SSNL conference

I am just back from attending the SSNL conference out in Washington DC. It was an excellent event with lots and lots of interesting papers and a great opportunity to meet with old friends and make some new ones. Although the conference has a really strong literary emphasis, there were several panels that dealt with narratives in digital media.

I was struck once again by the multiple ways we can approach narrative analysis. The papers I went to were really about the changing relationship(s) between text creators and their readers, but my challenge was to reconsider how these changing relationships change the shape of the texts themselves. As a linguist, I am interested in the language that gets used - for example, how this is the same as or different to offline communication (written, oral), but I have also been thinking that for my blog project that this is not enough. So I am starting to think about how linking is both an intertextual and interpersonal phenomenon and how this in turn might alter narrative shapes.