Group Members:

Anne Cong-Huyen

Amanda Phillips

 

Background:

 

In 2001, The Guardian published an article, "The man who fell to earth," that describes in terrible and heartbreaking detail how the body of a young Pakistani man, Mohammed Ayaz, was seen falling from the underbelly of an airplane and landing in a parking lot of a chain home improvement store, several feet away from a major highway in London.

 

In 2002, writer Amitava Kumar, published a brief essay, "Flight," in his essay collection Bombay, London, New York in which he reflects upon the story of Ayaz, and the difficult realities of escape, flight, and falling for the South Asian itinerant worker.

 

In 2007, Kate Pullinger and  Chris Joseph launched the "Flight Paths" blog with the intention of creating a "networked novel." Their blog served as a platform where they worked through their writing process and solicited feedback and contributions from others. In 2009, they relaunched the site with an electronic story "Flight Paths," which narrates the story of the migrant Yacub, his attempt to enter the UK through the undercarriage of an airplane, and an Englishwoman, Harriet, whose life intersects with Yacub when his body lands on her car.

 

 

Screenshot of "Flight Paths" electronic novel introductory page, with links to different chapters, and to the Flight Paths Universe

 

 

Screenshot from Chapter 2 of "Flight Paths," "Yacub at the Airport"

 

 

Screenshot from Chapter 4 of "Flight Paths," "Dark Mass"

 

The story of Yacub and Harriet, though fascinating in itself, is only one part of the Flight Paths Universe, as Pullinger and Joseph term it, in which other contributors are invited to submit and share their own additions to this network of narrative constructed through various media (digital video, photographs, poems, short stories, websites, etc.)

 

 

Screen Shot of front page to the Fight Paths Universe

 

 

Screenshot with sample past contributions to the Flight Paths Universe

 

Proposal:

 

This project will attempt to look at how various texts have inspired and contributed in this resulting "universe." By looking at the various processes present in this example of "transmedia storytelling" (Jenkins, Convergence Culture) or "vast narrative" (Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan, Third Person) we propose to examine how varied perspectives from different individuals and organizations have led to a very divergent and troubling, though potentially very powerful, practice of storytelling. 

 

"Transmedia storytelling" serves as a fruitful foundation for some of the underlying notions that motivate those individuals and institutions that have invested in the Flight Paths Universe, namely the concepts of collaboration and exchange in the narrative process. As Henry Jenkins writes, "Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels...these grassroots artists are finding themselves in confict with commerical media producers who want to exert greater control over their intellectual property" (21).

 

This statement leads to one particular concern: the various parts of these narratives, especially as they are manifest in "Flight Paths," often egregiously elide issues of (mis)representation, privilege, and agency on the part of both the artist and the object/subject. How can this be addressed and how can it be reconciled with the potentialities of this form of narrative?

 

A second potential component of this project is the narrative mapping of the Flight Paths universe. Flight Paths begins with a split in narration: Harriet the housewife and Yacub the laborer. In the fifth segment of the "official" text, these two paths cross, and the resulting collision is supposed to inspire the user-driven production that follows. However, there is a disturbing split in the contributions to Flight Paths: narrative segments deal with travel and flight or immigrant labor, but they rarely cross. We would like to trace the paths of these narratives to see how a more productive critique of the tragedy of Mohammed Ayaz and the circumstances that led to his death.

 

One approach to visualizing the development of Flight Paths as a Networked Novel will be to analyze textual relationships between the source text (the original Guardian article), the "official" text of the Flightpaths main page, and the secondary texts created by contributing users. Using Manyeyes and Juxta, we intend to develop data of the most frequently used words in the Networked Novel. This data will allow us to visualize which aspects of the source story are most generative of imaginative text. We will also attempt to visualize the contextual changes of the keywords as they move from fact to fiction. 

 

Since this Networked Novel seeks to encompass visual and aural components in addition to the textual, we will also attempt to analyze the intersections (or lack thereof) between these mediums. 

 

Results:

 

Juxta Analysis Results:

 

This particular image shows the desnsist occurences of common words between the story's text and that of the original Guardian

article. Words in common are in white and divergent words are highlighted in green. The large green bar in the histogram at the bottom of the image shows where these occurrences appear within the whole collation. Vertical lines in the histogram show other examples of shared words between the two texts.

 

Through the Juxta analysis, we observe that the words most common between the two texts are those generic ones pertaining to details of stowing away on the plane (i.e. cargo, engine, airport) and to work (i.e. earn, work, paid). Specifics covered in the article about the South Asian man's background and the labor conditions in Dubai that prompt the attempted journey are not among those that also appear in the resulting electronic story.

 

What Juxta cannot analyze, which is significant for examination of multimedia texts like "Flight Paths," are the representations that appear in sound and images. Where the text does not detail the work conditions of Yacub in Dubai, the images do present various two-dimensional representations of these situations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comparison of the story's text with the blog, which, according to Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, was an opportunity of "opening up the research process to the outside world, inviting discussion of the large array of issues the project touches on," shows much less similarity between the two texts. The majority of similarity comes in the entries where the authors posted excerpts from the final story into the blog. This image suggests that very little of the contributions and discussion that occurred in the CommentPress blog went into the actual story that was eventually published in chapter form as "Flight Paths."