Lisbeth Klastrup

Lisbeth Klastrup (born 1970) is a Danish scholar of new media. Although her early research was on hypertext fiction, she is now best known for her research on virtual worlds, in particular MMOGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft. Her focus in this research has been on "worldliness", or what makes an online space as in an MMOG feel like a world, although she is also known for her presentation of amusing anecdotes that she then connects to larger research questions. Her discussion of her EverQuest character's "trouser quest" (paper presented at Digital Arts and Culture in 2003) is an example of this. Another project, the Death Stories Project looks into representations of death in MMOGs.

Klastrup, particularly in a Danish context, also does research on the uses of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and moblogs, and the connection between offline and online communication. She also maintains a list of blogs by Danish researchers.

Klastrup is based in Copenhagen, and works as an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, where she is affiliated with the Innovative Communication Research Group and the Center for Computer Game Research. In the academic year 2006/7 she was on leave from the IT University, working as an associate research professor at the Center for Design Research Copenhagen, joining her colleague Ida Engholm. Engholm and Klastrup have previously (2004) edited a Danish anthology of case studies of hypertext fiction, MMOGs and other new media forms, Digitale verdener.

In 2005, Klastrup chaired the Digital Arts and Culture conference in collaboration with Susana Tosca. In 2008, she chaired the Ninth Annual conference for the Association of Internet Researchers, Internet Research 9.0.

Klastrup is currently (fall 2009) co-editing The International Handbook of Internet Research, with Jeremy Hunsinger and Matthew Allen, to be published by Springer Verlag late 2009.

Klastrup also keeps a research blog, Klastrup's Cataclysms

See also

• Simulated reality

Selected publications

• Klastrup, Lisbeth. Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story. IT University, Copenhagen: PhD dissertation. 

• Lisbeth, Klastrup (2003). "A Poetics of Virtual Worlds" (PDF). Proceedings of the fifth Digital Arts and Culture conference. Melbourne. 

• Lisbeth, Klastrup (2002). "Interaction forms, agents and tellable events in EverQuest" (PDF). Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference. 

• Lisbeth, Klastrup (2006). "Death Matters: Understanding Gameworld Experiences". Proceedings from the Advances in Computing Entertainment Conference (ACE) 2006. 

• Engholm, Ida; Lisbeth Klastrup (2004). Digitale verdener. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.