes

you aside and shows you how. Or else you just pick it up somewhere -

like sex or the truth about Santa - on the street.’ Learning how to

eat a pizza is almost as important for the cultural savvy New Yorker

as wearing the right shoes. “The Joseph LaRose Shoe Collection” by

37

Betsy Berne (http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?

storyid=1506) tells us of a wonderful vintage shop, Cherry, in the

West Village that has become a Mecca for shoe designers in search of

inspiration and shoe lovers. The writer (not unlike the Carry

character of the popular Sex and the City series) is herself someone who

loves shoes, maybe as much as books, judging from the following quote:

‘Prepare for delirium as you approach the storage area. Musty and

poorly lit, it is reminiscent of the Strand with its eight miles of

books—except in this case it’s eight million aisles of precariously

stacked crumbling shoe boxes displaying the proper psychedelic shoe

for each size 4-12 stack. It is not unlike being on a shoe acid trip—

and you’re peaking.’ Shoes and books, what a suitable comparison,

after all in both cases an old box or some dusty covers can hide a

treasure!

One of my favorite pieces is “On The Aesthetics of Urban Walking and

Writing” by Philip Lopate

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1466). This is

a wonderful piece of writing in the long tradition of the personal

essay, a literary genre that Lopate clearly masters. 54 In Lopate’s

view:

The urban connoisseur is also an amateur archeologist of the

recently vanished past. Not surprisingly, an elegiac tone

creeps into this genre, as personal memories intersect with

38

what had formerly existed on a particular spot. The walker-

writer cannot help seeing, superimposed over the present

edifice, its former incarnation, and he/she sings the

necropolis, the litany of all those torn-down Pennsylvania

Stations and Les Halles marketplaces that goes: Lost New

York, Lost Boston, Lost Tokyo, Lost Paris.

The passage is reminiscent of Benjamin’s idea of the city as a

palimpsest, as a geological landscape, where traces of the past

accumulate and transform themselves into plastic images. José Muñoz

Millanes aptly sums up Benjamin’s thinking on this point:

The city presents itself then, to the diachronic flâneur, as

an immense archeological deposit in whose vertical cuts

scenes come to light where, in a certain way, lives and

events already extinguished still survive. That is why

Benjamin states that for the flâneur "each street is a

vertiginous experience. The street conducts the flâneur into

a vanished time" and the entire city constitutes for him "an

epic book through and through, a process of memorizing while

strolling around." 55

Overall the stories published on the Mr Beller’s Neighborhood’s web site make

up for an imaginative, captivating and wonderfully human online

anthology of urban texts where the writing occasionally expands to

39

include pictures as well. This is the case of photo-essays such as

"Defacing Britney: A Look at New York's Newest Folk Art"

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=231), about a

project which considered Britney Spears’ defaced posters in New York’s

subway or “The G.O.P Comes to Town”

(http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/story.php?storyid=1524), a rather

effective visual account of the protests during the Republican National

Convention held in New York in September 2004.

Interestingly - and hardly surprising in the case of a web site

dedicated to stories about New York – Mr Beller’s Neighborhood includes a

link to stories about ‘9/11 and its Aftershocks’ which describes the

personal impact of that day's epochal events. In 2002 Mr Beller moved

offline with the official release of Before and After:Stories From New York, a

self-published paperback containing 60 stories from the Web site. In the

Introduction to the ‘After’ part Beller writes that: while the ‘Before

sections are series of essays, the ‘After’ [are] a series of views’ from

inside the city. They are testimonials, sort of ‘verbal photo

journalism’. What the pieces share is ‘a human scale’, because New York,

Beller argues, ‘is not one solid mass of indifferent, haughty, buildings

(or people), it is …not a symbol or even a skyline. It is a place where

people live. The people compose the place, and the place shapes the

people. Sometimes it dents them.’56 As Beller recalls, in the days

following the attack the web site was inundated with stories, it

40

‘became, in its way, another of the small and not so small groupings of

stories and pictures and candles and flowers that sprang up all over the

city and whose presence was such a consolation in the days and weeks

that followed.’ 57 One could say that for a brief moment the real city

and its web representation coalesced, they mirrored each other in the

collective sorrow, but also helped each other to start the long healing

process. Stories heal loss.

