digital literature

In Electronic Writing, what often becomes more essential than the narrative is how the computational elements are brought into the fold of storytelling with the text at its centre (Heckman and O’Sullivan 2018). It is true but not uniform across all spaces of creative production. Collaborative efforts like We Are Angry | Experience have been very successful in using the online space to deliver a powerful message. But, in a space like India, the digital divide also dictates the mode of storytelling, especially when it comes to solo ventures. When we think about Indian online narratives, the most common instances reach us via social media (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2018). Despite its reach, the extent of experimentation is rather low. That is why much of the writing can also be found on blogs hosted by websites like WordPress or Blogger. Yet, from personal experience of online writing, as most of the readership is found on mobile phones, the amount of media that can be incorporated is also limited. It is limited because, in a space like India, many people still do not have access to a standard internet connection to view the multimodal elements.My paper proposes to address how individual storytellers, i.e., the people who write, design, and publish narratives all by themselves, without any collective or institutional support, who are forced to be minimal, go about telling stories in the online mode. My central research questions would be to understand: 1) the markers of Indian-ness (if any will vary from a case to case basis as it is impossible to reduce a culture to certain markers) in the narratives 2) the socio-cultural background of people who are telling these stories 3) the platforms they are choosing to tell these stories. To gather the data, I intend to float a short survey in various research and writing communities and use the dra. ft | Future of Text (@dra_ft_) • Instagram photos and videos archive to develop my hypothesis. Via analysis, I hope to understand the type, mode, and platform(s) most accessible for storytelling in the Indian online space.

(Source: author's own abstract)

Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.The Fugue* book (ELC II; 2008) turns the reader into the author and protagonist of the same story he is reading and his real-life friends turn into fictional characters. Both obsessively harass him in a violent, sensual plot: with crimes, envy (including literary one), false attributions of authorship and bitter disputes in forums and social networks. Technically, the work is based on the idea of remixing and "mashup" and integrates elements as diverse as the Facebook APIs, applications in PHP and Javascript languages, automatic emails, PDF self-generation or speech synthesis. You can see a video of the work (https://youtu.be/m4UW5uo_H4M) which cannot be read right now due to the obsolescence of the Adoble Flash software.Technologies and platforms in this work are related to creation, not to edition or distribution, which supposes main problems and diverse derivatives of the technologies, like the need of continuous technological update, costs, dependence on the work to the availability of the technology and of the platforms, like for example, to other people's conditions, subjection to technological evolution of the platforms and the introduction of third parties, the big platforms, in the very heart of the works. This literary fiction is constructed with interaction, multimedia, language technologies, data obtained from the Internet and data provided by the reader, ingredients all of which involve well-known and used technologies and platforms.However, the reading pact that introduces us to fiction, reconfigures these platforms along different reading paths. The use of the wide range of platforms builds the plausibility of the stories and ironically places them at the center of the digital landscape in a critical review of the platforms themselves. The theme is distilled, refined, and focuses on the dehumanization of relationships between people, the text-context relationship, public and private space, the real self and masks (authorship, deception and plagiarism), gender literary texts and their analogy with the types of platforms… Texts and spaces related to a communicative situation completely out of literary creation make it possible for all these fragments to function as parts of a single literary narrative.Reading The Fugue* book is an intelligent, amusing and critical experience, with the subtle background of the complexity of the human being able to create (the) networks with words. When digital accelerates the hybridization of the arts, only the centrality of the word defines literature.

