cultural production

It is often said that the field of electronic literature is “author driven”. Many established e-literary artists produce their work on their own, publishing it on their personal website, promoting and often even writing interpretations themselves. This however is not the only model present in the global field of digital born literature. The poster is devoted to the Polish institution Korporacja Ha!art and the model of production of e-literature in Poland. The institution is an NGO that runs a professional publishing house, which has published over 500 traditional books, ebooks and audiobooks. It also runs a sort of laboratory for the production of digital born literature by the leading artists in the field in its area of the world. The producer activities of the institution also involve the publication of translations of classic first generation hypertexts (on CDs, which were distributed conventionally through bookstores) and second generation work accessible online. Apart from production itself, Korporacja Ha!art puts an emphasis on building context around the works: its organizes publicity, meetings, reading lessons and, finally, several conferences and a festival, during which works are premiered, presented and discussed. The aim of our poster is to present an analysis of the work model, financing strategies, distribution channels and creation of context around this kind of producer activity. The output is based on the analysis of documents, interviews with artists and producers and our own working practice. We will share the good production practices the organization has developed, and discuss aspects of the economy of the field in our local context. In doing so, we hope to introduce in to the study of electronic literature a new approach, borrowed from the methodology developed by John T. Caldwell in film studies. It is an approach centered around the study of what is called the production culture. Here, we shall apply it to the analysis of the field of production of works of digital literature.

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)

In recent years literature and communication scholars, publishing industry commentators, and technology journalists have declared the death of print. Anxieties over the future of print generally, and the novel, literature, books and literacy more specifically have become commonplace in the mainstream news media, technology blogs, and academic discourse. Despite these claims, people may read more than ever – if we recognize a more expansive set of textual practices under the rubric of that term. Given the number of emails, text messages, status updates, image captions, RSS headlines, tweets, web pages, and comment threads that are processed in the digital everyday, our experience of the world is arguably more textually mediated than ever. Are these cultural practices compatible with prose narrative fiction? Are they capable of forming the basis for network narratives now and in the future?

In this essay I explore the relationship between the novel and communication technologies and practices. I consider whether ‘born-networked’ prose narrative holds a place within the contemporary digital media ecology. I argue that it does, and that it must if there is lasting cultural value in the deep exploration of character, plot, and description that we traditionally associate with longer prose narrative fiction. However, establishing a place for born-networked narrative within contemporary culture requires substantive shifts in production practices in order to better accommodate additive participation. In support of this claim I introduce and compare examples of electronic literature and network culture in which collaborative cultural production practices challenge normative notions of authorship rooted in print production.

(Source: Author's abstract)

In the *Location of Culture*, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. A major site of ambivalence in the realm of digital art and literature lies in the fact that so much of this work exists outside of the economy of exchange and commodified culture. Where lies the future in an art that generates no income for its creators? In a user-generated culture, arts exist at a social interstice (in Nicolas Bourriaud's terms) that might provide a model to evade the pitfalls of consumer culture, commodified objects and monetary exchange. How might the social nature of these works and open source approaches create a space for a new literary/artistic model?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)