Also significant is the fact that by presenting the same material on the

screen as on the printed page, Mr. Beller provides an opportunity for

readers to compare the two experiences. For a start, as Steve Jones

acutely observes, ‘the relationship between the online stories and their

geographic locations infuse them with a palpable sense of place and

personal experience.’58 The red dots enable the reader to move back and

forth between the geographic map and the texts connected to it. Thanks

to the cartographic interface, she is no longer cast as the external

operator of a textual machine, as is the case in most hypertexts, but as

an embodied member of the textual world who travels around Manhattan

through the mediation of the cursor. Also, the map inscribes the text in

the reader’s mind as an object with a stable visual identity. Even

though textual architecture is not a inherently visual nor a spatial

phenomenon this visualization facilitates comprehension and motivates

the reader to explore the text. The idea of a stable visual identity may

conflict with the postmodern aesthetics of fluidity and kaleidoscopic

41

effects, but it compensates for the dizziness that readers may feel, as

they face in some hypertexts, too many choices with too few reasons to

chose, by telling them that beneath the scattered dots is order and

design. In Jones’ view, ‘As we zoom in, we get this feeling that we know

exactly where we are, and we start imagining the stories that we might

tell about ‘our’ city.’ 59 An interesting touch on the site is a real-

time clock, which conveyed a sense that the site is alive and its

material can be updated at any moment, in contrast with the book where

the content is static and page 2 always follows page 1. Worth noticing

is the fact that the printed edition bears a reference with the web

site, in that each story is accompanied by a small abstract map, which

vaguely indicates the tale's location. Also effective is the idea of the

book having two front covers, one for the "Before" stories and one for

the "After." ‘Readers who finish one section reach upside-down pages.

Mr. Beller said that the approach was intended to depict how the city

was upended on Sept. 11th.’60

According to Paula Geyh, co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction

(1997), Mr Beller’s site ‘seems more immediate and grounded in reality

than the vintage books…[it] creates a much more dynamic and kinetic

experience. It is akin to a virtual stroll around the neighborhood in

which one pauses to chat with acquaintances and overhears fragments of

conversations along the way.’61 Scott Rettberg, founder of the

Electronic Literature Organization, sums up effectively the differences

42

between the online texts and the book when he argues: ‘The music of

print is more classical than the improvisational jazz of electronic

writing’.62 As for Thomas Beller himself, when asked which version is

better, the web site or the book, he offered a Salomon-like way out of

the deadlock: ‘Authorial tone, point of view, the personality of an

author, writing style, these are immutable things… Whatever your

favorite piece is it is no better or no less a good piece of writing in

either form. To me, writing is writing.’63

In conclusion, this essay has argued that digitalization touches the

whole field of literature, directly or indirectly, more or less strongly

and that the trope of ‘the city’, so often associated to the process of

writing, has lost none of its poignancy when applied to the virtual

world of cyberspace. Digital storytelling is emerging as a natural

intersection for computers, arts and the humanities and its recent

applications, particularly with reference to the contemporary urban

experience, seem to point towards a revival of this ancient craft. The

reasons for such a revival are, to my mind, to be found in our

irresistible urge to restore a sense of connection when we are faced

with bewildering new social realities. The Victorian novel performed –

successfully - a similar function at a time of fast pacing urban and

social change.64 Digital storytelling, especially when it focuses on the

urban environment, is a useful tool in bringing together three pillars

of social experience: place, identity and community. In the early years

43

of the twentieth century, sociologists such as Georg Simmel lamented

that bonds of community nurtured over generations would be lost in

modern cities and that individuals’ best hope to resist the ‘social-

technological mechanism’ was the search for new ways to emphasize social

difference (i.e. their identity).65 The examples of (urban) digital

storytelling discussed in this paper constitute a possible contemporary

answer to Simmel’s well founded concerns. Still, this is just the

beginning, and the transitory nature of the present situation could lead

to spectacular prophesies and maybe hasty speculations regarding the

future of our cities and of our urban narratives. This paper has aimed

at offering some reflections upon one possible direction in the way

technology shapes urban representations.

44

54 In 1997 Phillip Lopate published an anthology entitled The art of the personal essay

(New York: Anchor), including more than seventy-five personal essays from

ancient forerunners to the finest personal essays from the last four centuries.

