Born Digital: Towards A Glossary of Digital Narrative

Das The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative (LGDN) wurde am 14. März 2025 als Teil der Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Universität Stuttgart und dem Center for Digital Narrative veröffentlicht. Es handelt sich um ein peer-reviewtes Glossar, das kontinuierlich durch Beiträge von Expert*innen aus verschiedenen Bereichen und akademischen Graden erweitert wird.

Call for Entries for the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative

07-08.05. | Call for Presentations: Imaginaries of the Future

01.03.2026 | Submission deadline “Bite-Sized Stories with Big Impact” Born Digital Microfiction Contest 

10-11.11.2025 |  Workshop: How to Write a Bad-Ass Glossary Entry - Online

19.09.2025 | Eindrücke der BornDigital-Stipendiat:innnen

18.07.2025 | Peer-Review Workshop on entries to The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative

“Launch of The Glossary of Digital Narrative”, Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen

13.03.-14.03.2025 | Call for Presentations Weird Stories & Wicked Communities  - University of Bergen, Center for Digital Narrative. Call for Papers: https://www.ilw.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/aktuelles/news/13.-14.04--Call-for-Presentations---Weird-Stories--Wicked-Communities/.

13.03. - 14.03.2025 | Workshop Weird Stories, Wicked Communities (Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen).

30.09. - 01.10.2024 | Workshop Digital Futures of Literature  - University of Stuttgart, KII, Room 17.23. Newseintrag .

05.02.2024 | 10:00-12:00 | „Let’s Build a City: The Encyclopedia Project as Essential Work“ – Dr. Hannah Maria Leontine Ackermans – Online. Newseintrag.

28.11.2024 | 13:00-14:00 | Go Digital at Stuttgart and Bergen! - Online.

The workshop “Imaginaries of the Future”, as part of the BWSplus project “Born Digital”, took place at the University of Stuttgart on 7-8 May 2026. The main topic of the workshop “Imaginaries of the Future” called attention to the multitude of challenges we are confronted with, such as climate change, democratic instability, social injustice, technological oligarchies, and the pervasive and rapid expansion of artificial intelligence in society and how they are reflected in digital narratives The two-day workshop gave the opportunity for students and early career researchers to share their ideas and works-in-progress, in 15-minute presentations, followed by panel discussions. The workshop attracted many interested visitors.  Students from the University of Bergen, the University of Stuttgart, as well as visiting students from the Donetsk National Technical University, attended the talks and engaged into the discussions.

Prof. Dr. Sibylle Baumbach officially opened the event by introducing the workshop’s main focus, the Born Digital project, and the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative.

Her talk was followed by Prof. Dr. Astrid Ensslin’s (University of Regensburg) keynote titled “’I was the person who wasn't there’: Ambispatial Orientation and Scalable Empathy in Emersive VR Fiction” In her presentation, she gave insights into her research on immersive/e-mersive virtual reality narration and cognitive empirical reader-response research in relation to empathy and attention research. She provided various examples in the field of gaming and showed how we can experience absence-in-presence.

Her keynote was followed by the first panel “Digital Narrative and the (Re)-Shaping of Human Perception”, moderated by PhD candidate Hannah Armour (University of Stuttgart). In her presentation “Beyond the Portal: Attention, Power, and Ethical Relation in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This”, Khadija Nasirova (University of Stuttgart) discussed the novel with regards to social media and the implications of online presence. The second panellist, PhD candidate Tegan Pyke (University of Bergen), introduced her new project on a specific form of online roleplay in her presentation “Character as Constraint: Narrativity on the Micro Scale in Online Forum Replaying”. The panel was completed by Odin Berle Arntzen (University of Bergen) with his talk “Buying Time. Techno Biological Inequality in Near Future Digital Imaginaries” in which he took a closer look at the action role-playing game “Cyberpunk 77” and its imagined future of inequality becoming a matter of biological, ecological and temporal factors.

In the afternoon, the second panel, “Redefining Authorship, Literature and Creativity in the Digital Age”, moderated by PhD candidate Jan Angermeier (University of Stuttgart), started with Nadja Hieber’s (University of Stuttgart) presentation “Future Vision: Returning AI’s Technological Gaze”. She proposed a new definition of the “technological gaze” and discussed how it may be used to empower human writers and texts. Her presentation was followed by Laiba Iftikhar’s (University of Stuttgart) talk “What remains Literary: Twitterature, Generative AI, and the Political Stakes of Human Authorship and Voice” in which she imagined a creatively limited future where humans stopped writing and AI struggles to generate new literary forms. The panel was closed by Devrim Pinar’s (University of Stuttgart) presentation “Imaginaries of Authorship: Assessment, AI, and the Narrative of Learning in Digital Culture” in which he presented his on-going eTwinning research project on new assessment methods in the age of AI. His talk focused on how AI re-frames learning and how finding new ways to work with AI becomes indispensable.

The last panel “Digital Control and Political Resistance in Dystopian Narratives”, moderated by Dr. Geoff Rodoreda (University of Stuttgart), started with Max Schmid (University of Stuttgart) and his presentation “’We’ve Become One with the Sound:’ Dystopias of Noise and a Rehabilitation of Silence”. He argued that parameters of sound and noise are a crucial aspect to consider in dystopian fiction, based on various case studies from Ali Smith’s Gliff to song lyrics. Memoona Bukhari (University of Stuttgart) approached Gliff from a different angle in her presentation “Ali Smith’s Future Imaginaries: Resisting Unwanted Futures of Weaponized Data and Surveillance”. She focused on Big Data surveillance infrastructures and how the characters of the novel might be able to escape them. Buse Gürsel (University of Bergen) closed off the panel by presenting her own developed urban simulator as a means to educate people on urban development in her presentation titled “Urban Governance Simulator and the Legibility of Urban Form”.

