Center for Digital Narrative

Contemporary life is increasingly driven by digital narratives. Yet we lack a comprehensive and cross-sectoral understanding of how digital narratives function, to what ends they are being used, and how they are shaping culture now and in the future.

The Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence funded by the Norwegian Research Council (external link) from 2023-2033.

Digital narratives are new forms of storytelling driven by computation. Contemporary life is increasingly driven by digital narratives–whether anti-vax conspiracy theories proliferating on the internet, storyworlds emerging from a computer game industry that now dwarfs other sectors of the entertainment industry, or machine learning systems that generate fiction. Yet we lack a comprehensive and cross-sectoral understanding of how digital narratives function, to what ends they are being used, and how they are shaping culture now and in the future.

CDN focuses on algorithmic narrativity, new environments and materialities, and shifting cultural contexts. We will investigate how the interactions of human authors with non-human agents result in new narrative forms, how the materiality of digital narratives have changed, and how cultural contexts are reshaping the use and function of digital narrative.

CDN investigates models of interdisciplinary research that are focused both on innovative practice-based methods and qualitative analysis of the new forms of stories told using digital technology. A humanities-based approach to digital narrative includes the analysis of cultural artifacts and their cultural impacts, but also results from direct experimental engagement with systems. 

CDN intends to establish Norway as a world leader in innovative humanities research and train a new generation of humanities researchers who will be ready to address future challenges. CDN will deepen our knowledge of how digital technologies impact one of the most fundamental human activities: how we tell the stories that shape our lives and understanding of the world. 

CDN addresses this need by developing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for digital narrative in six integrated nodes: Electronic Literature, Computer Games and Interactive Digital Narrative, Computational Narrative Systems, Social Media and Network Narratives, Extended Digital Narratives, and Artistic Integrated Research. 

See this video from the exhibition "Introduction to Center for Digital Narrative":