Keynote address

This is a two-part meditation on where electronic literature came from, some of the places it’s been, and how (and why) it might possibly go on.

Espen Aarseth will look at the roots of electronic literature in the period before 1997, discussing the origins of digital writing in terms of contemporary art and theory. Particular attention will be given to interactive fiction and what happened to it.

Stuart Moulthrop skips over the really important bits (1997-2010) and concentrates on the state of electronic literature in the current decade, especially the intersection of various text-generation schemes with latter-day conceptualism and “the new illegibility.”

Both keynote speakers will offer critical prospects on the very idea of electronic literature, the meaning of the name, and various present and future ontologies for our discourse.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

What is a bibliographical object in a distributed digital environment? What are the challenges in developing a bibliographical description of digital artifacts and how could these be addressed using post-colonial theories of knowledge production? When we try to apply traditional analytic or descriptive approaches to bibliography to digital artifacts, it quickly becomes clear that they are not “objects” in the analogue sense. Digital objects are constituted at the intersection of multiple dependencies—from file types and platforms to bandwidth, browser capabilities, and processing speeds to social and cultural conditions of production and reception. This talk draws on various models of bibliographical study and approaches to the history of the book to suggest some ways a general practice of digital bibliography might be developed.

(Source: ELD 2015)

Ireland is currently in the opening years of what has been billed The Decade of Centenaries, or The Decade of Commemoration. This decade, from 1912-1922, marks a violent and disruptive period, politically, socially, and creatively, cumulating in Irish independence from the United Kingdom, followed by a bloody Civil War. 1916 is seen as a turning point in Irish politics: not only were many thousands of Irish fighting in the Great War with the British army, many at home took up arms against that army during the Easter Rising. The Letters of 1916 is a crowd-sourced digital humanities project that is creating ‘a year in the life’ of Ireland, as well as how Ireland was perceived abroad, by collecting letters – any letter—about Ireland. This talk will explore the methods and politics of creating such as collection which is being positioned technically at the intersections of digital scholarly editing and big data.

(Source: ELD 2015)

+ info: http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/

“I suppose that my fiction will be word-processed by association, though I myself will not become a green-screener,” John Barth told the Paris Review in 1985. But just a few years later he did, not only switching to a word processor but exploring the machine as a subject in subsequent fiction. This lecture, drawn from my forthcoming book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, interweaves a narrative of word processing’s introduction to the literary world–we will see that Barth’s story, both his abrupt turn-around and his fear of guilt by association is typical–with a consideration of practical problems in doing research at the intersection of literary and technological history, especially the changing nature of the archive as primary source material becomes itself “born-digital.” Along the way we will take a look at Stephen King’s Wang, John Updike’s trash, and the 200-pound writing machine that produced the first word processed novel in English.

(Source: ELD 2015)

Lecture with Siri Meyer on self-representation from the Renaissance to social media.

