Traveling Lecture Series (TLS)

Postdigital Perspectives is an online traveling lecture series organized by the Network Postdigital Narratives. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary and geographical contexts, the series creates a shared space to examine how digital and non-digital domains have become increasingly entangled in contemporary cultural production and interpretation.

Hosted by two universities at a time and rotating every six months, the series fosters sustained dialogue while expanding the network's collaborative reach. Each 60-minute session (18:30 - 19:30 CET) foregrounds a distinct perspective on postdigital media, narrative, authorship, and practices of reading, viewing, and using media.

The goal is to map this rapidly developing field, but also to encourage conceptual clarification and methodological exchange across institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

Apr 30 2026

Social Chatbots, Character, and the Postdigital

Alice Bell (Sheffield-Hallam University)

18:30 - 19:30 (CET) · Teams Link · Flyer (PDF)

In this talk, I investigate social chatbots via the case study of character.ai, one of the world's largest social chatbot platforms. Using the results of my empirical study, I show how users of character.ai are often concerned with the quality and ontological status of chatbots and that cognitive poetic and narratological models of character can be adapted to account for these user responses. I argue that social chatbots epitomise the postdigital in their blurring of the digital and non-digital.

Event flyer
Jun 29 2026

Post-digital revisited. Is a term that always sucked still useful?

Florian Cramer (Hogeschool Rotterdam)

18:30 - 19:30 (CET) · Teams Link · Flyer (PDF)

Event flyer