[csaa-forum] cfp: LiNQ- The Digital and the Local

[Andrew Hickey]

Call for Papers: LiNQ Themed Issue: The Digital and the Local

In the last twenty-five years, technology has made an enormous impact on the way we communicate, often with largely unforeseen consequences. From the perspective of its impact on narrative communication, digital technology has begun to augment, alter, and introduce new practices of producing, sharing and reading and analysing texts. David M Berry (2011, 12) argues that ‘computer code enables new communicative processes, and with the increasing social dimension of networked media the possibility of new and exciting forms of collaborative thinking arises.’

In this issue, themed at the intersection between the digital and the local, we ask–What does this mean for the representation of regional culture? Are producers on the margins of vibrant metropolitan cultures able to be networked into these places, or are the big cities of our world increasingly concentrated into a few networked hubs that still leave artists, storytellers, and the places that nurture and sustain them in far-flung places as cultural vagabonds on the outer or periphery of “where it’s at”?

Certainly, digital tools are having an impact on texts in various ways. Some digital tools allow for immersive, interactive, game-like experiences, while others augment real-world spaces. Digital tools foster collaborative, audience-driven, and social approaches to producing and making sense of texts (Berry 2011; Bartscherer and Coover 2011). Digital tools allow texts to be published, annotated and hyperlinked in new ways, and bring to light archival texts previously unavailable or difficult to source. Digital tools are also transforming the way research data is visualised (Wankel and Carter 2013), in the manner often mediating research. However, questions of access, marginalization (Page and Thomas 2015), digital mediation, data commodification, and the diminishing gap between public and private plague the generative possibilities of digital tools.


This year, our annual themed issue of LiNQ, a 45 year-old peer reviewed literary and creative writing journal associated with the Department of English at James Cook University Australia, is called The Digital and the Local. For this December 2015 issue, we invite explorations of the possibilities and potentials of texts in a digital realm, and as a regional journal, we are particularly interested in questions of the local. We call for academic articles and creative submissions (fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and poems) that could address but are not limited to:

-Locative literature and the digital environment,
-Regional producers and consumers of literature in regional locales as researched through or connected by digital technology,
-Questions of the human in the digital environment,
-Questions of the real in the digital environment,
-Ethical questions and the production and consumption of digital texts,
-Identity construction and digital tools,
-The nature of, and interaction between, real, virtual and symbolic spaces,
-Audience-driven texts such as fan-fiction and mash-ups
-Collaborative text production activities,
-Social reading and writing of texts using digital tools,
-Transmedia and multimedia storytelling,
-Digital publishing practices,
-The impact of digital tools on the construction of texts,
-The production of multimodal texts
-Interdisciplinary understandings of digital texts,
-The changing nature of academic writing, research methods and notions of the university as a result of digital technology,
-The nature of teaching text production and composition using digital tools
-The impact and ethics of digitising archival materials, oral narratives, images, objects and other texts previously unavailable or difficult to access
-Innovative digital methods for analysing, interpreting and visualising textual data.

This year, LiNQ is moving fully to a digital platform. This shift means new possibilities in publishing digital writing and for creative writing submissions; we welcome work of this kind provided it is presented in a format that does not require additional input from editors. For example, provide editors with a link to an already-constructed website, or multimedia outputs hosted elsewhere.

Submissions should be no longer than 6000 words. Include a brief abstract of the article or creative submission (no more than 75 words) and a 50-word biographical note. Book reviews of no longer than 1000 words are also welcome.

Follow MLA citation style and format. All contributions should be submitted as a Microsoft Word file, double-spaced 12pt font. All images used must be with permission only.

Suitable papers will be double-blind peer reviewed.

Hard-copy submissions are not accepted and will not be returned.

See our submission instructions at
http://www.linqjournal.com/contribute/<https://3c-lxa.mail.com/mail/client/dereferrer?redirectUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linqjournal.com%2Fcontribute%2F>

Submissions close July 31, 2015 for our December 2015 issue.


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