Publishers Weekly: Words Without Borders Reboots. “The nonprofit organization Words Without Borders launched in 2003 to aid in publishing works from countries and cultures underrepresented in English-first language regions. WWB now has an archive of 12,000 published pieces across 140 countries and 130 languages. Though their mission has not changed, there are several new developments planned to expand the literary conversation.”
EurekAlert: Exploring how storytelling tropes cluster in popular films. “An analysis of film tropes–common storytelling elements seen in different movies–explores combinations of tropes that tend to co-occur in films, identifying patterns that could help inform development of new movies. Pablo García-Sánchez and Juan Merelo of the University of Granada, and Antonio Velez-Estevez and Manuel Cobo from the University of Cádiz, Spain present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 31, 2021.”
Gippsland Times: Telling the stories of our history. “AN online platform has been launched to share stories from Victorian Traditional Owners and Aboriginal people – including a story a local massacre. As negotiations get underway for Australia’s first treaty, the new website, Deadly and Proud, features Aboriginal storytellers from across the state sharing their stories of pride in Aboriginal culture, resilience, community and the historic path to treaty and truth-telling.”
EurekAlert: Storytelling can reduce VR cybersickness. “A storyline with emotionally evocative details can reduce virtual reality cybersickness for some people, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Waterloo found that storylines that provide context and details can help users feel immersed in VR experiences and can reduce feelings of nausea, disorientation and eye strain, depending on a user’s gaming experience.”
BoingBoing: Get 35 free audio books from Tor’s new horror imprint. “Renowned sci-fi and fantasy publisher Tor just launched a new book imprint called Nightfire, focusing on new horror fiction. And to celebrate, they’re giving away 35 free short horror stories as audiobooks. The list includes stories by Alyssa Wong, Chuck Wendig, China Miéville, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.”
Duke Research Blog: Hamlet is Everywhere. To Cite, or Not to Cite?. “Some stories are too good to forget. With almost formulaic accuracy, elements from classic narratives are constantly being reused and retained in our cultural consciousness, to the extent that a room of people who’ve never read Romeo and Juliet could probably still piece out its major plot points. But when stories are so pervasive, how can we tell what’s original and what’s Shakespeare with a facelift? This summer, three Duke undergraduate students in the Data+ summer research program built a computer program to find reused stories.”
Engadget: New York Public Library turns classic novels into Insta Stories. “The New York Public Library is using Instagram’s Stories feature to make classic novels more accessible and enticing to read, especially to the younger generation. It has teamed up with ad agency Mother in New York to create ‘Insta Novels,’ which turns classic pieces of literature into animated digital novels illustrated by various visual artists. “
MakeUseOf: Amazon’s Storytelling App for Kids Goes Free . “Amazon Rapids is a storytelling app from, you guessed it, Amazon. It was originally launched in 2016 as a way of encouraging children to read, with the stories presented as text message conversations between the various characters.”
MakeUseOf: The 10 Best Sites for Reading Free Children’s Books and Stories Online. “Hollywood and Disney may be coloring TV and the movies. But thanks to interactive websites with free children’s book and stories, the charm of princely tales and brave knights continues to endure. For kids, children stories are the window to the outside world. Stories continue to make kids dream of great adventures, heroic princes, and beautiful princesses. And, a bit about ogres and monsters that heroes must battle to keep the world safe. Try these ten websites with online stories for kids with your children by your side.”
Library of Congress: Linking chatbots to collections for place-based storytelling. “The following is a guest post from Library of Congress Labs Innovation Intern, Charlie Moffett. In the course of crafting data-driven narratives with digital collections, he created @govislandbot and an open-source mapping tutorial. Below he shares his processes, some of the challenges he encountered, along with the code.”
Interesting Engineering: This Short Story Vending Machine Brings Literature to Unexpected Places. “…for those of you who crave for reading, the Short Story Dispenser from Short Edition can save you. The story vending machine essentially allows you to spend at least some time reading. The machine doesn’t spit out books or send the stories to your smartphone or Kindle. But with the push of a button, you get a short story printed on a long strip of paper that’s similar to grocery receipts.”
Quartz: MIT researchers trained AI to write horror stories based on 140,000 Reddit posts. “Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Or Reddit at night. Shelley is an AI program that generates the beginnings of horror stories, and it’s trained by original horror fiction posted to Reddit. Designed by researchers from MIT Media Lab, Shelley launched on Twitter on Oct. 21.”
TechCrunch: Stories are the new News Feed . “If the camera is the new keyboard, then the future of social media will look more like a slideshow than a Word document. So while Snapchat invented Stories, we’ll have to get used to using them everywhere. We can still praise Snapchat, or be pissed at Facebook for changing the apps we use every day, but we have to accept that this our reality now.”
Quartz: Storytellers make the most influential scientific researchers. “The vast majority of climate science research published goes unnoticed and is rarely if ever cited, leaving gaps in our shared knowledge. But researchers who tell a good tale, using narrative elements rather than expository writing, prove an exception to this rule and are more influential as a result, according to a study led by ecologist and lawyer Ryan Kelley of the University of Washington College of the Environment, published on Dec. 15 in Plos One.”
Fimfiction has updated its downloadable archive, which currently has over 124,000 stories. It’s available as a 3.7 GB Torrent. FimFiction is a site devoted to fan fiction about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
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