All panels prompted lively discussions and offered feedback on current and future research projects that were presented.

The first workshop day concluded with the award ceremony of the Born Digital Microfiction Contest, and a speech by Dr Curtis Runstedler (University of Stuttgart) who was part of the jury. In the jury, he was joined by Dr. Christine Lehnen (University of Hamburg), Prof. Dr. David Thomas Henry Wright (University of Bergen) and Prof. Dr. Joseph Tabbi (University of Bergen). Thanks to the dedicated work by the jury, three winners were determined and awarded in the ceremony: Hülya Talu (first place), Max Schmid (second place) and Seyma Aydogdu (third place) were congratulated for their exceptional stories. They read their texts and shared what inspired their work. 

The second day of the workshop focused on the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative (LGDN). It started with an introduction and a peer review workshop by Dr. Marie Geraldine Rademacher (University of Stuttgart), in which participants learned how to peer-review recently submitted entries. Within the peer-review workshop, four groups reviewed separate entries for the LGDN and composed peer-review texts. The last part of the workshop was dedicated to crafting a glossary entry, a session led by Dr. Hannah Ackermans (University of Bergen) and Azza Sakr (University of Bergen). This acted as a great opportunity for early career researchers to contribute to the glossary and potentially publish an entry.

The two workshop days left participants with many new ideas, connections and feedback on their works-in-progress.

As part of the BWSPlus Born-Ditigal project, a group of Stuttgart students and postdocs went to Bergen for a workshop at the Center for Digital Narrative to discuss ‘weird stories and wicked communities’. Many thanks to our partners in Bergen, especially to Hannah Ackermans, Scott Rettberg, and Joseph Tabbi for a fantastic event and for making us so welcome!

Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen) kicked of Weird Stories & Wicked Communities with his keynote “On entitification: P-zombies, shoggoths, stochastic parrots and Waluigis”. In the focus were the treatment and conceptualisation of chat-bots as entities in the space of online discussion.

The panel “Technological Anxiety” included two presentations. Hanna Hellesø Lauvli’s (University of Bergen) input “From Spam to Spirit: Dead Internet Theory, Creative Practice, and the Algorithmic Self” on the evolution of spam, AI-slob and the end of useful, true or human-generated content was followed by Marianne Gunderson’s (University of Bergen) “‘Don’t worry about formalities’: Prompting as an affective genre,” which showcased her research into the so-called Eigenprompt. The Eigenprompt allows users to customize the content and style of automatically generated output, oftentimes aiming for a sarcastic imagination of a millenial’s tonality.

Following, Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang (Sydneshaugen Skole) gave his talk “The Rhethoric of Space in African Digital Literature”. Opoku-Agyemang demonstrated how authors of African Digital Literature reflect on the interplay of urban and rural spaces as well as overcome those categories and find new perspectives.

Under the umbrella of “Vernacular Creativity,” Maria Kraxenberger (University of Stuttgart) presented “Practices, Motivations, Effects of Using Online Literature Platforms: an Exploratory Survey Study”. Her research highlighted female usership, diversity in preferred genres and the double role of users as consumers and creators of online literature. During “Sims Family Sagas: Emergent Narrative Approaches to the ‘Legacy Challenge’ by Sims 2 Players” Tegan Pyke (University of Bergen) gave an introduction into narratives created predominantly by female players of the Sims 2 and the players’ interactions with their creations. Christin Walter (University of Stuttgart) closed the first workshop day with her presentation “Fanon vs. Canon: Character Centrality in Re-Imaginings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in AU-Fanfiction”. Her preliminary findings suggest that fanfiction authors stay true to the original character dynamics even when changing spatial or temporal circumstances.

The second day started out with a peer-review workshop by Lai-Tze Fan (University of Bergen). Peer-review as an often under-represented and overlooked but also time-intensive task became the centre of attention. Fan provided attendees with helpful tips, guidelines and what to look out for when acting as peer-reviewer.

In the panel “Artificial Voices” presenters showcased how digital contexts influence the shape and meaning of communication. Lina Ruth Harder (University of Bergen) discussed how grief and a desire for closure might motivate someone to train a chat-bot on the data of a deceased relative or loved one as well as possible ethical implications in “Haunted Algorithms: Techno-Necromancy and Ghosts in the Machine”. In the talk “The ‘Weird and Wicked’ Intersection of Human and Mechanical Voices in Digital Literature” Nadja Hieber (University of Stuttgart) reflected upon how generated speech is employed by poets and what effect it might have on human listeners. Ceyda Yazici (University of Stuttgart) explored in her presentation “Shape Me: The Self-Realization of Digital Id(Entities)” different philosophical approaches for interpreting the relationship between Original Characters and their creators as well as the surrounding communities and their usage of chat-bots.

The panel “World Building” began with “Devs on Devs: Exploring Video Games about the Video Game Industry” by Daniel Johannes Rosnes (University of Bergen). He deconstructed the formula of Video Game Development Simulators and discussed how it pertains to visions of and hopes for the industry. Merve Munz (University of Stuttgart) followed with “Compu(e)ting Gods in Afşin Kum’s Kübra”, analysing the imagination of a god-like AI, its prophet and resulting cult following. In “Virtual Worlds: From Entertainment to Sociopolitical Laboratories” Svitlana Tarasova (University of Stuttgart) demonstrated how video games and their culture pick up real-world phenomena as well as surpass the medium.

The workshop ended on a high note with the launch of the Living Glossary of Digital Narratives. The LGDN aims to be a reference point for students as well as researchers and welcomes contributions by everyone interested in the crafting and study of digital narrative.