Interactive Storytelling, Narrative and New Media

Design and Communication

An undergraduate degree in fine arts from
Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec started me off
on a successful career in design and communication.
I worked first as a graphic designer and then as a corporate communications planner in Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary. In the mid 1980's, together with Jim Budd, I established one of the first industrial design and communications company in western Canada to use computer technologies for the design and production of products, exhibits, and graphics. We worked with business and industry, government, and non-profit organizations, among them, the Alberta Microelectronic Center (AMC), Alberta Tourism, the Glenbow Museum, ITT Barton and Telus, to develop
corporate brand programs, products, and major exhibits.

Academia

In 1999, I returned to graduate school to complete a
Masters of Arts of Professional Writing (MAPW) at Kennesaw State University in Acworth, Georgia. Though I was primarily interested in print narrative for children, the digital world of games beckoned (and engulfed me) and since then I've been conducting research in how narrative and communication media work together and are part of the enculturation process. At KSU I conducted research with children, with authors, and with libraries and publishers, and established an ePublishing conference that targeted these three groups. I completed my degree April 2001, then moved to Vancouver, Canada, where I continued my research work at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University. I completed my PhD dissertation on Digital Narrative on December 23, 2007.

Academic Research

My main academic research interest is how story, imagery and interface engage and immerse children and adolescents in narrative environments and help them make meaning through the process of enculturation. I look to historical developments in narrative, in children's print narrative, and in digital narrative to identify patterns of development and similarities and differences between print and digital; this historical approach provides a new perspective of narrative's evolution in new media and shows, among other things, that "traditional" narrative structure is in fact quite a new development, and that tangible interactivity is not the sole prerogative of digital environments. Other research interests include visual language and the rhetorical process of writing for the web, and technology, media, and cultural policy as it affects access to and interpretation of culture. I have spoken at conferences on the evolution of narrative, the author-audience dialogue, immersive and engaging narrative environments, and the process of making meaning through narrative, as well as on other topics of interest such as literacy in the 17 and 1800s, and the transmedia world of Disney stories.