Siobhan O'Flynn
Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn, Digital Humanitist, Canadian Studies Specialization, Digital Media, Interactive Storytelling, Experiental Strategist.
Dr. O'Flynn consults on digital/interactive/participatory/transmedia storytelling via her company NarrativeNow, is the co-creator of the online site, TMCResourceKit.com, & co-founder of Transmedia 101, a community building & education initiative for Canadian producers moving into the digital sphere.
She is currently completing Mapping Digital Narrativity: Theory, Design, Practice for Routledge. This future-forward work considers cross-disciplinary research practices for an evolving media ecology that no longer works in discrete disciplines. Through case studies, this work examines the limits, overlaps, and new directions for analysizing interactive works drawing on post-classical narratology, game studies, game theory, performance studies, experience design, and innovative transmedia practices in the indie and industry spheres.
She is a Senior Lecturer, Canadian Studies, University College, University of Toronto and Faculty since 2001 with the CFC Media Lab. Her academic research and artistic practice in the digital humanities examines: the function, design, & experience of narrative in interactive environments; foresighting emergent trends in digital storytelling & entertainment in a Web 2.0/3.0 world; and the social benefit of interactive art for urban planning, social and cultural capital in the context of arts festivals such as Toronto’s Luminato & Nuit Blanche. Her courses in the digital humanities give students the opportunity to critically reflect on the impact of digital tools and new research methods, quantitative analysis to game theory.
In 2015, Dr. O'Flynn was the transmedia consultant on a soon to be launched NFB interactive web documentary. Title TBA.
SSHRC Insight Development Grant recipient with partner, Faisal Anwar, for Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics in 2011-2013, developing new research methodologies tracking the impact of social media sharing via innovative data visualizations.
In 2006/07 Dr O’Flynn was the narrative design consultant on Late Fragment, a (CFC/NFB) feature film that screened at Cannes as part of the Future of Cinema Salon. She has published numerous articles, given keynotes,workshops, & masterclasses around the globe on topics ranging from transmedia & crossmedia development & design, interactive/web documentaries, & disruptive innovations in Web 2.0 world. Dr. O’Flynn has presented at MIT, StoryWorld SF, the NFB French Program, the CBC & the Screen Edge Forum, Auckland New Zealand.
Dr. O'Flynn consults on digital/interactive/participatory/transmedia storytelling via her company NarrativeNow, is the co-creator of the online site, TMCResourceKit.com, & co-founder of Transmedia 101, a community building & education initiative for Canadian producers moving into the digital sphere.
She is currently completing Mapping Digital Narrativity: Theory, Design, Practice for Routledge. This future-forward work considers cross-disciplinary research practices for an evolving media ecology that no longer works in discrete disciplines. Through case studies, this work examines the limits, overlaps, and new directions for analysizing interactive works drawing on post-classical narratology, game studies, game theory, performance studies, experience design, and innovative transmedia practices in the indie and industry spheres.
She is a Senior Lecturer, Canadian Studies, University College, University of Toronto and Faculty since 2001 with the CFC Media Lab. Her academic research and artistic practice in the digital humanities examines: the function, design, & experience of narrative in interactive environments; foresighting emergent trends in digital storytelling & entertainment in a Web 2.0/3.0 world; and the social benefit of interactive art for urban planning, social and cultural capital in the context of arts festivals such as Toronto’s Luminato & Nuit Blanche. Her courses in the digital humanities give students the opportunity to critically reflect on the impact of digital tools and new research methods, quantitative analysis to game theory.
In 2015, Dr. O'Flynn was the transmedia consultant on a soon to be launched NFB interactive web documentary. Title TBA.
SSHRC Insight Development Grant recipient with partner, Faisal Anwar, for Nuit Blanche and Transformational Publics in 2011-2013, developing new research methodologies tracking the impact of social media sharing via innovative data visualizations.
In 2006/07 Dr O’Flynn was the narrative design consultant on Late Fragment, a (CFC/NFB) feature film that screened at Cannes as part of the Future of Cinema Salon. She has published numerous articles, given keynotes,workshops, & masterclasses around the globe on topics ranging from transmedia & crossmedia development & design, interactive/web documentaries, & disruptive innovations in Web 2.0 world. Dr. O’Flynn has presented at MIT, StoryWorld SF, the NFB French Program, the CBC & the Screen Edge Forum, Auckland New Zealand.
less
InterestsView All (20)
Uploads
Books by Siobhan O'Flynn
Papers by Siobhan O'Flynn
Source: Studies in Documentary Film, Volume 6, Number 2, June 2012, pp. 141-157(17)
As industry practices in film and TV evolve, narrative properties as IPs are now often designed to foster emergent narratives, game experiences, and fan-created content that use semiotic cues to invite fans to complete, extend and/or adapt existing material. This paper examines the theoretical challenges for narrative studies when the object of study is designed as a system and/or environment meant to encourage story creation by reader/viewer/fans. Drawing on recent arguments on scenario simulation in game theory (J. Simons), production, consumption, and agency in transmedia and fan studies (H. Jenkins; O’Flynn; A. McKellan), and the insights and processes core to user experience design (IDEO), this paper develops a methodology for critically assessing narrative strategies in two large-scale interactive projects Zed.TO (The Mission Business) and Reality Ends Here (J. Watson). Zed.TO employed a complex, serial narrative structure as a prompt to participatory interaction staged through live events and supporting content distributed across digital platforms. Reality Ends Here invites players to engage in team-based creation of media artifacts utilizing a system of narrative prompts. Both works leverage cognitive frames/schemata, elements of game design and what Roland Barthes termed the five codes (hermeneutic, proairtic, semantic, symbolic and cultural), to invite and immerse fans in staged, participatory performances that figure the reader/player(s) as multiple points of focalization in a shared, fluid narrative experience.
use and the question and often, point of access. As a series of ongoing, interrelated projects, the design of our research inquiries and installations have had to work within Twitter’s changing API
and +City’s hashtag archiving and analytical tools foreground the unstable status of digital content as both public and private. Hashtags, however, signal the tweeter’s deliberate intention to
communicate with a network and community of individuals known/unknown, and, as such, hashtags affirm public engagement.+City’s data visualization tools function as interfaces letting us manipulate and analyze this hashtag data in real time and in archived data sets.