His most recent book on New York is Waterfront : A Journey Around Manhattan (New York:

Crown, 2004).

45

35 Ibidem.

36<http://www.digitallit.org/>.

37 <http://www.storycenter.org/>

38 <http://www.dstory.com/dsf6/newsletter_02.html>

39 Ibidem.

40 Ibidem.

42 Ibidem.

43 Ibidem.

44 A pedagogical spin off of the Beller’s site is “Inventing Gotham: New York

City and the American Dream,” a virtual tour of New York City constructed for

and by eleventh and twelfth grade students at the Fieldston School in the Bronx,

NY. Thomas Beller collaborated to the project by allowing the school to use the

interactive map of New York City neighborhoods featured in his site. The project

includes, among others, students’ historical presentations and literary

journals. On the pedagogical applications of digital technologies see Tracey M.

Weiss et al. “Digital Technologies and pedagogies,” Journal of Social Justice, 29, 4

(2002). Available at

<http://ruap.csumb.edu/lifestories/newpage/pdf/journal.pdf>.

45 <http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/what.php>.

46

46 Ibidem.

47 Ibidem.

48 Ibidem.

49Matthew Mirapaul “Arts Online: Today's Publishing: Better by the Book or by the

Web?,” New York Times February 4 ( 2002). Available at

<http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?

res=F5071FF939590C778CDDAB0894DA404482>.

50 Thomas Beller’s email to Anna Notaro of 21 April 2005.

51James Norton, “Mr Beller’s Neighborhood,” Flakmagazine. Available at

<http://flakmag.com/web/beller.html>.

52Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1984).

53 However, the site falls short of providing complete interaction, since

readers and writers have no way to exchange opinions about the various stories.

As Beller’s admits: ‘The essential interaction is the ability of anyone to

submit their own piece…But as for bulletin boards and chat …we are not too

invested in that.’ Thomas Beller’s email to Anna Notaro, 21 April 2005.

47

55 José Muñoz Millanes “The City as Palimpsest.” Available at

<http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v03/Munoz.html>. See also by Walter

Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborne (London: NLB,

1977); Selected Writings, Vol. 2 (1927-1934) (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); The Arcades Project, translated by

Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). For a contemporary project

that intends to create a literary landscape of Manhattan by using a multimedia

map see “A Literary Map of Manhattan” sponsored by the New York Times and produced

by Randy Cohen and Nigel Holmes at

<http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/20050605_BOOKMAP_GRAPHIC/?

nl=ep&emc=ep&rd=hcmcp?p=048vd9048vek4_Z_m012000muUwQuUsc>. Readers of the Book

Review section of the New York Times were asked in May 2005 to join to the project

by sending in details of their favorite fictions set in Manhattan. In the end

the book map is the result of the collaborative effort of a community of

readers.

48

56 Thomas Beller ed. Before and After. Stories from New York (New York: Mr Beller’s

Neighborhood Books, 2002), 9.

57 Ibidem. Stories about 9/11 are archived at

<http://www.911digitalarchive.org/stories/>. Fray.com, a non profit web site

launched 1996 and whose philosophy is summed up in one simple idea: ‘That the

web was the ultimate conduit for personal storytelling’ also has an effective

compilation of stories at <http://www.fray.com/hope/pieces/>.

58 Quoted in Matthew Mirapaul “Arts Online: Today's Publishing: Better by the

Book or by the Web?” New York Times February 4 ( 2002).

59 Ibidem.

60 Ibidem.

61 Ibidem.

62 “Paper or Cyber” Reveries.com, 24-12-2002 available at

<http://web.archive.org/web/20040823043731/http://www.reveries.com/coolnews/

2002/december/dec_24.html>.

63 Quoted in Matthew Mirapaul “Arts Online: Today's Publishing: Better by the

Book or by the Web?” New York Times February 4 ( 2002).

64 Steve Johnson in Interface Culture makes a similar point, however following in

Benjamin’s footsteps, he falls short of recognizing the significance of

contemporary forms of storytelling. See cit. 29.

49

65 Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life adapted by D. Weinstein from Kurt Wolff

(Trans.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950), 409-424.

50