Submission of the online novel "Senghor on the Rocks" for the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. TITEL: Senghor on the Rocks AUTHORS: Florian Ledermann (ledermann@ims.tuwien.ac.at): Programming Johannes Krtek (johannes.krtek@flachware.com): Design Christoph Benda (christoph.benda@oeaw.ac.at): Text, Geodata URL: http://www.senghorontherocks.net DESCRIPTION: Senghor on the Rocks (SOTR) is the first novel extensively making use of online satellite imagery. Every page of the virtual book that was created for the online presentation of the novel is accompanied by a satellite view of the story’s current location. The novel itself is written in German and deals with an involuntary journey of young assistant cameraman Martin “Chi” Tschirner taking him through Senegal. In the first chapters Chi is busy shooting a promotional film in Dakar and does not care too much about where he is or what the city he is hurrying through may be like – other than loud, dirty and inscrutable. The routines of his work prevent Chi from seeing the world instead of a series of changing locations requiring different light filters and lenses. The story takes it’s turn as Chi loses his job and – deprived of the camera that normally shields him – finds himself defencelessly sucked into the foreign and vivid city of Dakar. SOTR was written in the classical form of a novel but with its linear narrative structure and the consistent first person perspective it was very well suited for an adaption as an online "geo novel". Every scene has been geographically referenced and readers experience the novel’s action as a journey on the map. INSTRUCTIONS: Senghor on the Rocks is an online project and can be viewed with all current web browsers. Due to fact that we are using Google Maps there is no way of creating an “offline” version. RELEASE DATE: Senghor on the Rocks has firstly been released on May, 26th of 2008 and was made available online under a creative commons license. --------------------------- The project was also presented in a paper and with a reading at this year's Electronic Literature in Europe Conference (Bergen, Norway). Hope to hear from you, kind regards, Christoph Benda Mag. Christoph Benda AAC-Austrian Academy Corpus ZK - Zentrum Kulturforschungen ÖAW - Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Sonnenfelsgasse 19/8 1010 Wien 0043/1/ 515 81-2232