tekstopia.uio.no (norwegian) - textopia.org (english and spanish)

textopia

literary exchanges in locative media

Photo: Erik Norrud

anders sundnes løvlie
research fellow, university of oslo
a.s.lovlie at media.uio.no

my project: textopia.org

academic blog: textopiablog.wordpress.com

academic wiki: inventiopedia

(occasionally i also twitter, as anderslovlie)

Millions of writers have written millions of texts about millions of places in the world. Chances are that someone once wrote a poem or a little story about just the place you are sitting and reading this. What did they see in this place? How did they describe it, what did they imagine took place here? And what kind of stories can YOU dream up about just this little spot?

These are questions I try to investigate through my Ph.D. project on 'locative media'. The working title for the project is textopia: literary exchanges in locative media.

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 is currently available for Android (search for "textopia" in Market) and for Nokias S60 3.1 GPS phones (e.g. N95, 6110 Navigator, E65). The Nokia version can be downloaded and installed by directing the phone's browser to textopia.org/m.

The project is scheduled to be finished in November 2010.

Academic publications:

Book:

The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America's Army, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Available from amazon.com. This book publication is based on the manuscript of my master thesis, which is available online. For the short version, see the conference paper with the same title below.

Book chapters and journal papers:

"Spatial Realism as Game Rhetoric" (forthcoming). In M. Bittanti, H. Lowood, & B. de Varco (Eds.), Ludic Cartography: Mapping Gamespaces. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Textopia: designing a locative literary reader (2009). Journal of Location Based Services, 3(4), 249-276.

Conference papers:

"Poetic Augmented Reality: Place-bound Literature In Locative Media" (2009). In 13th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (pp. 19-28). Presented at the MindTrek conference, Tampere, Finland: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

© ACM, (2009). This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era, (2009) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1621841.1621847

"textopia: A geo-literary browser" (2009). In Engaging Artifacts. Presented at the Nordic Design Research Conference.

"The Rhetoric of Persuasive Games: Freedom and Discipline in America's Army". In Conference Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, DIGAREC Series (Vol. 1, pp. 70-91). Presented at the The Philosophy of Computer Games 2008, Potsdam, Germany: Potsdam University Press.

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

Other publications:

The rhetoric of persuasive games: Freedom and discipline in America's Army (2007) Poster presented at the DiGRA Conference 2007: Situated Play, University of Tokyo.

Grants:

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

The Research Council of Norway: Three year PhD grant 2007-2010 (via the VERDIKT programme).

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).

Original project outline (doc, in Norwegian).

My employee page at the University of Oslo