Output details

Flight Paths: A networked novel

Research Questions: What does online discussion and collaboration offer to the initial research and planning phase of work of fiction? How do digitally native works contribute to the development of literary culture?

The worlds of traditional literary publishing and electronic literature have little in common; occupying two such distinct fields has not always been comfortable, and it has always been Pullinger’s goal to bring the two worlds closer together through her own writing.

Flight Paths was one of the first attempts to write a novel across the network, opening up the research process to discussion and collaboration from its inception, with support from Arts Council England, The Institute of the Future of the Book, NYC, and Refugee Week UK. Flight Paths tells the story of a Pakistani stowaway who falls out of the landing gear of a plane and onto the car of a London woman. The six stories that make up the project’s current iteration were co-created by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph; Pullinger wrote the story bible (the overall story outline for the entire project), as well as planning and writing each of the individual episodes and helping to collect digital assets, i.e. images, for each episode (50%) while Joseph constructed the episodes from the script, pulling together the digital assets while creating the soundtrack, using a multimedia web development software, Flash (50%). The project resides online at http://www.flightpaths.net. Pullinger’s forthcoming novel, Landing Gear (2014), develops this story further.

Flight Paths was showcased in the MIT-based Electronic Literature Organisation’s 2011 publication, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2; it is frequently cited and has been used as a case study in several PhDs.