Narrative and Technology: Curtis Wong and Geoffrey Rockwell in Conversation
754 views · Published 16 March 2012 · 1:19:10 · Indexed 12 November 2026
Channel: Trinity College Dublin · 2012 · Education
Narrative has always been shaped by technology, from the beginnings of written traditions through the newspaper serial and the rise of cinema. Modern information and communication technologies have also changed our expectations about narrative, privileging the non-linear, hypertextual, exploratory and the visual. No longer bound by the conventions of print or film, narrative in the digital age is multi-modal and multivalent. Geoffrey Rockwell (Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada) and Curtis Wong (Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research) will be exploring the impact of new modes of storytelling, from serious gaming to text-message novels, on modes of learning and teaching, on the creation of web resources, and on our expectations of older media. Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. From 1994 to 2008 he was at McMaster University where he was the Director of the Humanities Media and Computing Centre (1994 - 2004) and he led the development of an undergraduate Multimedia program. He has published and presented papers in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia including a book, Defining Dialogue: From Socrates to the Internet. He is currently the Director of the Canadian Institute for Research in Computing and the Arts and a network investigator in the GRAND Network of Centres of Excellence that is studying gaming, animation and new media. Curtis Wong is a Principal Researcher in eScience at Microsoft Research. Curtis is the co-creator of the WorldWide Telescope, an interactive virtual learning environment with the highest resolution multispectral imagery of the universe. He collaborated with Bill Gates to create Project Tuva, featuring the lectures of Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in an interactive, richly annotated hypermedia player for just in time learning. Curtis's work has been recognized with a British Academy Award for Online Learning, Emmy nominations and twice selected by Time Magazine for the "Best of the Web" and many other industry awards. Dr Patrick Geoghegan is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in History at Trinity College Dublin and an expert on the Anglo-Irish relationship in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Committed to all aspects of outreach and engagement with society, he also presents the award-winning weekly history programme, Talking History, on Newstalk radio. www.tcd.ie/longroomhub hermeneuti.ca
