Welcome to the online conference site of Story Seekers, an intervention for the future of Indigenous literature and digital media in Canada.
Our course has enabled and encouraged students to engage critically with Canadian literature and story-telling while studying the historical and contemporary cultural institutions and processes that have shaped Canadian literary studies. Under the guidance of our professor, we have developed the skills to look beyond Eurocentric perspectives and belief systems and explore different modes of story-telling and knowledge systems. Reading the works of Harry Robinson, Thomas King, Susanna Moodie, and Northrop Frye, we have learned how to read both Indigenous and settler-colonial texts through a critical lens.
With this as the foundation of our research, we now come together as a group and a class to contribute to an existing intervention into the future of the Canadian canon.
Our online conference is dedicated to evaluating the effect of technology, particularly digital media, on the circulation of stories. As a team, we are keen to find out how digital media democratizes access to literature – oral and textual– and preserve it for the future. Further, we will explore the possibilities and threats that are associated with advances in technology and media, especially in regard to sharing stories in different mediums and empowering groups that are repeatedly marginalized by dominant settler culture. We are inspired by Larissa Lai’s intervention, “Digital Space: Electronic Circulation, Cultural Commons, and Intellectual Labour,” from Canadian Literature which highlights the structure and circulation of journals in the digital space.
Larissa Lai’s “Digital Space” primarily focuses on the circulation of academic literature, but encourages readers to question how her ideas might be taken further to apply to other forms of story-telling and knowledge-sharing. Lai is both excited by the future of digital media, and critical of whether its aims at inclusivity can ever be realized. Our team shares this excitement and apprehension. For, even while media unites more individuals and diverse communities than ever before, today’s social media and mainstream news outlets repeatedly prioritize popular and powerful voices at the expense of disempowered communities. Throughout history, we have seen the stories of the dominant culture granted superiority over others, and this continues even as more communities are granted access to media and sources of knowledge. What is the role of digital media in providing a voice to the stories that haven’t been heard and creating a richer, more inclusive online space?
Our research focus, as sparked by Lai’s intervention, is on the advantages and disadvantages of digital media in our time and in the future. How can the “possibilities of digital reproduction and circulation” create a more equitable and just future, where all stories are heard and welcome?
This image is from the video game Qalupalik, which shares traditional Inuit legends through the virtual format of a video game. The dialogue in the game is all in Inuktitut, with English subtitles. In this way, a virtual medium is sharing different cultures, languages and stories with audiences that otherwise would not have been exposed to Inuit mythology.
The above video is a TEDx Talk delivered by Giovanna Di Rosario, a researcher from the University of Barcelona with a PhD in Digital Culture. She asks the challenging question: “What happens to literature in the digital world?” Digital Literature is introduced as literature that mixes text (linguistics), images, and sound, that is interactive, where words and letters can even move and where the machine can create. Our group seeks to take digital literature further: How can digital literature lead to an increase in knowledge sharing across cultural divides and lead to a more equitable future in the Canadian and global literature canon?
Works Cited
“Indigenous Video Games Offer up Exciting New Quests | CBC News.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 9 Apr. 2016, www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-video-games-you-should-download-1.3525101.
Lai, Larissa. “Journals in Digital Space: Electronic Circulation, Cultural Commons, and Intellectual Labour.” Canadian Literature, pp. 137-140.
Murphy, David. “Nunavut’s Pinnguaq Game Designers Aim for Mass Market Appeal.” Nunatsiaq News, 30 Sept. 2013, nunatsiaq.com/stories/article/65674nunavuts_pinnguaq_game_designers_aim_for_mass_market_appeal/.
TEDx Talks. “Are pixels the future of literature?” Youtube. 18 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CAaoWcknvM&t=6s&fbclid=IwAR1cC7cr_8Yt6P17sViajNopx9A_q5gd0W0dLcsh-_zPzvgsoMV6bw3v9Gk.