Dear colleagues,

We are inviting abstracts for a two-day conference entitled Dialogues of Power: Political (Re)presentations in the Arts to be held at the University of St Andrews on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 October 2016.

Please find the call below and feel free to circulate it among other colleagues who may be interested in participating.

All best wishes,

The organising committee, Isabelle Gribomont, Tiran Manucharyan, Bram van Leuveren

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Call for Conference Papers

Dialogues of Power: Political (Re)presentations in the Arts

28-29 October 2016

University of St Andrews

 

Until well into the eighteenth century, the arts and politics were often intimately intertwined through networks of patronage. Religious and political authorities commissioned works of art that were designed to promote or implement their policies. In our own times, patronage has given way to a wide variety of production modes, thanks to which the arts operate on a more autonomous footing vis-à-vis the realm of politics. This leaves one wondering, however, to what extent the arts in the twenty-first century can or should relate to issues of political interest. On the one hand, there is a deep pessimism about the political significance of the arts in society. As is well known, governments and education systems frequently cut art-related subjects from their budget. On the other hand, this pessimism urges artists to think about the political effects and underpinnings of their work in novel and creative ways. Community and verbatim theatre, life writing and experimental forms of documentary film serve as a case in point.

 

This conference takes its cue from the recent debate on the role of the arts in society by exploring the multifaceted relationships or ‘dialogues’ between the arts and politics. It asks: What is the political potential of the arts to (re)present emerging dialogues in an ever-increasing globalized society? How do artists use their work to convey or capture political messages and/or tensions in society? What kind of artistic techniques do they employ in doing so? How have relationships between the arts and politics changed or shifted over time? What do we mean by ‘politically engaged’ art? How are the links between the arts and politics conceptualized in current debates about the role of the arts in society?     

 

We especially welcome papers from PhD students and early-career researchers across the arts and humanities from the medieval period until today. Abstracts are invited for 20-minute papers about individual artists and artworks, as well as theoretical reflections on the relationship between the arts and politics. Topics include but are not limited to:

 

Intertextuality

Dialogism

Cultural hybridity

Intermediality

Multiculturalism

Translation/Adaptation

Nation/Region/Transnation

Artistic resistance

Postcolonial literature

Life writing

Documentary film/theatre

Court spectacle/festival culture

Cultural patronage

Social networks

Visual arts

Oral literatures

Authority and authorship

Canonicity

 

Please send your abstract (max. 300 words) and a biography (max. 200 words) to dialoguespower@st-andrews.ac.uk by 10 June 2016. Your participation will be confirmed on 30 June.

 

Registration for the conference is £20 and includes lunch, tea and coffee on both days.

CFP Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Issue #90, Fall 2016

Special Topic: Woolf and Illness

Submissions due: 15 July 2016

 

Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “On Being Ill” questions why illness has failed to feature as a prime theme of literature, alongside love, battle, and jealousy. This issue of VWM seeks contributions on Woolf’s exploration of illness in her life and work, as a paradigm for reexamining modernist literature and art, and its influence on subsequent writers. Topics might include questions such as: How does the literature of illness challenge or enhance theories of trauma, narrative ethics, and disability studies? How does Woolf’s focus on the politics and aesthetics of the ill body inform our understanding of the period, including in relation to Victorian values, in relation to the 1918-19 flu pandemic, and in relation to mechanized modernity’s drive toward professionalization and specialization? How has the contemporary literary landscape changed to contribute to the popularity of Woolf’s focus—from the success of the medical humanities to the proliferation of autopathographies? What might be inspiring or potentially problematic in Woolf’s theory of illness as a site for creative rebellion?

 

Send submissions of no more than 2500 words by 15 July 2016 to: 
Cheryl Hindrichs at <cherylhindrichs@boisestate.edu>

CALL FOR PAPERS

ICIDS 2016

9th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTERACTIVE DIGITAL STORYTELLING

November 15-18, 2016

http://icids2016.ict.usc.edu

The Institute for Creative Technologies

The University of Southern California

Los Angeles, USA

This year, the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2016) will take place at the Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. It also features a collaboration with the ninth edition of Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT9), a related series of gatherings that holds Artificial Intelligence as its focus.

