Rebecca Mueller/Winonan
Winona State University’s mass communication professor Davin Heckman recently co-authored an article with Kathi Inman Berens titled “‘Use the # & Tweet yr escape:’ LA Flood as Mobile Dystopic Fiction.” The article was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books on Aug. 15.
Heckman and Berens’s article explores “The LA Flood Project,” a collaborative project led by the eight-writer writing collective LAinundación. The writers staged a simulated flood of Los Angeles in which anyone could participate.
“It’s a very different kind of storytelling,” Heckman said. The project includes several elements including a Twitter feed, audio recordings and a map with stories pinned to various locations around Los Angeles.
Simultaneously as the article was published, Heckman began his first year as a professor at Winona State. During his time here, Heckman expects to contribute to how the mass communication department thinks about digital media. He is teaching several of the core departmental courses.
“[The students] seem bright and engaged. They seem happy that they’re here,” Heckman said of his upperclassman students. This semester, he is teaching 300- and 400-level mass communication courses, including a topics course on digital storytelling.
Prior to arriving in Winona, Heckman’s experiences took him around the world. He began by teaching for nine years at Siena Heights University in southeast Michigan. There, the communication program was nested in the English program, so he also taught composition and literature courses.
Most recently, Heckman spent a year in Bergen, Norway on a Fulbright scholarship beginning in August 2011. He arrived in Norway not long after the attacks in Oslo and the island of Utøya earlier that July. The timing gave him the opportunity to witness a nation responding to a tragedy. He explained that the citizens’ response was to embrace their cultural values.
“When your values are tested, if your values are good, then you should stand by them,” Heckman said.
When he’s not teaching, Heckman is involved in several organizations and projects. He is the managing editor of the Electronic Book Review (EBR) and is the current editor of the EBR’s Electropoetics thread at electronicbookreview.com.
Heckman is also the secretary for the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, an organization that studies digital and often interactive literary works.
He is also the author of “A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day,” published in 2008. The book explores the evolution of home automation and smart homes, and debates the potential influences that this technology could have on society.
His previous dissertation on the subject, called “Utopian Accidents: An Introduction to Retro-Futures,” was published in the spring of 2004.
Currently, Heckman’s research focuses on the constantly changing formats for digital literature and the struggle to preserve works made for older formats.
“Digital stuff has its own kind of shelf life,” Heckman said. If a particular format becomes obsolete, any works published using the format would then become inaccessible. Heckman explained that inaccessibility due to changing formats is a problem that doesn’t apply to paper books. He is interested in how the inaccessibility problem is changing society’s relationship with culture and the implications of this instability of formats.
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