trAce announces a New Media Article Writing Competition open to all.

Competition Deadline: APRIL 30, 2004.

There will be four prizes:
£100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work for the Review category
£100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work for the Opinion category
£100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work for the Process category
£200 GBP Editor's Choice Award will be chosen from any one of the three categories.

Prize-winners will be published on the trAce website http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/, which gets over 30,000 hits a day and is visited by writers, educators, journalists and researchers from over a hundred countries.

Why This Competition?
We want to provoke discussion and raise awareness of new media writing. These are the kinds of questions people are asking. Can you answer any of them? Or are there other issues not addressed here?

Q: How will the new media technology change writing/literature? Is 'writing' the right word for this new medium where the digital includes sound, image, moving image and text?

Q: Considering the community/joint authorship aspect of so much new media writing, who is the author and does it matter?

Q: What are the steps you would take to persuade a sceptic that there are serious artistic possibilities in new media?

Q: Can you demonstrate that this is not just a new medium for writing, but a new genre in itself?

Q: What's the difference between online writing and digital writing? Which is more important - the digital component or the writing itself?

Q: Why are writers who move their practice into new media spaces shedding conventional narrative strategies and devices and how does this "literary disconnect" relate to the rival tradition in literature?

Categories:
Review - £100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work
The web is a locus for a wide international community of practice by writers and artists. Here we are looking for reviews of: significant books; hardware or software that affects new media writing; web or net projects; trends arising from writers using the internet; personalities involved in new media writing or teaching.
See sample Review articles - http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/review/

Opinion - £100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work
A platform for debate about what we want from the web and how we want it to happen. Send your reasoned arguments, hobbyhorses, and rants. Here we are looking for serious-minded articles about new media writing or humorous and satirical views of this emerging genre.
See sample Opinion articles - http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/opinion/

Process - £100 GBP for Best Original Unpublished Work
A look at the internet as a creative medium for thinking, collaborating, communicating, coding, performing, exhibiting, imagining, visualising, teaching - and, of course, writing.
See sample Process articles - http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/process/

Special
Editor's Choice Award - £200 GBP
This prize will go to the entry that best investigates or challenges the aesthetics of new media writing. It will be chosen from any one of the three categories.

All categories are open to experimentation. For example: you can include html, plugins such as flash or shockwave, or javascripts. If you are submitting such a work, do not embed it in your entry, but provide a URL in your email submission (see Entry Rules).

Entry Rules
1. There is no entry fee. All writers are eligible except anyone who is employed by trAce during the judging period.

2. Prize-winners will be published on the trAce website. By entering the contest you agree to abide by a regular trAce writing contract, which will be provided to the competition winners and selected entrants only.

3. You can submit as many entries as you like but each entry must be submitted separately. All entries must be original, unpublished works. For new media writers, your entry cannot be work or a URL that has been distributed on lists or linked from your main site.

4. We aim to publish accessible discursive work. Heavily theorised academic essays or student coursework assignments are not suitable.

5. Each entry should be submitted separately by email to randy.adams@ntu.ac.uk by April 30, 2004.
Subject line: Competition <category name>
e.g. Competition <Review>

6. Please provide the following information in the body of your email submission:
a) Your name, email address, and street address. No pseudonyms. A short autobiography appended to the text of your email entry (100 - 150 words). Collaborative works can be submitted using any name, but participants must be listed with biographies.
b) Title of your entry.
c) Word count:
1. Plain text format: 800 - 1000 words, not including links or short biography of entrant.
2. New media format. No limitation but the work must be clearly standalone. If it is part of a larger piece, it must be clearly separable.

7. Entries should be submitted in one of two formats:

a) Plain text in the body of an email. Attachments will not be accepted. Include a list of links if appropriate but no footnotes or formatted text. The subject line should conform to the rules or the entry will be deleted unread.

b) If your article is in new media format, please include the URL in your submission email. If accepted for publication, we will add a banner heading and host the work on the trAce website. The subject line should conform to the rules or the entry will be deleted unread.

8. Entries will be acknowledged but there will be no other correspondence with entrants. Winners will be notified and a list of winners will appear on the trAce and Writers for the Future websites. Winners will be announced by 20 May 2004. If your work is accepted for publication it will be subject to the usual trAce editorial contract.

9. Entrants other than competition winners whose work is of particular merit may, at the discretion of the trAce Editorial Board, be offered a standard trAce writer's contract.

Judges
Randy Adams - is a Canadian writer and visual artist and Associate Editor at trAce. Author of the non-fiction book Eternal Prairie, he has also published prose poems, essays and photography in magazines and journals. For ten years he worked as an arts journalist and travel writer. His photography and mixed media work has been exhibited and collected by public galleries, museums, and archives. His net.work has been featured in several online publications. He has been an active member of the trAce community since 1998, and was the first writer/artist to be awarded a trAce Writer's Studio. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/studio/radams/

Sue Thomas - is the founder and Artistic Director of trAce. Her books include the novel Correspondence, short-listed for the Arthur C Clarke Award 1992; Water, 1994, and an anthology of contemporary short stories Wild Women, 1994. She has been working with the arts and technology since 1986 and is a Reader in New Media at Nottingham Trent University. Her new book Hello World: travels in virtuality is published by Raw Nerve in March 2004.
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/suethomas/

Tim Wright - trAce's Digital Writer-in-Residence, trained as a journalist and editor on various magazines (Which Computer?, LAN Magazine) and newspapers (The Independent, Sunday Times). In 1995 Tim left print publishing to become one of the three Managing Partners of NoHo Digital, one the UK's most successful independent new media agencies. In 1999, Tim and his creative collaborator Rob Bevan left NoHo to form XPT, with a view to finding markets and audiences for their own original digital works. In that time he has been the lead writer of two BAFTA-winning interactive projects - the comedy self help disk MindGym and web & email drama Online Caroline, as well as scripting the lunatic web 'holiday' Mount Kristos and the absurd virtual gift-giving service IT3C.
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writersforthefuture/view/

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Prize Money Offered by:
trAce and Writers for the Future, a project for NESTA managed by the trAce Online Writing Centre at The Nottingham Trent University.

Writers for the Future is a project for NESTA managed by the trAce Online Writing Centre at The Nottingham Trent University. Writers for the Future explores innovative ways of writing using the internet, and provides criteria for best practice in the emerging genre of new media writing.
http://www.writersforthefuture.com