ICIDS has its origin in a series of related international conferences that ran between 2001 and 2007 (http://www.icids.org/). Since 2008, ICIDS became the premier annual venue that gathers researchers, developers, practitioners and theorists to present and share the latest innovations, insights and techniques in the expanding field of interactive storytelling and the technologies that support it. The field re-groups a highly dynamic and interdisciplinary community, in which narrative studies, computer science, interactive and immersive technologies, the arts, and creativity converge to develop new expressive forms in a myriad of domains that include artistic projects, interactive documentaries, cinematic games, serious games, assistive technologies, edutainment, pedagogy, museum science, advertisement and entertainment, to mention a few. The conference has a long-standing tradition of bringing together academia, industry, designers, developers and artists into an interdisciplinary dialogue through a mix of keynote lectures, long and short article presentations, posters, workshops, and very lively demo sessions.

We welcome contributions from a large range of fields and disciplines related to interactive storytelling, including computational narrative, narratology, computer science, human-computer interaction, media studies and media production, game studies, game design and development, semiotics, museum science, edutainment, virtual and augmented reality, cognitive science, digital humanities, interactive arts and transmedia studies. We encourage original contributions in the forms of research papers, position papers, posters and demonstrations, presenting new scientific results, innovative theories, novel technological implementations, case studies and creative artistic projects in the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling and its possible applications in different domains. We particularly welcome research on topics in the following five areas:

BRAVE NEW IDEAS

We invite papers that explore highly innovative ideas and/or paradigm shifts in conventional theory and practice of interactive storytelling. We seek to draw attention to methods that differ from the state of the art in practice or theory and demonstrate potential for changed ways of thinking. These papers may not be “complete” in the “traditional” manner in the sense that it may not be possible to have experimental results comparing other related efforts or that they may not have large, publicly available data sets to be used for performance comparison. However, we expect these papers to be visionary by nature, where the ideas and theory are strong, but the experimentation maybe preliminary. However, sufficient evidence that the approach is promising must be provided. The aim is to establish a roadmap for the next 5 years as a community guideline for the development of the field.

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS

•       The role of the user/reader in interactive storytelling

•       The role of the author/designer in interactive storytelling

•       Computable narrative models inspired by cognitive science, narratology, drama studies, and related disciplines

•       Theories and aesthetics of interactive storytelling

•       Narratology for interactive media

•       Disciplinary analysis of IS research

ANALYSES AND EVALUATION OF SYSTEMS

•       Methods/Frameworks for testing user experience in interactive storytelling

•       Methods/Frameworks for testing story development

•       Normative evaluation of interactive storytelling applications

•       Case studies, post-mortems and best practices

USAGE SCENARIOS AND APPLICATIONS

•       Collaborative storytelling environments and multi-user systems

•       Social, ubiquitous and mobile storytelling

•       Interactive narratives in digital games

•       Interactive cinema and television

•       Interactive storyworlds

•       Interactive non-fiction and interactive documentaries

•       Interactive narratives as tools for learning in teaching, e-learning, training and edutainment

•       Interactive narratives used in health, rehabilitation and exercise

•       Interactive storytelling in roleplay, larps, theatre and improvisation

•       Interactive narrative in the real world (live installations)

•       Interactive narratives in museums

INTELLIGENT NARRATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

As a special collaboration for 2016, this category represents the ninth iteration of a series of gatherings dedicated to advancing research in artificial intelligence (AI) for the computational understanding and expression of narrative (Intelligent Narrative Technologies — INT9). We aim to maintain this forward momentum by gathering an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to share their latest work at the intersection of narrative and intelligent technology. Specifically, this category focuses on computational systems to represent, reason about, create, adapt, and perform interactive and non-interactive narrative experiences. We particularly welcome submissions that discuss AI advances within digital narrative technologies, including games, simulations, interactive fiction, story generators, and electronic literature. We also invite submissions on fundamental research in related and relevant fields, including, but not limited to:

