We got a good ting going

Director's introduction by Professor Scott Rettberg for our 2025 annual report re:generation:

The Center for Digital Narrative continued to thrive in 2025. After our 2023 annual report > hello, world and last year’s assembling intelligence, the work of our early career researchers is well underway. This year, we present re: generation (external link).

Re: generation, is, of course, a play on a significant CDN research theme – generative AI. We’re working to better understand its challenges to society, its underlying narrative structures, its impacts on culture and aesthetics, and not least, how writers and artists might work creatively with it to shape new genres of narrative in the future in areas ranging from electronic literature to cinema to computer games. Researchers in the center are also working with computational narrative systems, forms of story generation that stretch back to the very beginnings of the history of computing, helping us to understand how storytelling and computation have long been conjoined, how thinkers have imagined and enacted storytelling machines, long before AI became ubiquitous.

But re: generation is about much more than humanities-based approaches to AI. It addresses what we consider to be the core mission of our Center: to enable and help drive the creation of a new interdisciplinary field. Our vision was to bring together researchers in fields like literature and narratology, digital culture, game studies, computer science, ethnography, and the arts, to enable an environment where theoretical and creative insights, research methodologies and practices could cross-pollinate to each field represented.

As an immigrant to Norway, one of the Norwegian words that has always enchanted me is ting – a word which not only means “thing”, stuff, matter, but also, in a usage stretching back to the Viking age, the act of assembly, coming together, setting aside for a time inter-tribal conflict to meet and interact and decide upon matters of consequence. Today Norway isn’t governed by a congress or a parliament, but by the Storting (external link) — the big thing. Whenever our leadership group, or our steering board, or our advisory board, or our research groups, or our Wednesday lunch seminars gather to meet, or even when I see a mob of young researchers gathering in the lab for an end-of-workday
Mario Kart tournament, I can’t help but think we’ve really got a good ting going on here.

CDN is not only a ting where researchers from different disciplines break out of their silos to meet, but where
researchers from all over the world gather. We have already hosted guest researchers and visitors from more than 80 different countries. During the summer of 2025, when we hosted our first Digital Narrative PhD summer school, early career researchers from 18 different countries met here in Bergen. We take seriously our goal of helping to train a new generation of researchers, and it was energizing to watch the zeal with which not only the PhD fellows who call the CDN home but those from many different parts of the world set up about sharing ideas and building networks which will long outlast the duration of the ting for which they gathered.

Re: generation is also about human generations. Ours is very much a trans-generational center where people
of all generations, from those who can remember a life before everyone carried a computer around in their pocket, to those for whom “brain rot” is part of their everyday diet. At the CDN, senior researchers and staff work alongside post-docs, PhD fellows, MA-level research assistants in a research environment more non-hierarchical than most. We have hosted middle-school interns and visiting high school classes.

As we move into 2026, we are launching undergraduate internships and welcoming more students into the center as co-researchers. In 2025, we also bid farewell to one of the CDN’s most important leaders: Professor Joseph Tabbi retired. He helped to shape our research in electronic literature, did research fundamental to the field, and led electronic book review (external link), an open-access journal that for 30 years has been one of the most important venues for understanding the interaction of literature and digital culture.

Our early career researchers have begun to publish in important journals, to present their research at international conferences all over the world, and even to write grants that enable them to create new networks in their emergent fields. We are forging new partnerships within our university through LEAD AI and a new relationship with our Faculty of Art, Music, and Design (external link), with local cultural organizations such as the Bergen International Film Festival, and with other leading research centers around the world.

We are reaching out to the public through research-related exhibitions and new forms of creative practice, and are participating in important national debates about how technology is shaping our society. The CDN is at the very heart of a regeneration of humanities research that not only preserves the culture of the past, but provides us with tools for understanding, and helping to shape, our technologically mediated present, and our collective human future.