Based on the dual perspective of looking back and moving forward, this talk will explore the
underlying tensions in recent work on paratextual theory and on elements that may – or not – fall
under an evolving definition of what constitutes digital paratext.
Gérard Genette’s paratext theory, presented in this book Seuils (1987; translated and published as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation in 1997), is rooted in print culture and both text- and book-centric – that much is undisputed. As the theory grew in popularity, other types of texts, such as scientific journal articles (namely through the work of Blaise Cronin; see for example Cronin & Franks, 2006) or bibliographic records (Andersen, 2002; Paling, 2002) were thrown into the paratextual ring. Applications of the framework for the analysis of film (Gray, 2010), games (e.g. Burk, 2009), and other cultural products are now well established. This high regard notwithstanding, the recent experience of co-editing the book Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture (with Daniel Apollon and due to be published in July 2014) has shown that scholars from various disciplines assess the value, potential uses, and adaptation of paratextual theory to digital culture quite differently. A mapping of the book’s content will illustrate how paratextual theory finds meaning, first, in studies that position and define digital paratextual elements lato sensu, using the digital shift as background and, one might say, explanation enough; and, second, in research where the stricto sensu definitions of digital paratext, epitext, and peritext are at the core of the debate as scholars explore the tension between the known and the new (often as the printed and the digital, but not always). Although no consensus was reached, the book, in itself, offers data on how scholars from various disciplines view, define, explore, and use the paradigms of paratextual theory in their study of digital culture – whether they perceive the latter as a context, a shift, an evolution, or a rupture. Given this landscape and context, some avenues for further research and collaborations across disciplines will be discussed.
Furthermore, by harnessing content from current research projects, the interest of using
paratextual theory in information science, and more specifically in the study of information
behaviour, will be presented. These projects pertain to the fields of cultural and scientific
production, broadly defined, and use conceptual frameworks drawn from Genette but also from
the works of Robert Darnton (1982) and Robert Bourdieu (1992; 1996). They concern three
major players of the cultural realm: writers (of both scholarly texts and fiction), readers (who now
produce what is at times controversially called user-generated paratexts and who testify openly to their reading experience), and information professionals (who act as facilitators between the two former groups, whether for reference or leisure purposes). The digital age has also made it very clear that these groups are extremely permeable. An overview of preliminary analyses from three different projects will be used to illustrate the relationship between the “content” and the “wrapping”: a group of writers’ views, collected through direct inquiry; the use of acknowledgements in the study of authorship in scholarly communication; and the analysis of
user-generated tags in the virtual cataloguing site Goodreads. The goal is not to create a coherent model at this point, but rather to show how each of these research angles can be supported by thinking “paratextually” about digital culture.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Viewed next to print literature, e-lit appears as a poor copy, a replica(nt) lacking both the genius agency of modernism and the abject subjectivity of postmodernism. In this talk, I will use the concepts of re-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari) and “the open” (Giorgio Agamben) to show how, like Hoffman’s automaton, the “born digital” is powerful precisely because it fails to deceive. Neither preserving nor directly opposing the conventions of print-lit, e-lit functions as a reflecting apparatus that unmasks language and meaning-making as machines through the revelation of its own machine-works. Using multifarious examples from the work of Alan Bigelow, Mez Breeze, Emily Short, Jason Nelson, and others, I will show how these re-inscribe obstruction, glitch, error, randomness and obsolescence as potentiality. In doing so, they repurpose the productive and reproductive functions of writing not for some finite end or product, but for play.

(Source: author's abstract)

In two essays, “Toward a Semantic Literary Web” (2006, ONLINE at http://eliterature.org/pad/slw.html) and “Electronic Literature as World Literature” (2010, Poetics Today), I set out a project for identifying literary qualities and marking literature’s present transformations within new media. The idea in these essays was to discern aesthetic and communicative qualities that I felt could be carried over to the present (e.g., Goethe’s and Marx’s unrealized call for the formation of a world literature “transcending national limits”), and those that could easily go missing (e.g., the materially bounded object whose aesthetic can be recognized and repeated by a generation of authors in conversation with one another).

Trying to hold onto both of these desirable literary qualities, I turn my attention in the present talk to the one place where such conversations are now being staged – not in scholarly journals or social media (online or in print) but rather, in databases. Specifically, I consider the open source, open access literary database. I settle on database construction as a necessary scholarly and technical complement to the creation of works, not for wholly archival purposes, but as a condition or destination for present creativity. The electronic database, by granting authors (and their critics) direct access to present discourse networks, opens possibilities that appear unique to literary writing in new media.

One point of reference in my talk will be the Electronic Literature Organization’s  Electronic Literature Directory (ELD version 2.0). The ELMCIP Knowledge Base, developed by Scott Rettberg in Norway, Simon Biggs in Scotland, and colleagues throughout Scandinavia, The U.S., and Europe, offers another, complementary point of entry. Brief descriptions of other literary archives, developed or in development in Montreal, Providence, Siegen, Sydney, and elsewhere, will indicate how interoperability can work at the level of databases, and how literary collaboration might at last begin to work across disciplines and institutions. I argue that the current, wide-ranging database construction (already a trans-disciplinary collaboration among scholars and programmers), is the necessary precondition to the emergence of the electronic ‘world literature’ that I described some years previously.

(Source: Author's abstract for HASTAC 2013)

Nelson believes today's computer world is based on tekkie misunderstanding of human life and human thought.

These have led to unfortunate traditions and structures: hierarchical directories, the PARC user world (the so-called "modern GUI"), the division of the software world into high-walled applications, WYSIWYG documents (simulating paper under glass that you can't mark or cut up), the redefinition of "cut and paste" from their important meaning of previous centuries, the one-way non-overlappable links of the World Wide Web, the locking of Web pages to Internet locations, XML with its imposed hierarchy and non-overlappable attributes of locked-in descriptors, and now the Semantic Web-- a plan for tekkie committees to standardize the universe of human ideas.

All these, Nelson says, are based on warped notions of how ideas, and people, work, and come from traditions and mind-set of the tekkie community. But it is not too late to provide alternatives, because the problems of the present approaches corrupt our work and lives at every level, and huge improvements are possible.

(Source: Author's abstract, Incubation3 conference site, trAce Archive)