•       User modeling and narrative user interfaces

•       Authoring modes and tools for interactive digital storytelling, including collaborative authoring

•       Story/world generation and experience management

•       Artificial intelligence for story generation and storytelling

•       Computational understanding, analysis, and summarization of narratives, including natural language processing and computer vision

•       Drama management for interactive narratives

•       Narrative discourse generation

•       Interactive cinema and television

•       Media, VR and game technologies for interactive storytelling

•       Narrative knowledge representation, reasoning, and acquisition

•       Virtual characters and virtual humans

•       Synthetic actors

•       Non-verbal interactive stories

•       Narrative presence and engagement in virtual environments

•       Narrative-related affect and emotion

•       Computational creativity in narrative systems

•       Human-computer interaction with narrative technologies

Though evaluations are not a strict condition for acceptance, authors are strongly encouraged to provide means to validate the described approach or system/environment/experience.

SUBMISSIONS

The peer review process for ICIDS will be double blind. Reviewers will not know whom they review and authors also will not know who reviews them. As a condition of that authors have to anonymise the paper before they submit it (i.e. no author names and no references or acknowledgements that can help to identify the author). Only the reviewers of the same paper and the respective author(s) will be able to see the reviews and additional comments if they are available. Reviews will not be made public after the review process will have been finished.

All submissions must follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format, available at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0. Papers must be written in English, and only electronic submissions in PDF format will be considered for review. Submissions that receive high ratings in the peer review process will be selected for publication by the program committee as Springer LNCS conference proceedings. For the final print-ready version, the submission of source files (Microsoft Word/LaTeX, TIF/EPS) and a signed copyright form will be required.

All submissions will be processed using the Easychair Online Conference System. Authors are advised to register a new account well in advance of the paper submission deadline:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icids2016

THE SUBMISSION CATEGORIES ARE:

•       Full papers (10-12 pages in the main proceedings) describing interesting, novel results or completed work in all areas of interactive digital storytelling and its applications. Papers for the Brave New Topic category only fall into this category.

•       Short papers (6-8 pages in the main proceedings) presenting exciting preliminary work or novel, thought-provoking ideas in their early stages.

•       Demonstrations and posters (2-4 pages in the backmatter of the proceedings) describing working, presentable systems or brief explanations of a research project.

IMPORTANT DATES

•       Submission deadline – June 17th, 2016 (11:59 pm. Hawaii Standard Time) Authors are strongly advised to upload their submissions well in advance of this deadline.

•       July 29th, 2016 – Accept/reject notifications sent to authors.

•       August 12th, 2016 – Camera-ready copy due.

•       November 15-18, 2016 – ICIDS Conference.

WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

Workshops can vary in length, from half a day to a full day. Proposals for workshops should be two to four pages in length, and include the following information:

1.      A brief technical description of the workshop, explaining its goals, topic and expected outcome. A format and proposed schedule, including audience, and a short draft of the call for participation.

2.      The names, affiliations and email addresses of the proposed organizing committee. This committee should consist of two to four people recognized in the area.

3.      The primary contact for the organizing committee.

4.      If available, a list of tentatively confirmed attendees.

Workshop organizers must submit their calls for participation to Reid Swanson, ICIDS-2016 Workshop Chair, at rswanson@ict.usc.edu

INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION

Since 2010, ICIDS has been hosting an international art exhibition open to the general public. A separate call for the International Art Exhibition will be issued here: http://icids2016.ict.usc.edu/exhibition/

ORGANIZATION

The Ninth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS-2016) will take place on November 15-18, 2016 at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, USA.