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

Recent researches have revealed some of the factors that seem to hinder both the production of digital literary contents for young readers and their diffusion in the school context. Within the framework of the project led by Nathalie Lacelle (2017-2020) and dedicated to accompanying the development of digital children’s publishing initiatives in Quebec, three major issues have particularly emerged:- a lack of knowledge about the current editorial offer, by educators, librarians and, more generally, by common readers;- a difficulty in including e-literary creations in the school canon and in conceiving pertinent educative materials, that seems to be mostly provoked by an unfamiliarity with the poetics and the rhetoric of digital texts;- a lack of understanding, by creators and publishers, of the young readers’ psycho-cognitive and affective specificities, as well as of the constraints and conditions that define the school reading process.In order to reduce these limitations, to stimulate the reading practices and, at the same time, to develop young readers’ competencies in digital literacy, a website dedicated to children’s digital literature has been conceived, in partnership with the Littérature Québecoise Mobile group, directed by Bertrand Gervais: Lab-yrinthe.The website is intended as a virtual laboratory on contemporary children’s digital literary phenomena and aims at providing information based on scientific observations, as well as conceptual and didactic tools to educators, publishers and researchers.More particularly, Lab-yrinthe presents a catalog of heterogeneous digital literary works produced or distributed in Quebec, including enriched books, mobile apps, narrative video games, geolocated narrations, augmented reality creations, interactive theater performances, virtual installations and podcasts. Each creation is analyzed from a set of descriptive parameters conceived by the research team (Acerra, Lacelle et al., 2021) with the purpose to illustrate the semiotic, multimodal and technological materials of the text, as well as the poetic or rhetoric effects of their combinations. From this basis, some educational and didactic suggestions are depicted: teachers can refer to this section to find a reading key of the digital work and, at the same time, to have clear examples of the possible exploitations of a digital writing process in the school context.Finally, a dedicated section of the Lab-yrinthe website presents the main co-creation and co-production projects, carried out with partners from the cultural industry (ranging from the National television, to the Montréal Poetry Festival and Bookfair, from digital and analog publishers to National libraries and archives). In this case, both the actors, the contents and the distribution conditions are presented as indicators of the current orientations of the digital publishing field.BibliographyAcerra, E., Lacelle, N., et al. (2021, in press). « Décrire les œuvres littéraires numériques pour la jeunesse », Lire, comprendre, interpréter et apprécier des supports composites, La Lettre de l’AIRDF, n° 68.Lacelle, N., et al. (2017-2020). Soutien au développement de démarches d’édition numérique jeunesse au Québec à partir de pratiques favorables de production, diffusion et réception. Research project financed by the Fonds de Recherche Société et Culture (Québec).

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

The recently formed Dutch Digital Literature Consortium – a partnership of researchers from Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Royal Library of the Netherlands and local libraries – aims to develop and launch an online catalogue of digital literature, created in the Netherlands and Flanders, and turn this collection into a publicly accessible digital catalogue. The project draws inspiration from comparable databases, such as the Electronic Literature Collection 1-3, NT2, Hermaneia, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica. Whereas these databases bring together digital literary projects from a variety of traditions – often with a particular focus –, the project at hand focuses exclusively on works from a specific geographical location (much like collections such as the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection).The development of such a database gives rise to several theoretical and methodological questions that are central to the study of e-lit: which works and genres are eligible to be included in the database, and on what grounds is this selection made? Practical decisions critically hinge on the fundamental question what digital literature is. This question has been answered – explicitly and implicitly – by different actors and institutions involved with e-lit, such as funding institutions, libraries, and other ‘gatekeepers’. Such institutions are significant because they are responsible for the material and the symbolic production of digital literature. As Yra van Dijk points out, digital works are ‘not autonomous, in the sense that they are in fact funded and sometimes initiated by some institution, mostly in the end by the government itself’ (2012, 2). If, as Florian Cramer claims, ‘electronic literature ha[s] established itself as a field in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, i.e. as an area of production and discourse with intrinsic distinctions and authorities’ (2012, 1), then we need to consider how these authorities push digital literature in specific directions.While acknowledging that digital literature is also a transnational phenomenon, this paper analyses the ways in which institutions shape digital literature in specific techno-cultural contexts. The Low Countries share a language and – to a great extent – a literary tradition, while they also differ significantly culturally and institutionally. When one pays attention to the institutional frameworks, the specificity of the Dutch versus Flemish digital literature tradition is brought into focus. The institutional approach that I advocate thus does not only do justice to the multidimensional and changing nature of digital literature, it also takes into account the differences across linguistic areas and nation states.The question what counts as ‘literature’ is answered differently over time and in specific geographic contexts. The same holds true for the question what belongs to the realm of the ‘digital’. Therefore, this institutional approach is twofold, 1) I examine which digital genres and individual works are considered literary, and 2) I examine what is considered digital within these specific contexts. The theoretical overview of the institutional framework of digital literature in the Low Countries offers a solid starting point for the Consortium’s position on the practical, methodological questions raised above.

