I have a bit of a brain crush on digital humanities theorist Rita Raley at the moment — we met at UCSB a year ago, but I just recently read “Walk This Way: Mobile Narrative as Composed Experience”, an essay of hers published in the book Beyond the Screen last year. In it, she discusses Hundekopf, a Knifeandfork project conducted in 2005 which is one of our favorites. Raley’s essay is one of the better analyses of locative narrative that I’ve read, and it certainly situates the themes with which Sue and myself were preoccupied far more lucidly than my own attempts at prose. She understands mobile narrative as a mode of writing rather than navigation or annotation and one that engages the city as a “temporal process rather than spatial entity”, very much on my mind recently when researching rhythmanalysis. She closes with this, which is as much of an inspiration for my work as anything:
“When a participant receives a text commanding her to look around, there is a sense in which that command is more open than closed, at least insofar as there is an interpretative gap between instruction and execution. That gap is the site of ambivalence, the uncertainty of meaning, and thus open to improvisation and experimentation.”
