Project Description
The Living Glossary of Digital Narrative (LGDN) is a collaborative project between the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. The lead for this project at UiB is Professor Joseph Tabbi, with Hannah Ackermans and Tegan Pyke handling key administrative tasks. The CDN’s Head of Technology, Colin Robinson, will oversee the project at a technological level.
Project Deliverable
The aim of the LGDN project is to an online terminology base for disciplines related to the crafting and study of digital narrative. The intention for the Living Glossary of Digital Narrative (henceforth, the Glossary) is for it to become a leading international resource for scholars and practitioners interested in terminology definitions. The Glossary will not be a fixed publication, hence the use of the ‘living’ descriptive in its title. It will grow and adapt alongside its related fields, with entries being edited and created to reflect current terminology use.
By collating alternative terms and definitions under singular headings, the Glossary will help define terms that continue to be used interchangeably or in differing ways. This shared vocabulary will aide in the building of a cohesive community, allowing for productive discussion both within and across disciplines.
Deliverable Title
The title of the project outcome has been decided between the project teams at the University of Bergen and the University of Stuttgart. It was selected to reflect the nature of the outcome, which will strictly define terms, not authors, practitioners, critical or creative works. This choice places the project alongside Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova’s subject defining resource Posthuman Glossary (2018) and its accompanying text More Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti, Jones, and Klumbytė 2023), both of which incorporate expanded terminology discussions under the ‘glossary’ heading.
Current Aim
At the official launch of the Glossary in August 2024, there will be a working base of about a hundred seed entries and ten expanded entries. These entries will have been produced by the editorial team and researchers associated with the CDN, with a focus on terms viewed as foundational to digital narrative research. These terms will be selected from a list suggested by researchers associated with the LGDN project.
Entry Creation and Specifications
As previously stated, entries to the Glossary will aim to define and discuss terms related to digital narratives and the fields these fall within. Entries will not cover people or works, though extended entries may mention both.
Entry Format
Entries in the Glossary will be composed of four separate sections:
- A definition, which provides a brief overview of the term. The definition does not require references but must be accurate. Definitions will be between 40-100 words in length.
- An explication, which provides a more encyclopaedic, detailed description, which can cover the term’s history, prior or ongoing academic discussions, and various uses of the term. Most explications will be between 300-700 words in length, but exceptions will be allowed for particularly complex entries, with a maximum of around 1000 words. For the explication, references will be required.
- A ‘See Also’ section, which provides suggestions for related terms also listed in the Glossary. These will be working hyperlinks, allowing for ease of navigation.
- A bibliography, containing all works referenced in the entry and further reading suggested by the entry author, should they wish to provide some.
This format has been chosen following consultation of many existing academic lexicons and encyclopaedias, including the Living Handbook of Narratology (Hühn et al. 2009-2014), the aforementioned Posthuman Glossary (2018), and the Dictionary of Narratology (Prince 1987). The intention is to allow for modal construction of entries, where seed entries can be produced rapidly—allowing for a wide starting terminology base—before being selected and possibly expanded into full entries by contributors with relevant knowledge.
Seed Entries
Seed entries are the initial format for all entries within the Glossary. Their only requirements are a definition section and a ‘See Also’ section, though seed entries may also supply a bibliography for further reading.
Starting Seed Entries
The initial batch of 100 seed entries will be created with assistance from the Chat-GPT large language model (LLM). This decision has been made to allow the current, small editorial team to produce a large quantity of definitions without reliance on voluntary labour. The nature of an LLM—generation of text based on what is most statistically probable—also means it will produce definitions related to the most common term usages, which avoids accidental inclusion of fringe definitions.
All content produced in conjunction with the AI will be vetted, edited for accuracy and authorial tone, and approved for use by the editorial team. Any definitions that cannot be created this way or are deemed unsuitable will be written or rewritten by the team or CDN associated scholars. The Glossary website will include a disclaimer stating that some definitions were created with assistance from AI technology, but all entries have been meticulously checked for accuracy by the editors.
