communities

This intervention will focus on the circulation of digital literature in the Spanishspeaking context, from a distant reading perspective, analyzing digital literature as information, and its pieces as global artifacts in circulation. The aim is to discover how local processes co-exist and dialogue in a global network that is changing the way that texts are distributed and accessed, and it is modifying the very essence of texts themselves.

I am interested in whether e-lit in Spanish can be “understandable” at a globallevel due to the fact that its works have, in theory, an “unlimited” reach in terms of distribution and reception. Digital literature deals with the globalizing agents of the technological medium itself and of its system of circulation, as well as its technical, linguistic and cultural possibilities. We cannot forget that digital inequality is real, and that it has effects both at the level of production and at the level of reception. We will address if the Spanish language creates a homogeneous community of readers and if Spanish is a good unifying agent for the readers of digital literature. Around what affections and sensibilities have virtual communities of digital literature readers grown up, around what themes, genres, or specific digital creations? Are digital libraries or repositories responsible for creating culturally active reading communities? AreSpanish virtual communities of readers numerous and heterogeneous or, on thecontrary, are they concentrated in large uniform groupings? We will explore in what way the virtual space of Spanish e-lit circulation affect the physical and ubiquitous space with which it overlaps, the “real” territory. As well as if they are intertwined and how they affect each other.

This is the book of abstracts and catalogs of ELO 2017: Affiliations, Communities, Translations.  It includes abstracts to all workshops, roundtable discussions, lightning talks, research papers and panels, readings, performances and screenings, and exhibitions that are part of ELO 2017 conference and festival at UFP and other venues in Porto, Portugal.

For more information, see the individual elements of the programme.

Electronic literature exists at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and STEM: an acronym that itself defines a contested battleground of technical skills. The lack of diversity in STEM has received considerable scrutiny, and computer-related fields particularly suffer from a lack of diversity. Salter notes that this has contributed to the rise of “brogrammer” culture in disciplines with strong computer science components, and with it a rhetorical collision of programming and hypermasculine machismo. Brogrammer culture is self-replicating: in technical disciplines, the association of code with masculinity and men’s only spaces plays a pivotal role in reinforcing the status quo. Given this dramatic under-representation of women in computer science disciplines, the privileging of code-driven and procedural works within the discourse of electronic literature is inherently gendered. The emergence of platforms friendly to non-coders (such as Twine) broadens participation in electronic literature and gaming space, but often such works are treated and labeled differently (and less favorably) from code-driven and procedural works that occupy the same space. Salter argues that electronic literature communities must be aware of the gendered rhetoric and socialization surrounding code, and be vigilant against the tendency to value code (and, by extension, male-coded labor) over content when evaluating works in this form.

(Source: http://kathiiberens.com/)

From the perspective of Library and Information Science, Belov presents an investigation into curating electronic literature in public libraries. Specifically, he addresses the "Digital Arena Electronic Literature Reading Series" produced by the University of Bergen Digital Culture Program and the Bergen Public Library.

This paper originates from a conference paper presented and published in the book collection OLE Officina di Letteratura Elettronica. The here presented paper publication appears with minor edits.German net literature had an early and very public start through competitions organized in 1996-8 by the major newspaper Die Zeit and IBM, but was declared dead or stillborn immediately afterwards. Consequently, net literature became a subject of controversy between artists, theorists, and literary critics from which not only a strong community evolved but also a literary system. In this system, competitions served as public, peer-reviewed mediators for net literature and became an important feature of “post-processing.” Since the end of the 90s however, German net literature became slowly invisible. The lack of public awareness of net literature is common to many countries. Post-processing is a key for public visibility and according to Siegfried J. Schmidt et al. an important component in a literary system. In search of reasons for the state of invisibility of German net literature, I analyze mechanisms of post-processing in our community, which I regard as a literary system. This descriptive synopsis is the first paper in an upcoming series that opens up questions towards the role of peer-review, public reception, and artists' community-building. 

After the completion of the ELMCIP double-issue on “Electronic Literature Communities”, the international e-lit community seems to us a kind of hypertext with many intertwined threads. If Electronic Literature were a building, it would be a mansion with many rooms, many architects, and many builders – different human and computer languages could be heard pouring forth from each wing, and diverse materials and styles represented in various parts of the building, but all would share a common room at the center. Without adhering to any specific shared agenda, the communities documented here are evolving in conversation with each other. The two issues together offer many beginnings, and many histories of electronic literature which each have their own histories and trajectories and together provide a holistic impression of a field in the process of becoming.

