identity

Due to the constant threat of technological obsolescence, documentation practices of archiving and database construction are of vital importance, to warrant that artists and scholars can continue developing and understanding this field of practice and study. To this end, multiple e-lit databases are being developed in the context of research projects.Within the field of Digital Humanities, database construction is too often regarded merely as a preparatory task. But from the perspective of its developers, the e-lit database is both a research space, a form of dissemination, and a cultural artefact in itw own right. By no means neutral containers, database carry out diverse processes including storage, distribution, and exposition. Scholarship and artistic practice entangle: scholars attempt to document and research a field. Artists interrogate the database structure in their works, and the production of databases further develops the field, which leads to more (varied) creation and dissemination of electronic literature.This article examines how the database form increasingly in-forms and infiltrates electronic literature and becomes an aesthetic in its own right. We compiled a research collection in the ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity in Practice) Knowledge Base, consisting of works that reflect on the fact that they are part of a database, by taking on its formal characteristics. We consider how scholarship and artistic practice entangle: scholars attempt to document and research a field, and artists interrogate the database structure in works and the production of databases develops the field, which leads to more (varied) production of electronic literature.We analyze three works of electronic literature: Identity Swap Database by Olia Lialina and Heath Bunting (1999), Dictionary of the Revolution by Amira Hanafi (2017), and Her Story (2016) by Sam Barlow. Embedded in the database, these works reflect a variety of roles for databases in digital culture. Our analyses will shed light on the multifarious roles that databases play in the field of electronic literature—as storage of information, platforms for dissemination, artistic artefacts, and as a methodological tools for critical thinking about the construction of the field itself. In particular, we focus on three functions of databases that are amplified by electronic literature: reflection on online appropriation of identity and data use; commemoration or preservation; and an exercise in empathy.

This innovative reader addresses the social, cultural, political, and educational implications of today’s burgeoning information and communication technologies in substantial critical depth. Using three broad human themes—Constructing Identity, Building Community, and Seeking Knowledge—this brief freshman reader engages students in exciting rhetorical issues, including "Gender Online," "The Global Village," and "Information Overload and New Media." In each case, hopeful and optimistic views are balanced with incisive technology criticism, helping to make cutting-edge social issues intellectually coherent and accessible to your students.

Source: www.amazon.de

The LdoD Archive proposes a model for virtualizing the Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, which simulates textual and bibliographic processes in the conceptual and material production of this work. By placing digital facsimiles in the context of their topographic transcriptions, the LdoD Archive shows the relations of document to text and text to document. By placing both facsimiles and topographical transcriptions in the context of experts’ editions, the LdoD Archive further illuminates the relations of text to work and work to the text. To the extent that each text of each edition can be variably contextualized within an archive of authorial and editorial witnesses, functionalities of analysis and comparison in LdoD Archive highlight the very process of constructing the text from the documents, and the work from the text. Thus, the construction of the book, based on either authorial plans or posthumous editorial decisions, becomes an instantiation of the process of identity and difference that allows text and work to emerge from a set of inscriptional traces and from acts of reading and interpreting those traces. Besides those features of representational simulation (of the authorial genetics of the text, and its editorial socialization between 1982 and 2012), the LdoD Archive offers a set of functionalities of performative simulation that allow interactors to reconceptualize and rematerialize the work at editorial and authorial levels. This dynamic and social layer of the LdoD Archive enables the reediting – i.e., the selection, organization and annotation of fragments – and rewriting of text – i.e., the creation of variations anchored in specific passages of the fragments. This simulation of literary performativity in the LdoD Archive – encoded and programmed through the reader, book, editor, and author functions – is one of the conceptual and technical achievements of the LdoD Archive. Despite their high value as teaching and research resources, many digital projects remain confined to the expert scholarly community. In the digital archive devoted to Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (Arquivo LdoD, http://ldod.uc.pt, published in 2017) we experimented with Web 2.0 techniques in constructing a social edition where expert and common users – in their regular studying, reading, and writing practices – can engage in the creation and publication of new versions of the book. Within this reading, editing and writing space, users are invited to engage with the Book of Disquiet by playing different roles. The aim of this paper is to describe how the role of the interactors is constrained by the functionalities and the interface of the LdoD Archive, on one hand, and to show how actual users, in formal and informal contexts, have appropriated those functionalities, on the other. We will present the early testing results of the platform functionalities, in terms of users’ interaction. The data will be collected through specific activities with a small virtual group, considering in particular the dynamic processes of editing, annotating, glossing, and rewriting the texts. Through the integration of computational tools in a simulation space, the LdoD Archive provides an open exploration of the procedurality of the digital medium. As both conceptual and technical artifact it contains an innovative model for digital editing and digital writing. By recreating the universe of the Book of Disquiet according to ludic principles of textual manipulation, the LdoD Archive explores reading, editing, and writing practices according to a simulation rather than a representation rationale. The simulation of literary practices contained in the LdoD Archive attempt to address the gap between digital humanities and electronic literature.

