accessibility

The Electronic Literature Second Tuesday Salon will discuss specific actions and solutions for ensuring that everyone can explore and enjoy electronic literature. Join us for breakout rooms for brainstorm sessions.* Electronic literature writing and reading solutions-- what are the barriers to finding, reading and writing e-lit and how can we address these? Samya Brata Roy moderating*Electronic literature conference solutions--what are the conferences out there, how do we make these more accessible? Maria Mencia moderating*Electronic literature discourse -- what are scholarly issues (curriculum, criticism, etc. that disadvantage specific groups, and how can we address these (e.g., canon, literary value, academia vs. practice, North American-centricity, etc.)? Lai-Tze Fan moderating* Electronic curriculum--how do we infuse and include electronic literature in classrooms and universities? What are the scholarly barriers? Sarah Lozier-Laiola moderating

Note that these conversations will not be recorded, but solutions will be placed in a living Google Doc for further expansion.

(Salon Invitation)

Background

At a recent ELO meeting about options for increasing the accessibility of Deena Larsen’s work "Chronic", Deena mentioned us that the next ELO Virtual salon would be dedicated to the topic of accessibility. Since I am writing an essay about the accessibility of electronic literature, Deena invited me to share my work-in-process at the salon.

Presentation

My essay rewrites and overwrites, with all the political and creative connotations those terms contain, Joseph Tabbi’s essay "Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint" through the lens of disability. Using three small case studies, I explore the concept of digital accessibility through the concepts of defamiliarization and writing under constraint.

Electronic literature uses defamiliarization to provide a powerful force against mainstream rhetoric surrounding digital media, considering reader engagement and reflection in its success rather than attention counted in time and size of the audience. Using Eugenio Tisselli's The Gate as a case study, I argue that for a work to defamiliarize, its authors need to consider what is familiar to a variety of audiences.

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. I argue that constraints can become meaningful through  the lens of disability because you have to interrogate your medium by making it more accessible. I use Franci Greyling's Byderhand as an example.

Not every work can be made accessible for everyone, but one must still think through which groups of people are systematically excluded. Through the case study of Lyle Skains' No World 4 Tomorrow, I argue that considering accessibility is key in successfully addressing the intended audience.

Discussion

During the long and engaged discussion that followed, we considered various elements of accessibility, including the overlap and difference between literary constraints and accessibility restraints, the necessity of identifying intended audiences, how to experience works created by disabled authors. More practically, we discussed various approaches that could help us improve the Accessible Bits document, including types of tagging and spider graphs.

In electronic literature, the practice of writing under constraint is widely accepted as a creative catalyst; through self-imposed textual restraints, we find new meanings and forms. At the same time, some of us are often reading and writing under constraint due to various disabilities. Yes, we can describe electronic literature as “formally inventive” in its wide use of multimedial writing, but no text or its reception is purely formal because it is always material, situational, and embodied as well.

Bringing up accessibility of these texts generally leads to a knee-jerk reaction: "I don’t want to be limited", "it would stifle my creative freedom", or, god forbid, "why does everything have to be so politically correct?" What if we move past this initial resistance not toward denial, rejection, or a resigned compliance, but with the same creative energy that we allow other forms of writing under constraint?

This essay rewrites Joe Tabbi’s essay “Electronic Literature as World Literature, or, the Universality of Writing under Constraint” through the lens of disability. I explore the concept of digital accessibility by speculating upon what accessible electronic literature can be.

(Conference abstract)

Abby Adams discusses the challenges from the perspective of an archive, providing insights into the specific role of an institution’s archive in regards to making works accessible to the public.

In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; English translation, 1997), Gérard Genette provided scholars with the seminal concept of paratext: functional elements of the book (such as covers, title pages, illustrations, footnotes, etc.) that help to fulfill the text’s destiny (p. 408) by making it present for the reader (p. 1).

Today, the book often escapes the boundaries of the tangible object of Genette’s study, as is the case with The Unknown – The Original Great American Hypertext Novel. This born-digital collaborative work, so far from Genette’s perception and yet so suited to his views, is a goldmine of thresholds, namely through the source code, which the reader is invited to explore in parallel with the content and navigation provided in the published pages (Gillespie et al., 1999).

This paper combines outlooks from two disciplines, held together by a shared interest in the study of digital culture. The field of information studies provides a qualitative content analysis of the creators’ information-sharing practices and outlines issues of access and retrieval; the literary studies field offers a textual analysis, relating the paratext to the text in order to determine whether the former fulfills what Genette called its “literary function”.

Together, these perspectives reveal how measuring this work against Genette’s framework paves the way for an interdisciplinary study of digital culture. Here, as the concept of book hovers so near the edge it might yet fall over, the paratext may truly be the threshold we need to step inside its new, parallel, and virtual reality.

Source: Authors Abstract

Throughout history, stewards of cultural heritage collections have advocated for technologies of external memory based on their proven ability to endure into the future. Despite studies that demonstrate how zeros and ones inscribed on digital media often stand up well to the ravages of time, the long-term preservation of the content they encode—particularly in the field of electronic literature—has proven to be a challenge. This is because the accessibility of electronic literature depends as much on the preservation of bit-streams as on the long-term viability of specialized computing environments and their constituent hardware and software components, thereby placing works of electronic literature at considerably greater risk of disappearance than their analog predecessors. Although authors of electronic literature have cultivated a growing awareness of best practices in digital preservation, they still lack tools designed with the posterity of their creations in mind. This paper explores these issues, as well as the question of ephemerality for electronic literature, by assessing contemporary digital formats within the broader history of preservation technologies.

The old rites of literature are quickly starting to come to a head, and as we move through the 21st century we will find ourselves staring into new modes of expression of literary concepts that we have known only on the printed page for centuries prior. Meta-fiction not only allows for new ways of approaching a narrative but also new ways of approaching literature in general, including electronic literature. Questioning the boundaries between the reader and the writer, the audience and the performer, the characters in the text and the ones reading it, one might say that meta-fiction was one of the first forms of hypertext mediums in which the reader was encouraged to draw on outside influences and information to arrive at the heart of the text. This understanding of meta-fiction, then, makes it an appropriate place to begin an analysis of new modes of discourse and the variability of the messages presented. In such a textually-conscious style of writing, how does the narrative alter according to the mode of presentation while still retaining a questioning and awareness of the literary roots? How does electronic writing make itself particularly appropriate for these sorts of questions? Exploration of such fictional representations that bring to the forefront the act of writing allow for identification of several competing and differing aspects of meta-fictional works and corresponding electronic literature: the accessibility to the reader, the role of imagination and the uncertainty of the truth of its representations, a self-consciousness about language, the changing role of the author, and a sense of play about the work of writing and reading about the lives of others.

Reaching out to new readers of electronic literature is now easier, thanks to the widespread use
and accessibility of digital media--computers, smartphones, electronic tablets, gaming consoles.
The channels are in place, but how do new audiences discover and read electronic literature?
This paper will present two case studies of two different events whose purpose is to introduce
readers to electronic literature. Both cases show how managing the performative aspects of electronic literature and its context is essential to engage new readers.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)

State of the Arts: The Proceedings of the Electronic Literature Organization's 2002 State of the Arts Symposium & 2001 Electronic Literature Awards. Published as a book with CD-ROM. The CD includes the winning works as well as most of the shortlisted works, video files and photos of the 2001 awards ceremony, and audio of keynotes from the 2002 State of the Arts symposium.