General chair:

Andrew Gordon, University of Southern California

Programme Committee Chair:

Frank Nack, University of Amsterdam

INT9 Track Co-Chairs:

Chris Martens, University of California at Santa Cruz

Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, North Carolina State University

Programme Committee:

Please see: http://icids2016.ict.usc.edu/committee/

CONTACT

Questions about the conference should be directed to the organizers at: icids2016@ict.usc.edu

For further information and for updates please visit the webpage at:

http://icids2016.ict.usc.edu

Please feel free to distribute this call for papers.

Project Narrative Summer Institute:

July 4 – July 15, 2016

“Narrative Medicine across Genres and Media”

 The Project Narrative Summer Institute (PNSI) is a two-week workshop at The Ohio State University devoted to an intensive study of issues in narrative theory as they relate to a specific theme or movement. This summer’s PNSI on Narrative Medicine will be led by Project Narrative core faculty Jared Gardner and James Phelan. On July 13-14, we will be joined by Rita Charon (Columbia University), the pre-eminent scholar-practitioner of the movement.

 The goal of Narrative Medicine is to reform medical practice. It asks: how can reclaiming the centrality of narrative to the processes of illness, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery (or the impossibility of recovery) change the way both practitioners and patients experience those processes? How can narrative theory be marshaled to help effect these changes?

 This focus on practice and people feeds back into the project of narrative theory. To what extent has the field displaced the mind and body of the storyteller with theoretical tools designed to provide quantifiable, mappable, and universal structures? What happens when the endpoint of working with narrative theory is not the construction of new tools or new interpretations but practical consequences in the lives of tellers and listeners? 

 PNSI 2016 will take up these and other questions in connection with a wide range of narratives and narrative theory.  Above all, we will explore the complex interplay among medicine, narrative, and narrative theory that constitutes the lifeblood of Narrative Medicine. 

The deadline for applications is Monday, March 25, 2016. For more info on how to apply, see http://projectnarrative.osu.edu/programs/summer-institute.

Summer Course in Narrative Studies (SINS) is now open for registration! SINS brings together postdoctoral students, faculty members and leading scholars for a combination of keynote lectures, participant papers, workshops and master classes. Applications are due 16 April 2016.

SUMMER COURSE IN NARRATIVE STUDIES 2016
The Summer Course in Narrative Studies (SINS) is an intensive PhD-level course that brings together postdoctoral students, faculty members and leading scholars in a multi-disciplinary, international discussion of existing and emerging concepts and approaches in the broad field of narrative study. The course is hosted by Aarhus University and it takes place at the Sandbjerg Estate, Denmark, 7.-12. of August.

Read more on www.sins.au.dk.

—FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS AND EXTENDED DEADLINE—

Seventh International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’16)

Advancing the Science of Narrative

Special Focus: Computational Narrative and the Humanities

a satellite workshop of:

Digital Humanities 2016 (DH2016)

11-13 July 2016

Kraków, Poland

http://narrative.csail.mit.edu/cmn16/

—IMPORTANT DATES—

15 March 2016.  Submission deadline (EXTENDED).

11 April 2016.  Notification of acceptance.

16 May 2016.  Final Camera Ready Versions Due.

11-13 July 2016.  CMN’16.

11-16 July 2016.  DH2016.

—WORKSHOP AIMS—

The workshop series, Computational Models of Narrative (CMN) is dedicated to advancing the computationally-grounded scientific study of narrative.  Now in its seventh iteration, the workshop has a tradition of crossing academic borders and bringing together researchers from different disciplines on a common object of study.  Narrative provides a model for organizing and communicating experience, knowledge, and culture.  Investigations of narrative operations in textual, aural, and visual media have been systematically pursued in the humanities since before the early structural linguistics and folklorist inspired work of the Russian Formalists, and in the computing sciences since before the early cognitive science inspired work on scripts and frames.  Research continues on computational approaches across the humanities and sciences.  In order to appreciate the various domains and approaches connected to the computationally enabled study of narratives and narrative theory, it is becoming increasingly clear that research in this area requires engagement from many communities of interest.  Peer-reviewed full proceedings from CMN’13, ‘14, and ‘15 are each available in the OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs) published by Schloss Dagstuhl; peer-reviewed proceedings from CMN’11 and CMN’12 were published by AAAI and LREC, respectively. 