(source: ELO 2018 website)

In the conclusion of *Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English* (1965), Northrop Frye asserts that there “is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference” (821). This paper will partly push against this tendency in Canadian literary criticism and will consider a select instance of Canadian electronic literature. In Frye’s terms, “Canadian sensibility” is “profoundly disturbed” not only by “our famous problem of identity,” which can be, in part, summarized by the question of “[w]ho am I?,” but by the question of “[w]here is here?” (826). I claim that *here* in the question of “where is here?” has become digital; i.e., “we” (as in Canadian writers and critics) are now online and not in the prairies or the lakes or the cityscapes and we live lives in which our identities (along with the potentiality of a national identity) have been outsourced to an indefinite electronic space. Identity is experienced through the mirrors of technological avatars and doubles in a mise en abyme of electronic spacelessness. I call it “spacelessness” because the ontology of this “space”—the space of the digital—is indiscrete and indefinite; it remains, to put it in the terms of Alan Liu (when applying Derrida’s notion of the transcendental signified to “data pours” [“59]), “transcendent” (62). Extrapolating from Liu, the space of electronic literature should be conceived as being “transcendent” as opposed to “immanent”—to use a Deleuzoguattarian term—but this notion of transcendence is unique in that a materiality of space is nonetheless configured through the complicated interplay of technological and subjective doubling, which renders materiality in very new terms and in a very new place. To put this argument differently, I would say that the emergence of Canadian electronic literature is still concerned with the question of “where is here,” but now the orientation of here is situated in a very different notion of “environment.” This new notion of environment is no longer a directly “Canadian” environment—an environment of mountains, trees, fields, prairies, lakes, and rivers that is inhabited by moose, geese, humans, and various other non-humans—but rather an environment that features an extreme plurality and a profound lack of both subjectivity and space. The electronic environment that is presented by Canadian electronic literature is not a void-space of subjective inexistence, but a material space of sociocultural heterogeneity; in other words, it is a space that is constituted as a vague, expansive, and indefinite commons. This argument will be primarily grounded in an in-depth analysis of Darren Wershler’s *NICHOLODEON* and *NICHOLODEONLINE* (but many other examples will be considered as well). *NICHOLODEONLINE* is akin to an archaeological locale that requires nonlinear apprehension: the text does not progress in a linear fashion (as it does in the print version for example), but rather proceeds through the nonlinear processes of clicking through the various pathways of what could be called its “ganglion” (a term that is very important for bpNichol).