Expanded Entries
Expanded entries will include all four sections specified above, with the explication including citations for sources. These will be exclusively produced by people whose work or research falls into the same field as or a field associated with the term. These scholars will either be people of note within their field or scholars associated with the CDN or the University of Stuttgart who are currently undertaking or have surpassed education to a Master’s level. These requirements have been decided upon to instil confidence in the end users, who will want assurances that the source they’re using has been produced by writers with relevant expertise.
Explications in extended entries will take a neutral stance regarding discourse related to term use and associated practitioners and scholars. They will also provide examples of the term in use within a scholarly context(s) and, where applicable, creative contexts. For example, the Glossary entry for the term ‘hypertext fiction’ should include references to notable works of this genre.
Extended entries will be unique to the Glossary, not amalgamations of quotes (or direct quotes) from source materials, and they will not be available for duplication on other platforms such as the Electronic Literature Directory, produced by the Electronic Literature Organization. This will establish the Glossary as a primary source of scholarship, instead of a point of reference. It will also protect Glossary content from incurring penalties with various search engines for duplication of content, which could possibly harm the Glossary’s search rankings or the rankings of associated projects. This is important, given that 95 percent of Google’s users do not navigate beyond the first results page.
All extended entries will be subject to a peer review process, which will be carried out by the editorial team and a network of trusted associates in relevant research areas.
Editorial Process
The editorial process will be spearheaded by the editorial team and will be done via the tried and tested method of a shared inbox with collaborative workflow documents stored elsewhere. This approach has been selected for multiple reasons, chief of which is familiarity and ease of use for a group of rotating researchers, all from different ages, backgrounds, and levels of technological ability. Ease of use and lack of reliance on a closed system—which may be subject to frequent updates or, possibly, obsolescence—is highly important to the longevity of the project outcome.
Peer Review
Extended entries will be peer-reviewed on an ad hoc basis, but it is expected that they will be processed in batches via group editorial sessions held with scholars associated with the CDN and, possibly, the University of Stuttgart. This will be carried out at least once a semester, dependent on submission volume. If this is not possible or extended entries with high priority for publication are received, entries will be sent to peer reviewers deemed suitable by the editorial team and processed individually. This aligns the project more closely to traditional scholarly publication processes, rather than that of the more informal online process of projects like Wikipedia.
It should be noted that proofreading, checking for grammar and spelling errors, as well as other inconsistencies—will be a separate process undertaken once an entry has been approved by peers for publication. It is likely that this task will be undertaken by Joseph Tabbi, who carries out a similar role (among others) for his journal, the Electronic Book Review, though this role may be shared if entry influx is remarkably high.
Publishing of Glossary Content
When the peer review and proofreading process is complete, terms will be added to the website by Colin Robinson. This keeps security for the website high, reduces training time for those who may be involved, and avoids the risk of mishap or content duplication that occurs with multiple administrators.
Further Expansion
Members of the LGDN team have met with staff from the Norwegian Language Collections section of the University of Bergen library to discuss incorporation of terms defined by the Glossary into Termportalen, their online, dictionary-like resource for term definitions in Norwegian. If this partnership is undertaken, the Glossary would become the source definitions for the Norwegian equivalents of the terms. Currently, this is a long-term, lowpriority goal, to be reviewed and undertaken once the Glossary has been firmly established.
There has also been discussion of a Glossary application programming interface (API), which would allow third parties to integrate the Glossary’s terms into their own databases and archive. This would aide establishment of the Glossary as an authoritative source.
Bibliography
Braidotti, Rosi, and Maria Hlavajova, eds. 2018. Posthuman Glossary. Theory in the New Humanities. London: Bloomsbury academic.
Braidotti, Rosi, Emily Jones, and Goda Klumbytė, eds. 2023. More Posthuman Glossary. Theory in the New Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Hühn, Peter, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, eds. 2009-2014. “The Living Handbook of Narratology.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. 2009. https://wwwarchiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.html.
Prince, Gerald. 1987. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. http://archive.org/details/dictionaryofnarr0000prin.