Jeremy Douglass

Assistant Professor of English

This talk surveys a set of research problems in approaches to interactive narratives--including video games, interactive comics, and "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style print gamebooks. How can we apply ideas from cultural analytics, graph theory, and social network analysis to the understanding of stories with many pathways and multiple endings? How do we digitize, encode, explore, visualize, and compare the shapes of thousands of such stories across different decades, languages, and media forms? The talk also discusses working with the largest collection of interactive print in the world--the Demian Katz Gamebook Collection, recently acquired by UC Santa Barbara Library Special Collections.