Extending Digital Narrative
The objective of this research is to explore the narrative potential of emerging technologies to understand how they will shape future storytelling genres.
Main content
The rapid pace of technological development enables innovative digital narrative and storytelling methods, presenting both opportunities and challenges to society.
The Extending Digital Narrative, or XDN, is a research project and its corresponding node at CDN that explores the potential of emerging technologies that also present us with new environments for storytelling. These include large language model AI systems, virtual and augmented reality, conversational interfaces, and other platforms yet to come.
Although these three modes of digital narrative are distinct, they are already intersecting in compelling ways. The use of AI for example is a thread that now runs through all of these forms of emerging narrative: when we speak and converse with a smart speaker we are engaging and transacting with an AI system, and many next-generation immersive narratives feature interactions with responsive dialogue engines.
Researchers in this node will document and analyze key works in these emerging genres, develop creative experimental works that test their affordances and constraints, and study their impacts on audiences, both to understand the present, and the future of narrative in digital environments.
