tekstopia.uio.no (Norwegian) - textopia.org (English and Spanish)

textopia

Literary exchanges in locative media

Photo: Erik Norrud

Anders Sundnes Løvlie
Research fellow
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
a.s.lovlie at media.uio.no

inventiopedia - annotated bibliography-wiki about locative media

I am currently living in San Francisco, as part of a one-year stay as visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

I am working on a Ph.D. project on locative media. The working title for the project is textopia: Literary exchanges in locative media. The project was started in September 2007 and is scheduled to last three years.

This project focuses on the use of locative media (broadband-capable cell phones with GPS receivers) for exchange of culture and knowledge in and about public spaces, through the set-up of a location-based wiki system.

Simply put: A system which allows you to walk (or drive) through the city and hear readings of literary texts which talk about whichever park, square or street corner you are passing by. This is done by collecting literary texts which talk about the city in the wiki-site textopia.org. A mobile application enables users to hear recordings of the texts when they pass through the places they talk about. The mobile app can be downloaded and installed by directing the phone's browser to textopia.org/m. (For the moment only GPS cell phones from Nokia are supported, but an Android version is in the works.)

Project outline (doc). NB: This is the original version, in Norwegian; an updated version in English will pehaps be made available, sooner or later.

Academic publications:

"textopia: A geo-literary browser" (forthcoming), proceedings of the NORDES conference 2009.

The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America's Army (2009), Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Available from amazon.com. This book publication is based on the manuscript of my master thesis, which is available online. Thankfully there is also a shorter version: My paper from The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2008. And for the lazy buggers among you there is even a poster version (from DIGRA 2007).

"End of story? Quest, narrative and enactment in computer games" (2005).
Conference paper, in proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Worlds in Play conference, Vancouver.

Grants:

US-Norway Fulbright Foundation: One year grant for visit at UC Berkeley, Jan. 2009 - Jan. 2010.

Media:

Media coverage of the textopia project

"Die ethischen Werte des Computerspiels". Article in Berliner Zeitung by Johannes Thumfart, May 13th 2008 (in german).

"Sju teser om bokas framtid". Commentary in Dagbladet by Bjarne Buset, April 23rd 2007 (in Norwegian).

"Reis inn i Bjørvika". Article in Aftenposten by Hilde Lundgaard, January 29th 2008 (in Norwegian, no online version).

My employee page at the University of Oslo