Fat & Fabulous
English major and DH minor Lauryn Cole built a public-facing version of her Honors College thesis using Twine, a tool for creating interactive narratives and text-based games.
“Fat & Fabulous: The Power of Contemporary Romance as a Site of Anti-Oppression Work“ will be deposited in its entirety on UO Scholars’ Bank. But as Lauryn explains, the “choose your own adventure”-style navigation has the potential to reach different audiences and to experiment with formal expressions of larger theoretical and ethical commitments. Specifically, the redesigned thesis draws on Lauryn’s work in English 410: New Media and Digital Technology, taught by Prof. Ashley Cordes as a course on Indigenous New Media research approaches:
“DH projects, especially if constructed from an Indigenous Methodology, should work as a site of activation for community building and knowledge sharing. The translation of my original thesis to this DH medium was done with the intention of making the content accessible, engaging, and community oriented rather than staying on the shelf in the confines of a purely academic setting.”
The project also leverages insights from Lauryn’s experience English 410: Digital Storytelling (Prof. Mattie Burkert):
“By choosing Twine to construct the story of my central thesis, I’m forcing readers to wait to find their way through the entire narrative. Their choice of hypertext to follow determines what type of information is revealed to them but prohibits the instant “gratification of a birds-eye view that the original paper format would have provided.”
Ultimately, Lauryn’s DH project does more than translate her research for wider audiences; it speaks back to assumptions about identity, positionality, subjectivity, and authority that are embedded in academic culture:
“Stories are essential to how we build and communicate knowledge- even academic papers (though taught to be stripped of narrative voice in the search for ‘objectivity’) are built on storytelling- even if we don’t always label it as such.
