Jill Walker Rettberg

Position

Professor, Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative

Affiliation

Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies

E-mail: jill.walker.rettberg@uib.no
Phone number: +47 55588431
Visitor address: CDN - Center for Digital Narrative Langesgate 1
5007 Bergen; Room: 206
Postal address: P.O. Box 7805

NO-5020 Bergen

Norway

Jill Walker Rettberg

Position

Professor, Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative

Affiliation

Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies

Research groups

Short info

I help build better futures by developing our understanding of how stories and technologies shape each other. I am currently exploring how new language-based AI is impacting the kinds of stories we tell and that spread online.

Research

Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a €15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced grant AI Stories: Narrative Archetypes for Artificial Intelligence (2024-2029), and of the ERC Consolidator project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024).

Current research

Rettberg is currently developing new research on how new language-based AI is impacting the kinds of stories we tell and that spread online. She argues that generative AI has deep cultural biases that are less easy to spot than the biases that are evident in, for example, facial recognition. This emerging work draws upon the research on AI and visual technologies in the Machine Vision project as well as on Rettberg's decades of narratological research into digital genres of storytelling, such as electronic literature, blogging and transmedia narrative.

Books

Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity Press, 2023). Watch an unboxing video or listen to a conversation on BBC's Start the Week where Jill discusses how machine vision connects not only to contemporary AI art but also to the new technologies of impressionists like Monet.
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves, was published as an open access monograph by Palgrave in October 2014, and can be freely downloaded.
Blogging was published in a 2nd edition by Polity Press in 2014, and has also been translated to Korean and Polish.
Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader. Co-editor with Hilde Corneliussen. (MIT Press 2008).

Bridging the humanities and technologies

Since the start of her career Rettberg has participated in cross-disciplinary research arenas with the goal of increasing the understanding of each other's methods and research questions.

Rettberg is a member of UiB AI, a cross-faculty platform for AI research at the University of Norway, and a PI in LEAD AI, a university wide COFUND network supporting postdocs in AI across disciplines. She is a frequent participant in NORA events, and keynoted NORA's 2023 conference.

The first conference she presented at was Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext in 1999, where she won the Ted Nelson Newcomer Award for the best paper by a newcomer to the conference. 24 years later Rettberg keynoted the 2023 edition of the same conference.

Outreach

Jill Walker Rettberg has shared her research in social media since October 2000, when she started her still-active research blog, jill/txt. In 2016, she began making research stories for Snapchat, which you can follow by adding jilltxt on Snapchat, or you can see an archive of selected Snapchat Research Stories on YouTube. Rettberg's pioneering use of Snapchat was written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education in April 2016, and was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Award by Kairos Journal in June 2017. Rettberg is also an active participant in debates on Twitter, Facebook and in Norwegian newspapers, and is a frequent expert source in Norwegian media.

Maskinsyn is a dissemination project connected to the MACHINE VISION research project where we have made an exhibition in collaboration with the University Museum (open to the public 18.03.2021-29.08.2021) and are developing a live action roleplaying game (a larp) called Sivilisasjonens venterom that will be held in November 2021.

Rettberg won the Meltzer Foundation Prize for Excellence in Research Dissemination in 2006 and the John Lovaas Award for Research Dissemination in Social Media in 2017.

Teaching

Course development and teaching

Jill Walker Rettberg has been responsible for developing and teaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on games, electronic literature, digital art, social media, critical digital culture theory, web design and machine vision.

PhD Supervision

Rettberg is currently the main supervisor for one PhD student, Henning Skarbø, who was recently awarded a public sector PhD. His project is a collaboration between Digital Culture at UiB and the hospital, and will develop a conversational app for chronic patients, combining humanistic theories of digital culture with human-computer conversational design.

She is also co-supervisor for Elisabeth Nesheim here at UiB, who is writing a PhD on haptic interfaces in digital art, and is a dissertation committee member for Sara Raffel, who is writing her PhD on storytelling in virtual reality, at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Rettberg has been an opponent at three PhD defences, at the University of Copenhagen, Tallinn University and the University of Stavanger. She was a mentor at the Doctoral Consortium at the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers conference, and in 2017, she was a jury member for the Association of Internet Researchers' prize for best PhD dissertation.

Publications

Reader opinion

Conference lecture

Podcast

Lecture

Academic article

Radio or TV participation

Academic monograph

Media interview

Academic book chapter

Journal review

Research report

Master’s thesis