Call for video submissions: The Mediated Text
Deadline: 28 February 2019

image credit to True Color Lab

Digitally-assisted ways of reading texts have brought the relationship between book and reader under new scrutiny. E-books, for example, give readers a hitherto unknown level of control over the appearance of their texts, while the rise of the digital audiobook places an external agent – the narrator – between the page and its interpreter. These phenomena make clear what is always true, though often hidden: our interactions with texts have never been a pure, unadulterated coupling of narrative and narratee but are always affected by numerous external factors.

On Friday, 5 April 2019, Loughborough University Textual Futures will host ‘The Mediated Text’ symposium at its London campus. We will be joined by members of the BBC’s Research and Development team, publishers, and academics including Professors Martin Eve and Matthew Rubery to explore how the act of reading has always been, is currently, and may in the future be a mediated experience.

As part of the symposium, we wish to showcase research that engages with these enquiries via a video loop. Videos could present relevant projects in a similar way to a traditional conference poster, demonstrate models and machines that facilitate new engagements with texts, or interrogate readers’ interactions with texts. For our purposes, ‘text’ is broadly defined to include all artistic outputs. Please note that your video should make sense without audio.

If you would like your research to be screened in our loop, please send a weblink or initiate a file transfer for your video to Leah Henrickson (L.R.Henrickson@lboro.ac.uk) by Thursday, 28 February 2019. Please include all bibliographic information and a brief biography with your submission. If you would like to join us for the symposium, the registration fee will be £35 to include lunch and other refreshments throughout the day.

Please note that videos should be MP4/H264 files, with aspect ratios of 16:9 and minimum resolutions of 720p. Videos should be no longer than 10 minutes.