Some of the questions we (and many others) are now asking are: Are there limits in new social art forms when content is pulled from the digital public realm, as Twitter users often list personal details (location, occupation, etc) on their public pages & post profiles pics? What is/should be the borderline between the public and private digital spheres? What are the implications of data mining and the commercialization of digital content in the era of big data, given that public tweets have a brief and unreliable window of search and recovery? Tweets exist as ephemeral traces of digital and in-world interactions, unless one chooses to pay social media monitoring systems such as Sysomos or Radian6, which make data proprietary. And, as Tim O’Reilly* has flagged, what new insights will we have when data visualizations function as interfaces rather than reports?
This article examines the evolution of interactive, cross-platform and transmedia documentaries within the context of the earlier model of database narratives and the impact of Web 2.0 technologies. Specific documentary projects illustrate how the interactivity supported by online platforms has influenced the aesthetics of form and altered conventional models of production and distribution.
KEYWORDS: Nuit Blanche, ourtopia, participatory art, psychogeography, social media, hybrid city"
Narratives have historically been the way in which communities identify themselves. With the advent of mobile technologies, the potential to create hybrid narrative spaces has emerged, altering not only the way that human beings tell stories, but changing the way in which these stories are authored, distributed and experienced. Mobile technology affords the potential to re-see and re-imagine the landscape, to augment the space around us with new meanings and narrative possibilities. “Personal stories and intimate memories are [reshaped] in the form of mobile narratives that acknowledge aspects of our history whilst exploring the creative potential of the mobile phone.”
In 2000, as part of the View from the Balcony installation created by Hana Iverson on the Lower east Side of New York City, a story-sharing system was developed that would facilitate connecting that immigrant neighborhood back to its European roots in Poland, Hungary, Italy, Ireland and beyond. Projects like this, which required networked kiosks, institutional partnerships and substantial funding, were soon made light-weight and possible by the adaptation of cell phone technology. [murmur] Toronto, Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row (Philadelphia), Proboscis in the U.K, and the Slavery in New York exhibition, sponsored by the Historical Society of the city – to name a few - were working on using the cell phone and other mobile media to mine the stories of place, authored by and distributed to the community. These projects use the method of “re-storying”, whereby people inscribe personal histories into official or un/misrecognized spaces in order to position themselves, over time, in the culture and history of place. In the complexity of the contemporary world, where the border between public and private, physical and mediated, place and non-place are in constant flux, mobile situated story-telling restores essential links between a person, place and community.
In this chapter, four projects will be discussed in order to address the socio-cultural, historical and narrative frameworks that form the basis for specific situated narrative practices. Mobile story-telling is creating new forms of physical and virtual communities, and new interactive methods for reading and writing the city.
Cross/Walks: Weaving Fabric Row, a collaborative Philadelphia art project, the Proboscis initiative – primarily its experimental Social Tapestries platform, and David McInTosh’s Qosqo Llika, a multi-media documentary in Cusco, Peru, will be evaluated for their content contextualization and collaborative, participatory systems. Some of these projects engage with social activism and all of them apply idiosyncratic narrative structures in response to the specific histories of living and past communities as embedded in or recovered from geographic place. Their impact will be measured by their ability to create a locative platform that provides a deeper understanding of place and connection to its inhabitants.
Many of these projects have a crossmedia or transmedia component calling attention to the affordances and limitations of different narrative media. For narratives located in place, the discursive exchange with the environment [is what] constitutes the artwork's intended meaning [and] which is irrevocably lost if it is re-contextualized. These projects pose questions about the ways technologically situated narratives are intended to be bound to place and yet they interplay with the complex technological systems through with they filter in order to be experienced. Different communities have differing attitudes towards co-operation and participation in technologically mediated experience as evident in these projects’ varying case histories, adding new insights into everyday participation in interactive mobile systems.
"

In 2009, one time film producer and now digital strategist Thomas Mai called for the recognition of the end of the independent film era and the shift to a ‘fandependent’ entertainment industry. The rise in networked communication, digital and mobile devices, and participatory strategies in content creation, development, funding and distribution, and the affordances of the web and digital media have changed how content across media is created and consumed. This paper will assess the implications of current trends in terms of the disruptive innovations likely to radically alter a global media landscape in the coming year, with a particular focus on new practices impacted by social media in the increasingly hybrid sphere of film, television and gaming."
Paper is now available here: http://lisa.revues.org/5703
Further, this unique aspect of digital media continues to foster new emergent forms of adaptation, many of which are now leveraging Web 2.0 social networks and user-generated content such that an audience can collaboratively affect, contribute to or independently produce adaptations. And while recent theorizing of adaptation has challenged the convention of fidelity to the original, in story and tone and other increasingly ephemeral aspects of the original, adaptation via interactive media often necessitates the identification of a core theme or experience associated with the original that then functions as the organizing principle for designing the adaptation as an experience. As such, interactive adaptations can be understood as both recuperating older notions and extending the parameters of what can be defined as an adaptation."
KEYWORDS: Nuit Blanche, ourtopia, participatory art, psychogeography, social media, hybrid city
Talks by Siobhan O'Flynn