humanities

Jacques Derrida famously asserts, “The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality” (Of Grammatology 5). When writing of the ‘future’ here, Derrida points to a way of thinking “beyond the closure of knowledge,” which is to say an absolute danger inasmuch as it betrays all that is by welcoming an unknown and as yet unthought is not. N. Katherine Hayles proclaims electronic literature the future of literature on the strength of its capacity to keep pace with a ‘new’ digital normality, to anchor a new structural center for 21st century literature and safeguard against an otherwise imposing and dangerous future for study in the humanities—a very different ‘danger’ than one to which Derrida alludes. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage the question, “What is electronic literature?” and while readily conceding the force of advancing technologies bring to bear broadly on the production, distribution, and consumption of literature, the thrust of the argument resists conflating “literature” with its medium or delivery technology. Chapter one reorients the question of electronic literature by focusing first on the more anterior question, “What is literature?”—remembering Derrida’s caution in pursuing any ontological delimitation and drawing on the work of Peggy Kamuf among others to assist in parsing a response. Chapter two considers what is essentially new in electronic literature and argues against Hayles’s accounting of media specificity as it underwrites new configurations of literarity. Chapter three attends the question of literarity in the form of ‘monsters’ and reads James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside The Unknown (Scott Rettberg et al. 1999), asking if and in what ways linguistic practices marking Ulysses a definitive act of “literature” can be found at play in electronic literature as well.

A survey of humanities research websites (and how to teach with them) by Susan Schreibman.

(Source: EBR)

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/)

Digital_Humanities is a compact, game-changing report on the state of contemporary knowledge production. Answering the question, “What is digital humanities?,” it provides an in-depth examination of an emerging field. This collaboratively authored and visually compelling volume explores methodologies and techniques unfamiliar to traditional modes of humanistic inquiry--including geospatial analysis, data mining, corpus linguistics, visualization, and simulation--to show their relevance for contemporary culture.

Included are chapters on the basics, on emerging methods and genres, and on the social life of the digital humanities, along with “case studies,” “provocations,” and “advisories.” These persuasively crafted interventions offer a descriptive toolkit for anyone involved in the design, production, oversight, and review of digital projects. The authors argue that the digital humanities offers a revitalization of the liberal arts tradition in the electronically inflected, design-driven, multimedia language of the twenty-first century.

Written by five leading practitioner-theorists whose varied backgrounds embody the intellectual and creative diversity of the field, Digital_Humanities is a vision statement for the future, an invitation to engage, and a critical tool for understanding the shape of new scholarship.

(Source: MIT Press)

The author argues that design of media technologies, media genres and media texts should be an important part of media studies. Design methods in media studies compared to methods in sciences, especially computer science, can yield important results if researchers state their normative position clearly and apply rigorous evaluations of their results. Liestøl’s synthetic–analytic method is analysed as an example of a media design method.

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.

The Internet epistemologist Richard Rodgers describes the latest evolution of digital culture as “the end of the virtual,” a moment at which attention can no longer be confined primarily to integration, encapsulation, or remediation, but must turn instead to natively computational questions and methods. The meaning of this periodic shift is clear enough for the social and information sciences, but less so for the humanities: especially for literature, a field recently split into core and periphery, a home ground of literature-proper set against a hazier outline or outland that has come to be called “the literary.”

This talk begins by subverting the all-too-familiar topos of end-times or elegiac criticism (the end
of some world as we know it), by insisting that end may as easily refer to contour or wrapping as
termination or extinction. That is, an end may also be an edge, a line along which a structure becomes ready-to-hand, or available for manipulation. An end in this sense is an affordance for engagement: commonly, for lifting and carrying.

Equipped with this metaphor, I turn to an interestingly problematic set of digitally native productions,
three examples of Internet-mediated, found composition:
-- Michael Joyce’s “novel of internet,” Was: annales nomadiques
-- K.C. Mohammad’s “flarf” poems collected in The Front
-- Andrei Georghe’s programming project, “The Longest Poem in the World”

Each of these texts involves lifting in two senses: most literally, they use words and phrases lifted or
appropriated from Google, Twitter, and other online sources; at the same time, this light-fingered
procedure lifts and repositions “the literary” at various angles with respect to literature, prompting
serious thinking about their ongoing relationship. Does “the literary” have any use for self-described
writers? What is the nature of language in “the literary?” Joyce locates himself within modern and
postmodern traditions, which have familiar responses to these questions. The same seems at least
partly true for Mohammad, though flarfists seem as anxious about poetry as a profession as they do
about flarf as a program or movement. By contrast, Andrei Gheorghe does not identify as a creative
writer, seems to think of writing as primarily a formal process, and describes his project as purely
technical, even though it meets at least some specifications of verse.

These three texts (admittedly a small and arbitrary sample of a digitally-native literary) may suggest
a trajectory, alignment, or figure, which I will attempt to use as a defining contour of post-virtual literature, especially with regard to certain neo-parodic or reverberative practices they may inspire, or require.

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