The Immersive Worlds Project: A Digital Anthology from the New Literacies, Technologies, and Cultures of Writing Classes at Valparaiso University Main Menu

About the Anthology

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Spring 2022.  In these pages, members of the New Literacies, Technologies, and Cultures of Writing classes at Valparaiso University present sections of eight works of speculative fiction annotated in TEI, the Digital Humanities standard for "future-proof" archival editions.  Each selection presents contextual information as well while linking to some of the rich scholarly and fan resources surrounding each novel. 

Our project began in fall 2017. As our work has followed two close presidential elections, the covid-19 pandemic, and the racial injustice that has come to renewed attention following the murder of George Floyd, we find the questions that these novels explore to be highly relevant. These fictions invite us to question entrenched racism, disinformation, fractured democracies, ecological collapse, and the digital media itself on which our education, workplaces, leisure, and social interaction is based.

Our pages present information in Scalar, an open-source digital environment that is designed for long-form educational projects. From those pages, we link to portions of the novels that we have encoded in xml. 

We are grateful for the support and wisdom of Valparaiso University's Professor Timothy Tomasik in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and Professor Nick Rosasco in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences. We are grateful as well to the hosts of the Scalar environment at the University of Southern California and the creators of Boilerplate at the University of Indiana for making the immersive worlds of content management systems and TEI more manageable.

We hope that you enjoy these selections and the "taste" that they sample of these most immersive novels.

Elizabeth Burow-Flak
Department of English, Valparaiso University
On behalf of Fall 2017, Fall 2019, and Spring and Fall 2020, and Spring 2022 sections of New Literacies, Technologies, and Cultures of Writing

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