Animating Text Newcastle University (ATNU) is a digital collaboration led by the School of English between scholarly editors based in humanities disciplines and the Digital Institute that sets out to create new ways in which readers/users can interact with texts, and to explore and test opportunities for immersive reading/writing. What's unique about ATNU is that our ideas for the immersive texts of the future are based on the texts and books of the past that we are editing (1500-1900), which were already imagined as variable, dynamic, vital, interactive, akin to a 3D experience.
This collaboration aims to both use and build digital software that will give us: (a) new ways of explaining the complex life of texts over time and through space, and in and out of different languages and cultural contexts, and (b) new immersive experiences for readers. At the heart of this is a conception of texts as mutable and contingent and a reimagining of what a reader can be: an auditor, a performer, a creative writer. The project is driven by a desire to understand how texts are transformed in their passage across linguistic and national borders and to develop new skills of seeing/hearing/making stories that are based on and anticipate a very high level of interactivity, and a rounded (embodied) understanding of how meaning is made.
ATNU connects the original, deep, historical research from the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, the School of Arts and Cultures, the School of Modern Languages, and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, with the transformational research of the Digital Institute. The intention is to share expertise and intellectual resources and to work to deliver ambitious, future-facing research that will nurture largescale collaborative projects.