The SCP Foundation’s role in the development of academic literacy and the promotion of reading and creative writing

Abstract

This article analyses the international creative writing project SCP Foundation as a constructive hyperfiction based on the creation of fictional scientific articles. The objective of this study is to specify the formative aspects of this literary practice and explore the implications for planning innovative and educational classroom activities. To do this, articles were selected according to the relevance principle - the 25 SCPs with the highest impact and the best scores - and a qualitative analysis was performed employing thick description and textual analysis. The findings show that the SCP Foundation is an affinity space in which important literacy-based learning is developed. In addition, it is noteworthy that a highly heterogeneous formal-academic linguistic register is used in the selection of the topics, theresources employed, the complex hypertext structures and the multimodal elements. Furthermore, in this literary practice, information disorders such as fake news, data manipulation and research ethics as well as aspects related to literary reading such as urban legends and creative writing, generally converge. Therefore, these are unique texts that promote Media and Information Literacy in informal contexts in addition to being works that have the educational potential to encourage reading.