The Pulse of the Story

On Rhythm in Narrative Apps

Abstract

This video essay explores rhythm in narrative apps. It is intended as an invitation to pose some of the same questions, and perhaps to discover some of the rhythmic features described in my previous research in this field (Hagen & Mills, 2022; Hagen, 2022). Thus, the essay aims to invite the viewer to reflect and discover, rather than provide answers.

In the video essay, I pose several rhythm-related questions accompanied by examples from three narrative apps: Florence(Wong et al., 2018), Pry (Gormann & Cannizzaro, 2015), and The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (Joyce, 2011). I attempt to show what rhythm does in a narrative app and highlight the categories of reading rhythm and narrative rhythm. As I have shown (Hagen, 2022; 2023), these are previously seldom described aspects of narrative apps, and few analyses of rhythm in multimodal research have been conducted (with some exceptions, such as He, 2023; Han & Zappavigna, 2024). My motivation for creating a video essay stems from the fact that the format allows for the expression and demonstration of rhythms across multiple modes, rather than merely describing them. To some extent, the video essay can serve as a meta-commentary on rhythm analysis, as it has its own rhythm and plays on parallels and contrasts in its visual expression and across different modes.