What is reading? As a transitive verb, and in the strict action, it is to pass the view by the signs that we recognize from our mother tongue, written in a text to understand them and turn them into sounds. The act of reading goes beyond the interpretation of an inherited code. Reading is a cognitive visual/motor activity and meaningful of reality. When we read a text, our thinking manages a bunch of received information that little by little it is organizing according to its maturity, experience, cognitive processes, intuition and conceptualization. The order in which it happens does not matter. What is important is the fact that when it is read, the construction and appropriation of both historical and a-historical concepts is happening. But, what happens when we read Electronic Literature? Technology, following the proposal of Marshall McLujan, is an extension of our own body. For that matter, clothing is an extension of our skin. The shoes are an extension of our feet. One might think of the transitive verb of reading as a natural activity in the human being. Simone de Beauvoir affirms in her novel "Una Muerte muy Dulce" that neither death is natural. The act of reading has implicit the development of a technology of reading. So, we could make the statement that everything is Electronic Literature. You cannot think of reading as a natural act. The expansion of reading happens at the moment in which a common code is constructed that is accepted by a specific society as an element of meaning of identity. Thus, the idea of understanding ourselves as undifferentiated beings of nature is displaced. Code technology makes man more cultured. It subjects you to the understanding of reality. Reading will no longer be the understanding of sound, the use of taste as appropriation and cognition, touch as the experience of unity. The artificiality affirmed by Simone de Beauvoir and the extension proposed by Marshall McLujan coincide in the code of the written language subject to the truth, to the construction of concepts. The act of reading is now understood, not as passing the view on a text that contains an artificial and literal code; but as an act of acculturation and appropriation of an identity discourse. Sound and vision, substantial elements of the primitive, are reduced to the subjection of the text that is read and is true in itself.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Whilst there may be aesthetic tropes within digital media, there is no universally accepted authority within contemporary culture nor is there an easy mutual acceptance of what is “right and proper” or indeed legitimate outside the now virtue of being popular and well followed. Indeed the now bodily distanced and disinhibited digital citizen frequently demonstrates a palpable distain for the elite and pretentious (1). Considering this, any community with Literature in its name may have an identity problem; literariness still pertains to an elevated quality of artistic or intellectual merit and is thus counter to popular cultural production. In addition, mainstream culture has successfully commoditized many counter-cultural communities (2). Electronic Literature has arguably not been through such commodification processes, and the question of interest is why not? To that extent this paper seeks to explore possible answers. Investigating the broader shifts towards increased visuality within modern culture (3) the paper will discuss and revisit the discourses on the power structures of the gaze, consider spectatorship’s dominance over readership and interaction and co-creation and the function of the image within contemporary narrative forms inside and outwith Electronic Literature (4). The paper will also consider the politics implied in the move to open access, the fluid distribution of often context-less “images”, how this relates to prior notions of literary publishing, and whether this manifests as an opportunity or a challenge to Electronic Literature’s dissemination. Lastly and toward a conclusion, the paper will propose that if we consider the tradition of literature as one that is driven by the expression of human experience, where in today’s context literary “traditions” are not longer built around specific commonalities of form (i.e. predominately verbal language) but rather subject matter, themes and worldviews then the questions of identity and of “literariness” can evaporate to make space for fuller participation in the ocular freedoms in contemporary culture.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

The tropes of the detective genre have been challenged, subverted, re-appropriated by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, or Paul Auster, establishing what could be considered a new strain of postmodern detective fiction. In these stories, solving the case is not central to the story, and what the detective searches transforms or is derailed by becoming a discovery of something completely different. In some cases, the detective, along with the reader, explores an encyclopedic space in such a way that these stories have already been connected to hypertextual literature (Rosello 1994).

This paper will explore how digital games open up new territory in the genre of postmodern of detective stories. Digital games can have the player explore aspects of the narrative that may not be directly relevant to the mystery to be solved, or by creating a mystery that may be unstable and dependent on the choices of the player. In my presentation at ELO 2014, I discussed how video games have gone from trying to implement classical detective story models (Todorov 1977), encouraging the player to interpret the space and events to solve the case, to removing the challenge of all exegetic performance and letting the player carry out more trite, video game-like activities.

In further examination, I realized that the “vanishing exegesis” that I discussed then relates to postmodern literary detective fiction; both games and novels share a strong influence of cinematic noir and mystery films. While games like L.A. Noire (2011) attempt to put the player in the shoes of a traditional sleuth, some games experiment with the gap between the identity of the detective, narrative exploration, and how player’s choices affect the events of the story. The paper will focus on two games, Blade Runner (1995) and Deadly Premonition (2010).

Blade Runner takes place in the same time period as Ridley Scott’s film (1982), and provides the player with tools to perform exegetic work to solve the mystery. On the other hand, discovering who is an android and who is a human, which is part of solving the mystery, is determined randomly at the beginning of each game. Depending on the player’s attitude towards the non-player characters and their interpretation of whether the protagonist is an android or not, the game will have different resolutions.

In contrast, Deadly Premonition is a detective game with supernatural undertones, which also includes traditional detective work to solve a murder case. Heavily influenced by the show Twin Peaks, the game also lets the player digress and abandon detective work to explore the town where the play is set, from hanging out with the inhabitants to going fishing. The player character seems to address the player by the name of “Zack”, establishing the detective as a schizophrenic personality, whose perception of reality is unreliable. In both examples, the mystery, its resolution, and the identity of the detective are questioned and subverted as the player works on unraveling the mystery, bringing a rich interactive parallel with postmodern literary fiction.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)