2023 Robert Coover Prize – English

“This award is a real honor,” noted Tshofen, “The award's namesake was Robert Coover, a pioneering postmodernist short story writer and short story writer whose works were adapted for film and worked with such notables as Art Spiegelman. . His public essays on literary hypertext are seminal in the field, and he has guided some of the most important electronic writers of this generation.” “This puts us among the luminaries of e-literature who have shown the world how digital mediums can challenge and expand literary print cultures,” added Maaren.

Decameron 2.0 is an interactive digital storyworld created in WebGL, in dialogue with Giovanni Boccaccio's medieval frame narrative of the Great Plague in Florence (1353). Boccaccio's “Decameron” offered literature a model of combining heterogeneous events within a single frame narrative. In the book, ten storytellers retreat from a plague-ridden city to walled gardens to entertain and amuse each other, each telling a story to the group for ten days. This work of literature stood out from earlier and later literary works because it featured strong, complex female storytellers. “It seemed logical because the world shut down in March 2020 and these nine women started meeting on Zoom, telling each other stories so that we could go back to this original text and really think about it,” says Tshofen.

The explorable space of the online gallery Decameron 2.0 features hundreds of short, poetic collaborative sound, text, still image and film works that offer a living archive of women's lives during the disaster. Motherhood, sisterhood and friendship are constant themes. Many of the works in Decameron 2.0 work like palimpsests, layering archival values ​​from the ancient and medieval manuscript tradition with contemporary photographs and films to draw a continuum between then and now.

The Decameron team understands this work as Creating Research – a research method that has been recognized by the SSHRC for more than a decade and is the foundation of one of the three majors of Toronto Metropolitan University's and York University's joint Masters in Communication and Communications. Cultural program. Research design methods experiment with new ways of answering critical research questions. TMU student-led SORCE collective (external link) and the TSU Library Partnership are just two of the university's many important fields of research.

“I've taught and published about research design and digital humanities methods for more than two decades, and I've supervised many groundbreaking doctoral theses and master's projects using design research methods,” said Tshofen, “but I've always been an outsider. It was very generative for a group of very talented storytellers to first create and then theorize our creation through appropriate disciplinary approaches. We have exhibited this work four times internationally, including in Portugal, Japan, Toronto and Calgary. The work has led to the development of workshop methods that have been successfully delivered to international audiences of feminist philosophers, electronic literature scholars, and digital humanities scholars. We have several published and forthcoming academic articles on the work that demonstrate its multimodal intertextuality, such as placing it in relation to marginalia and the palimpsest in the medieval manuscript tradition, and we have contextualized the work in relation to modern times. the practice of autoethnography as well as a feminist ethics of care”.

Collaborating on digital platforms has allowed Kari Maaren, a literary medievalist, writer, composer and musician, and comic book artist, to combine her storytelling and musical interests. Maaren wrote a series of musical improvisations about the fallout of the pandemic. Colleagues in the group offered visual and cinematic editing of the works. These musical pieces acted to bring together the individual galleries of the story world of Decameron 2.0. Interested in musical storytelling, Maaren also influences how the perspectives of collaborators who respond to her music add new layers to stories and sometimes branch out in unexpected directions. From his thoughts on the relationship between music and literature, a new group of works was opened. He has a musical work, a literary adaptation of Beowulf, on display at the Literary Places exhibition at the Museum of Tartu, Estonia (March – May 2024) and has begun work on a musical response to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Decameron 2.0 coding was supported by a research grant from TMU's Faculty of Arts, as well as grants from Athabasca University and SSHRC IDG Digital Imaginations and Decameron Storyworld (DIDS) grants to Monique Tshofen and Jolene Armstrong (Athabaska University). For Tshofen, support from TMU's Center for Digital Humanities was critical to the success of the work. “When we started, I had never used digital tools more sophisticated than a word processor,” notes Tshofen. “Now, non-linear digital writing and publishing platforms like Adobe Suite, Markov generators, Twine and Scalar, as well as archival platforms like Omeka, have become an integral part of my approach to scientific writing.” Center Director Dr. Jason Boyd and Reg Beatty's monthly workshops, part of a national network of DH workshops, provide hands-on opportunities to learn new tools. Working at DH has other benefits, Tshofen notes: “By playing with these tools and thinking and learning about other people's work with them, I became a good reader of ancient, medieval, and literary modernist writers who took a similar approach to the new vaults. They are curious about the media around them and what new ways of thinking they can open up.”

When asked about the practical difficulties of working within modes of research creation, Tshofen points out that current citation practices are anti-feminist collaborations: “Our habit is to name first authors and so on. take renders the work of partners invisible, which goes against the ethical principles that guide our work and the deeply collaborative and co-creative nature of our feminist practice.”

Another challenge, Tshofen notes, is getting humanities scholars, who are used to seeing the academic book and academic journal article as the only measure of meritorious work, to understand and appreciate the importance of critical opportunities, despite the SSHRC's support for research creation. Creating research is not easy. “This kind of work of thought-provoking material is a whole unlike traditional scholarly writing,” Tshofen noted: “Decameron 2.0 is creative electronic storytelling, and it's so much more. The work is closely related to the fields of knowledge, from the history of literature and books to the history of art and philosophy; its design critically models open and interactive modes of inquiry long championed by platform and game studies, interactive documentaries, and museology; and conceptually it is deeply informed by ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as posthumanism and speculative feminisms. How it was made, how it was designed and how it was placed, and what it says are part of the understanding for other scholars.”

Maaren and Tshofen appreciate that TMU's unique triple designation of research as an SRC – Scholarly Research and Creative Activity – maintains an open space for innovative and interdisciplinary work.