Output details

Inanimate Alice

Research Questions: What new creative possibilities for writing and teaching are offered by the new technologies? How can multimodal online forms contribute to the development of a canon of electronic literature? How can traditional forms of narrative be integrated with the new narrative forms produced by the digital technologies?

Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl growing up surrounded by technology. The stories are told using text, music, images, video, sound effects and games; they are available in five languages. Alice’s own interest in games and technology gives a strong narrative rationale for the story’s multimodal interactivity. With each episode Alice is one or two years older, and the gameplay becomes incrementally more complex, reflecting her increasing skills in this field. The stories are 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 episode and helping to collect digital assets, such as images, for each episode, while Joseph constructed the episodes from the script, pulling together the digital assets while creating the soundtrack, using a multimedia web development software, Flash. See http://www.inanimatealice.com.

This has become one of the world’s most popular digital literacy pedagogy titles. Hundreds of reader-created mash-ups and new episodes have been created in classrooms around the world. In 2012, the American Association of School Librarians chose Inanimate Alice as a Best Website for Teaching and Learning. Inanimate Alice was the only work of digital fiction featured on the BBC/ACE ‘The Space’. Education Services Australia commissioned a series of twelve Inanimate Alice photo-stories 2012/13 and in 2013 Inanimate Alice partnered with the Los Angeles-based Shoah Foundation.

The work is widely cited in scholarly journals and has been the subject of several doctoral theses.