(Source: The author's abstract)

This thesis conducts a critical investigation into digital literature—a genre of literary expression that is integrated with, and articulated using, digital computing systems and infrastructures. Specifically, it presents a framework for evaluating the expressive capacities of this genre as it relates to particular conceptions of knowledge-making in the contemporary technocultural environment. This framework reveals how the generation of critical knowledge concerning digital literature, as crystallised through a reader’s material engagements with specific works, enacts a ‘performative’ conception of knowing and being, in which the observable world is treated as emerging in the real time of practice—as being articulated through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies, rather than existing as a fixed array of passive, unchanging primitives. Digital literature is presented subsequently as a model of this greater performative vision—as a means of evaluating the structures and processes that manifest it, particularly within digital systems, and for assessing its practical and political implications for art and culture more broadly. In so doing, this thesis aims to justify the value of engaging digital literature from a standpoint that is more expressly political, contending not only that these texts are revealing of key processes shaping digital activities, artefacts, and environments, but are enacting alternative vectors of thought and practice concerning them.

Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.

The diasporic reading framework uses diaspora, in this specific case the Asian diaspora, as a concept that helps us interpret the techniques, forms, and content of digitally-influenced poetry produced since the 1980s. In turn, this reading also allows us to see how the experimentations of these poets enrich the conventional categorizations of Asian diasporic writing. To this end, I gather an archive of literary works that includes the poetry of more renowned and canonically accepted poets (e.g. Leung Ping-kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Wah) as well as less easily categorized genres by lesser known individuals and groups (e.g. multi-media works, blogs, public projects) in order to read them together productively.

The first chapter of my dissertation uses poetry from Hong Kong as a case study to establish my definition of diaspora and build a theoretical basis for using it as a reading framework. The second chapter takes this framework and applies it to works beyond Hong Kong, demonstrating its portability as well as showing how the abstraction of shared land into non-physical spaces is a powerful way to understand works that have previously been considered only post-colonialist, only nationalist, or only feminist. Chapter three applies this reading further to works that experiment with form using digital technology, and the final chapter revisits previous themes in light of new advances in social media. I conclude that the political stakes of diaspora as a reading framework is its function as a tactic against hegemony.

Electronic literature (e-lit) constitutes one of the most innovative and exciting literary forms occurring today; it is the unique child of this new technological age. Scandinavian e-lit is no exception, yet it has frequently been overlooked by literary academics in both the United States and Scandinavia. This dissertation investigates how Scandinavian e-lit engages with printed Scandinavian literature, and how critical analysis of Scandinavian literature can benefit from an understanding of e-lit. In this dissertation I argue that, far from relegation to the outer margins of Scandinavian literary research and studies, Scandinavian e-lit, and scholarship on such works, ought to occupy a central position in the field, alongside print-based counterparts. Such a shift in focus would create a new vantage point from which Scandinavianists could analyze canonical and contemporary works of print-based Scandinavian literature.

Chapter one addresses the effect of the corporeal body on the electronic text and the reading experience, while the second chapter examines Scandinavian works of e-lit to investigate how these resemble and/or distinguish themselves from codex-based literature. Chapter three provides a detailed, close reading of Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive by Swedish poet-artist Johannes Heldén, as an example of analytical approaches to works with multi-modal capacities. Finally, chapter four discusses the institutional support, and new analytical tools Scandinavian literary scholars are developing to effectively research, evaluate, and teach this form of literature. In short, this dissertation explores what Scandinavian e-lit is, what its relationship to conventional literature is, how it functions, and how we can understand it.

