DFIN

April 23, 2010
Stacey Mason

The Digital Fiction International Network is a group of scholars dedicated to more consistent approach to the study of of digital research. The group hopes define digital research on terms that are “accessible to the wider research community (e.g. stylistics, narratology, literary theory, media studies).”

Chief Investigator Alice Bell writes,

The co-investigator, Astrid Ensslin, and myself noted that the study of digital fiction had undergone a significant paradigm shift from a 'first-wave' of theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of stylistic, narratological and semiotic analysis. While there was some important work going on across the world, we felt that there was a need to draw people together. Principally, therefore, we wanted to foster a collaborative international network of academics working on similar projects. Secondly, we had a methodological motivation. We wanted to define an area in digital fiction research which was devoted to methodological transparency. Each member of the DFIN takes a slightly different approach to digital fiction, but we all analyse digital fiction using a transparent and replicable methodology.

Members of the DFIN have recently published a manifesto in the Electronic Book Review, though they are reluctant to call it that:

A manifesto is political; a mission statement is corporate. We deleted these concepts from our discussion. We were not etching a scroll of aesthetic edicts for the digital ages. We were not carving a credo in the sense of monologic truth or certainty, of liberation, of democratization, of salvation, of renewal. […]
What emerged was a creed for the screen. In a word, a [s]creed.

Their [s]creed addresses their approach to research and analysis, promising a “body of exemplary analyses of digital fiction.”

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