Contact info

Position: Senior Lecturer in Digital Media
Email: e.muse@bangor.ac.uk
Skype: eben.muse
Personal website: Parnassus Musings
Phone: +44 (0)1248 388628
Location: John Phillips Hall 

I began my academic career working with folklore, mythology and cinema to understand how we use stories and storytelling to make sense of our past and our history. I had the opportunity to apply that understanding to the study of creativity and learning while working for the Research Institute for Enhancing Learning when I first came to Bangor University in 1999. My research and teaching now revolve around three areas of interest: the space of the book, practice-research, and digital media storytelling.

'The future of reading – possibilities in a world of speculation' presented at the SfEP Conference 2015

My current research looks at the changing relationships between books, the people who consume or produce books, the places that books are found and shared, and the institutions that try to order those relationships. Digital innovations have driven the book industry since 1971 when Michael Hart used a multi-million dollar computer to digitize the Declaration of Independence and founded Project Gutenberg. In many ways this has moved the industry forward with innovations like Booktrack's soundtrack for reading or multimedia crowd-written books like Atavist . But the technology has done just as much to send book reading and writing back to older models including serial publication or chapters as television-style episodes. Books and writers may now read us as much or as often as we are read them.