history of electronic literature

Ever since their appearance in the early 1990s, hypertext novels were presented as the pinnacle of digital aesthetics and claimed to represent the revolutionary future of literature. However, as a literary phenomenon, hypertext novels have remained marginal. The article presents some scientifically derived explanations as to why hypertext novels do not have a mass audience and why they are likely to remain a marginal contribution in the history of literature. Three explanatory frameworks are provided: (1) how hypertext relates to our cognitive information processing in general; (2) the empirically derived psychological reasons for how we read and enjoy literature in particular; and (3) the likely evolutionary origins of such a predilection for storytelling and literature. It is shown how hypertext theory, by ignoring such knowledge, has yielded misguided statements and uncorroborated claims guided by ideology rather than by scientifically supported knowledge.

Amid the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), a man named John Peter developed a peculiar system allowing for the procedural generation of Latin poetry. A decade later, in 1677, Peter's system was published in a landmark booklet, titled "Artificial Versifying," whose subtitle proclaims that anyone "that only knows the A.B.C. and can count 9" may use it to produce "true Latin, true verse, and good sense" [1].The system itself centers on six tables in which letters are distributed across grids of cells. To generate a line of poetry, the user first produces a string of six digits (e.g., "952129"). Next, each digit is used to retrieve a sequence of letters from the table corresponding to that digit's position in the string. The letters obtained from a given table form one of nine words contained in that table, and the concatenation of the six chosen words constitutes a line of Latin verse in dactylic hexameter. The system is capable of generating 9^6, or 531,441, lines of verse.As a bizarre forerunner of electronic literature, "Artificial Versifying" was wildly successful: the booklet appeared in three editions, and its procedure was reprinted in books and periodicals for the next 200 years [2-5]. Sadly, Peter's innovative system has received scant treatment by scholars working in this area today [6-9]. This limited coverage is incommensurate to its importance as a groundbreaking work produced centuries ahead of its time. Indeed, its combinatorial method is similar to those employed in early computer poetry, such as Theo Lutz's "Stochastische Texte" [10-11].We have carried out the first translation into English of the "Artificial Versifying" system. While it would be easy to translate any one of the 531,441 hexameter verses that the system can produce, we sought instead to translate the system itself into English. This only entailed translating the 54 words in the six tables, but the process raised a number of interesting challenges nonetheless. The major difficulty is in preserving both meaning and meter, and in total we identified twelve features of the original system that we sought to maintain. In wrangling with interrelations between these features at the level of combinatorics, our design space was not unlike Peter's. While a core aim of this process has been to make "Artificial Versifying" accessible to non-Latin speakers today, this act of translation has helped us to better appreciate the triumph of the system's design.While our project seeks to celebrate an unheralded pioneering effort in the area that became electronic literature, we situate this work amid emerging scholarship on the challenges and opportunities of translating computational textual artifacts. This subarea of translation studies [12] is perhaps best characterized by the Renderings project carried out by Nick Montfort, Piotr Marecki, and other collaborators in the last decade [14-17], though others have taken it up [18-21]. In this paper, we will show that the peculiar considerations inherent in the translation of computational textual artifacts are already present in protocomputational works that are sufficiently procedural, such as "Artificial Versifying."

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)

Electronic (digital) literature is developing in every corner of the world where artists explore the possibility of literary expression using computers (and the internet). As a result, innovations in this genre of literature represent unique developments and there is a growing corpus of scholarship about all aspects of electronic literature including the perspective of digital humanities. Contributors to New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture, a special issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture explore theories and methodologies for the study of electronic writing including topics such as digital culture, electronic poetry, new media art, aspects of gender in electronic literature and cyberspace, digital literacy, the preservation of electronic
literature, etc.

This paper aims at analyzing the historical evolution of poetry experiments in Italian and Portuguese languages. Poetry has always been interested in experimenting with new ways of writing; however the computer and internet media make the experiments with the language a basic question. The first part of this paper will refer to a historical approach tracing the most important breakpoints in the poetry development in Italian and Portuguese languages during the last century. We will focus above all on Italian Futurism and visual poetry and we will connect Italian visual poetry tradition to Brazilian concrete poetry to identify the main characteristics and to define the links between these movements and the contemporaneous epoetry environment. In the second part some Italian Portuguese e-poetries will be presented and analyzed. A close-reading of some famous works will be proposed trying to identify the strategic elements which constitute the poetics of digital text - the infographic images, the poeticity of the elements, theirs [il]legibility, the pluri-signification of the relation image. The third part will allow us to observe if there are some distinctiveness in Italian and Portuguese works due to historical reasons and traditions.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).