—SPECIAL FOCUS: COMPUTATIONAL NARRATIVE AND THE HUMANITIES—

This inter-disciplinary workshop will be an appropriate venue for papers addressing fundamental topics and questions regarding narrative.  Papers should be relevant to the computational modeling, and scientific or humanistic understanding of narrative. The workshop will have a special focus on how the computational modeling, analysis, or generation of narrative has affected approaches in the humanities for studying and generating narrative in or across textual, aural, or visual media.  Possible themes could connect to the representation of narrative, connections between cognition and narrative or knowledge representation and narrative, the use of heuristics to handle complexity, incorporation of insights about human thinking, the use of narrative to organize information in the humanities, the relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches for narrative understanding, or how narrative is seen to function differently depending upon the medium.  Regardless of its topic, reported work should provide insight of use to the scientific understanding or computational modeling of narratives. Discussing technological applications or motivations is not prohibited, but is not required. We accept both finished research and more tentative exploratory work.

We invite and encourage submissions either as full papers or position papers, through the workshop’s EasyChair website:

    https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmn16

We also invite you to submit an abstract soon so that we can gauge the number of submissions we can expect. (Submitting an abstract is possible without submitting the full paper at the same time.)  Full papers should contain original research and have to fit within 16 pages; position papers can report on work-in-progress, research plans or projects and have to fit within four pages plus one page of references.

Illustrative Topics and Questions

– How can computational narratives be studied from a humanities point of view?

– Are generative models of narrative texts, movies or video games possible, desirable, and useful?

– What comprises the set of possible narrative arcs? Is there such a set? How many possible story lines are there?

– Is narrative structure universal, or are there systematic differences in narratives from different cultures?

– How are narratives affected by the media used to convey them?

– What aspects of cross-linguistic work has narrative research neglected?

– What opportunities are there for narrative analysis across languages?

– What makes narrative different from a list of events or facts?

– How do conceptions and models of spatiality or temporality influence narrative and narrative theory?

– What are the details of the relationship between narrative and language, image, or sound?

– How is narrative knowledge captured and represented?

– How are narratives indexed and retrieved? Is there a universal scheme for encoding episodic information?

– What shared resources are required for the computational study of narrative? What should a “Story Bank” contain?

– What shared resources and tools are available, or how can already-extant resources be adapted to the study of narrative?

– What are appropriate formal or computational representations for narrative?

– How should we evaluate computational and formal models of narrative?

– Can narrative be subsumed by current models of higher-level cognition, or does it require new approaches?

– How do narratives mediate our cognitive experiences, or affect our cognitive abilities?

– How can narrative systems be applied to problem-solving?

– How far are we from a theory of narrative adaptation across media?

—ORGANIZING COMMITTEE—

– Antonio Lieto (University of Turin, Italy)

– Ben Miller (Georgia State University, USA)

– Rémi Ronfard (Inria, LJK, University of Grenoble, France)

– Stephen Ware (University of New Orleans, USA)

– Mark A. Finlayson (Florida International University, USA)

—Keynote Speaker—

– John Bateman, University of Bremen, Germany

—PROGRAM COMMITTEE—

David Elson, Columbia University & Google

Floris Bex, Utrecht University

Rossana Damiano, University of Turin

Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Hertfordshire

Pablo Gervás, Complutense University of Madrid

Andrew Gordon, ICT

Livia Polanyi, LDM Associates

Marie-Laure Ryan, University of Colorado Boulder

Tim Tangherlini, UCLA

Mariet Theune, University of Twente

Atif Waraich, Manchester Metropolitan University

Mehul Bhatt, University of Bremen

Emmett Tomai, University of Texas-Pan American

Neil Cohn, UCSD

Inderjeet Mani, Yahoo Labs

Loizos Michael, Open University of Cyprus

Chris Meister, Hamburg University

Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University

Benedikt Löwe, Universität Hamburg