We are developing a unique mobile interface for exploring the history, construction and continuing cultural impact of Ottawa's Rideau Canal, a World Heritage Site, for the Virtual Museum of Canada. Heritage Passages will draw on materials from the Heritage Conservation Research Collection of the Archives and Research Collections (ARC) at Carleton University and Ottawa's Bytown Museum to reveal a series of intertwined narratives. Digitized artifacts, texts, photos, video interviews, and architectural/engineering drawings will be interpreted through a series of interpretive paths, or "passages," linked to a detailed, navigable timeline that tells the story of the canal's conception and construction. These materials will also be linked to detailed architectural models of the locks and associated buildings, to be developed by the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) with the aid of laser scanning technology. The exhibition will be available remotely via a standard web browser or, while on site, through a smartphone application developed using our proprietary StoryTrek authorware. Visitors will be able to download a GPS-enabled, augmented reality smartphone application providing on-site access to archival materials directly from significant locations along the canal.

My dissertation examines the shifting treatment of digital human characters within Hollywood cinema. It observes a marked transition from the notion of the digital actor, or "synthespian," as a perceived replacement for the human actor, to that of the digital character, which facilitates the performance of a Hollywood star at the same time as it eases the cross-media translation of the digital character as a kind of intellectual property. I consider how the construction and reception of the digital human has been shaped by the growing intersections between cinema and video games in the age of media convergence, paying special attention to how the relationship between actor and character has been re-configured as a kind of gamer-avatar framework where the actions of a human star 'drive' that of their (usually transformative) digital character. I examine what is at stake when this re-configuration increasingly co-exists with a broader transmediation of the digital character across various ancillary media platforms, where the consumer/spectator may take the reins and operate the digital character-as-avatar.

This research is supported by the Graphics, Animation and New Media National Centre of Excellence (GRAND NCE)

Using our StoryTrek authorware, I am creating an “archival atlas” of New World utopias and dystopias. By mapping archival city narratives, photos, plans, blueprints and visionary descriptions onto actual geospatial sites, I use the city streets themselves as an open, interactive and dialectical interface to historical narratives of urban upheaval and renewal.

The archival atlas project combines literary and cultural critique with new collaborative tools for multimedia spatial analysis, tracing continuities between the earliest radical media and recent forms of networked activism. It aims to theorize the transition from textual archives to narrative databases, linking social and cultural geographies to recent debates over the future of libraries and the printed book.

This research is supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We developed a new kind of dynamic or “live” form of hypernarrative, in which the content and structure of stories is determined by live information. This system would ultimately allow the creation of hypermedia narratives capable of mining public databases on the fly, in order to customize and integrate narrative material appropriate to the user's particular temporal and geospatial context. Unlike other forms of hypermedia, a live hypertext narrative can actually be different every time it is read. More akin to an improvised performance than a recorded one, a live hypertext changes depending on where and when it's accessed, and on what's happening in the world and on the Web. Live hypertext thus presents a new development in the history of writing that challenges our inherited notions of the stability, fixity and even authority of printed text.

This research was supported by an Initiatives for the New Economy Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.