My hope is that future Scandinavian literary scholarship, and academic study will not only incorporate works of Scandinavian e-lit into these activities, but that their inclusion will become routine. Integrating the study of e-lit into established literary practice not only offers opportunities to understand literary movements, themes, styles and relationships among works of Scandinavian literature (as its print-based counterpart does), but it also affords the opportunity to reconsider the nature and potential of literature itself. As such, it is a bright field of potential, as well as an innovative, fascinating form of contemporary literary art.

Seiça describes modification as an art practice meant to subvert and divert from what we—as readers, spectators, and also consumers—expect from technological apparati and platforms. He extends the study of mods to “lit mods”—including art, games, and literature.

In particular, Seiça notes that the learning curve for modding has changed: where in the past, it may have taken a certain amount of user knowledge, modification may now be automated (for instance, through Instagram filters). More importantly, he asks what lit mods show us about literary practice and literary criticism. Where fast-moving content—fast-moving e-literature and e-poetry included—may defy interpretation, so analysis is strengthened by breaking down their mechanisms.

(Source: publisher)

This paper analyses the use of ‘the coast’, particularly the coast of England’s South-West Peninsular, as a site for deconstruction in the works of a number of intermedia poet-artists. It is based primarily on selected readings of digital literature works which specifically engage with the South-West coast, covering works by Mark Goodwin, Andrew Fentham, Penny Florence and JR Carpenter (including the latest work by JR Carpenter ‘This is a Picture of Wind’, shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018). The reading considers the texts’ representations of ‘coasts’ and ‘peninsulars’ and their relationship to the de-stabilisation and frustration of positions of authority and authoritative structures (especially positions and structures of nationalism and sexism). The South-West peninsular can itself be considered de-centred and eccentric, remote from England’s administrative and financial centres and with a rich history of translocal interactions and migrations (c.f. Natalie Pollard) between other peripheral artistic and cultural regions and nations (especially those with Celtic heritage). Moreover the peninsular has attracted major canonical artists and writers since at least the 18th century, including (among many other) JM Turner, William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost and Patrick Heron. In 20th century poetry Cornwall has been resident to translocal migrants WS Graham and Peter Redrove, in addition to many of the Radical Landscape Poets (considering especially those anthologized in Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant) and a wide range of British avant-garde poets, all of whom draw on the coast metaphor. This paper draws on this rich tradition of modernist and post-modern poetics and fine art practices, and relates it to the work of contemporary intermedia digital poetry and art practitioners who engage with the same landscape. Coasts can be considered as liminal and transient spaces, unstable, ever-changing and fluxatious, cycling through daily, lunar-monthly and yearly patterns. Beaches and sand-dunes shift, cliffs open into caves and collapse, solid seemingly changes into liquid and vice-versa, and the landscape provides a gestural sign of the ancient cumulative attrition of water and wind. Coastlines, may seemingly de-limit like borders and boundaries, but the reality is far from binary. Coastal and Peninsular communities can act as refuges for de-centred artistic practices. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro points to bohemian coastal Brighton, to where eventually ‘all the freaks wash down.’ Perhaps the South-West peninsular has a similar magnetism for eccentric practices. This paper interrogates this metaphor and its related structures. What are the implications of peninsularity, how is eccentricity utilised for deconstruction, why is the SouthWest coast a particularly appealing symbolic field? More specifically, how are these structures used in intermedia digital poetry practices to de-stabilise and frustrate positions and structures of authority (especially positions of sexism and nationalism). Pointing to established critical work by (among others) Johanna Drucker, JR Carpenter and Scott Rettberg, the paper will also provoke questions about the production and distribution networks of digital literature, which analogously and sometimes self-consciously de-centre and de-stablise authority.