About Me
Kate Stuart is a PhD candidate from Bangor University, Wales, researching authorship and online book culture. Her current project looks at author identity, exploring how they present themselves online, how these performances can be influenced by new technology and innovation, and the way these identities can be shaped by the reader as both an imagined entity in the creation of a text and as a member of an online book community. At the centre of this practice-based investigation into authorship is the creation of an “unstable” e-book, currently named Shifting Sands, which will be released towards the end of 2020.
About the Project
The book, as an object for communication and storytelling, has been relatively stable since the development of the printing press, with innovations that sustain rather than disrupt. In recent years, however, technological development has enabled new methods of publication and distribution that have the potential to disrupt this established stability. With this, authors have new opportunities that not only enable them to experiment with storytelling, but also in the ways they present themselves to their readership. While recent scholarship has indicated that authorship has changed in response to the closer book community facilitated by social media and online engagement, there is little research about how the author identity is impacted by the innovative storytelling potential available with new technologies and their online engagement.
This project aims to explore author identity and how it is affected by the creation, publication, and building of an online reader community for an e-book that exploits some of this experimental potential. It will focus on my role as an “innovative” author, noting how my author identity is shaped in response to the implied reader (during the creation process) and through any engagement with readers online both before and after the publication of the e-book. As such, any engagement with me, as the author, through social media or my author website, may contribute to the formation of this author identity and thus influence this research project. While the research log associated with this project will “de-identify” and anonymise any participation in this way, readers are welcome to express any concerns or withdraw comments by contacting katestuartauthor@gmail.com. Readers can also ask for more information about the research through the same contact address, by visiting the website contact page, or by reaching out on Twitter or Facebook.