Without having been particularly asked to, many authors of this double-issue sought to draw the beginnings of “their” field in a way that identifies with a national identity or shared language, just as many historical literary communities have identified themselves. The two issues have included perspectives of literary community from France, Norway, Catalonia, Spain, UK, Netherlands, and the United States. (read here Part I)

A more personal narrative of becoming part of a community of practice is represented in the second issue with the contribution of Norwegian poet Ottar Ormstad who shows how his artistic practice as a concrete poet moved digital and thereby points out the importance and role the e-lit community played in this process. His personal shift towards electronic literature is identified with the e-Poetry festival 2007 in Paris, which provide him with a gateway to the community. (read here)

In his contribution, Loss Pequeño Glazier describes the beginnings of the community that established that very important festival. Glazier tracks the foundation of the Electronic Poetry Center in 1994, along with the launch of the Poetics List (Charles Bernstein in 1993) and demonstrates the connections between e-Poetry and a longer tradition of experimental poetry. Historical notes from the listserv from that time feed his contribution. (read here)

Likewise, Laura Borras Castanyer connects the institutional work of Hermeneia and the creative production of electronic literature both in Catalan and in a Hispanic context more generally. Her narrative offers connections between the complex situation of language and identity in historical and contemporary Catalonia, the history of avant-garde writing in that cultural contexts, and the contemporary work of electronic literature. (read here)

In search of origins, authors in this double-issue have provided us with landmarks to find our way through these histories, remembering events, journal launches, mailing lists, formal processes of institutionalization, publications of creative work, and other happenings that served as impetus for communities to take shape.

A completely different type of beginning is sketched out by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig who introduce us to a new genre: “netprov” and in a twitterlogue converse and contemplate over this genre’s origins and potentialities. (read here) Andres Løvlie also presents a particular experimental writing practice he has developed to facilitate public contributions to a system for locative literature: texttopia. In discussing the conditions for creative community, his article also speaks to Rob Wittig’s contribution on “Shyness, Cushions, and Food: Case Studies in American Creative Communities” in first installment of this double-issue.

Collaborative practices in electronic literature were of particular interest in four additional papers that address collaboration from differentangles.

In this respect, David Meurer positions born-networked writing practices within contemporary culture and emerging cultural production practices and discusses challenges to the authorship model common to print. (read here) Authorship and collaborative production also is addressed by Yra van Dijk who investigates into Dutch e-lit and explores aspects of collaborative practices represented in the paratexts of selected works. (read here)

A contribution written in through collaboration that blends two (seemingly) disparate fields of practice can be found in “Creative Practice and Experimental Method in Electronic Literature and Human Experimental Psychology” by Andrew Michael Roberts, Lisa Otty, Martin H. Fischer and Anna Katharina Schaffner. Here, the authors present close readings of works from a fresh view new to e-lit: psychology that takes into account the cognitive processes of reading as well as the tradition of concrete poetry and its relation to new digital experiments. In reference to works by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and other works of electronic literature as well as concrete poetry they explore how the locus of tension “shifts from meaning to process” and ask: “does the author / text / programme control our reading, or can we use our sense-processing and cognitive abilities to master that process?”

Finally, Jerome Fletcher and Lisa Somma situate plans for a new e-lit community in “Offshore of Writing: E-literature and the Island”, regarding islands and the views of the mainland offered from their shores as metaphors for creative practices taking place in digital media. These creative communities taking shape are operating at some distance from the “mainland” of mainstream culture, but taking advantage of the freedoms made available by this distance and divergence, and perhaps developing new models of social relations between creative collaborators, between artists and critics, and between forms of artistic practice.

(Source: Dichtung Digital 42)

This talk for the Archive & Innovate conference will present to the ELO community a new major research project and research network focused on electronic literature in Europe. ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project that will run from Spring 2010-2013 and funded under the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) theme: 'Humanities as a Source of Creativity and Innovation.' ELMCIP involves seven European research partners (University of Bergen, Edinburgh College of Art, Blekinge Technical Institute, Univeristy College Falmouth, University of Jyväskylä, University of Amsterdam, and University of Ljubjlana) and one non-academic partner (New Media Scotland) who will investigate how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
The research goals of the project are to:
• Understand how creative communities form and interact through distributed media
• Document and evaluate various models and forces of creative communities in the field of electronic literature
• Examine how electronic literature communities benefit from current educational models and develop pedagogical tools
• Study how electronic literature manifests in conventional cultural contexts and evaluate the effects of distributing and exhibiting e-lit in such contexts.
The outcomes of the project will include:
• Series of case studies and research papers (for publications and conferences)
• Series of public seminars
• Online knowledge base (including materials from seminars, project information and an extensive bibliographic record of e-lit works)
• Pedagogy workshop and anthology (Resulting in extensive documentation, presented as an accessible website and DVD-ROM)
• International conference in 2013 in Edinburgh
• Public exhibition of electronic literature artworks and performances
• Openly distributed publications (conference proceedings, exhibition catalog, project documentation and a DVD anthology of e-lit works)
With a budget of just under €1,000,000 we can anticipate that the project will have a major impact on the field of electronic literature and present numerous opportunities to authors and scholars of electronic literature. In the presentation at the ELO conference in particular, my goal will be to identify opportunities for individual artists, writers and scholars of electronic literature to contribute to and to collaborate with ELMCIP, and also to identify some and discuss ways that we can develop mutually beneficial research collaborations between ELMCIP, the ELO, and other international organizations active in the field of electronic literature.