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Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)

There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By 'writing the net', Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net's “becoming-literary,” by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer's body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of “as-if.” Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary. (Source: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-internet-unconscious-9781628923384/)

The Digital Humanities are in. The trendy scholarly practice for the tech-savvy literati, the DH has generated manifestos, grievances, enthusiasm, grammatical controversy (plural or singular concord?), and conferences. Said to possess both a “dark side” and a utopian core, it is humanities plus media. Humanities in media – but have the humanities ever existed outside a medium of inscription?

This paper is proposed as the second part of an essay, the first part of which was presented at DAC'98, having the overall title 'Performances of Writing in the Age of Digital Transliteration'. Part one of this essay raised questions -- contextualized by reference to Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler, amongst others -- concerning the intrinsically digital characteristics of text, along with certain implications of these characteristics (and what they have entailed, specifically and especially: the Net) for traditional literary culture, for the latter's critique, and for textual, especially artistic textual practices.

Whereas the first part engaged digital characteristics of textuality, this second is more concerned with practices themselves and theories of those practices. The first part argued that although inscribed textuality provides a, perhaps 'the,' paradigm of 'the digital,' it has, in traditional literary culture, been less susceptible to the varieties of (algorithmic) programming which works in digital media invite (because of their very structure). Despite this, 'programming' is proposed as both a more comprehensive and more accurate term, compared with, for example, 'authorship' or 'composition,' when setting out to indicate and characterize existing, potential and even traditional textual practices.

'Programming' operates here in the sense of an intrinsically provisional practice of inscription, prior to publication in whatever media; it is the detailed announcement of a performance which may soon take place (on the screen, in the mind); it is an indication of what to read and how. This sense of programming is poised to reconfigure the process of writing and *incorporate* programming in its technical sense, making it an inalienable part of textual practice. In fact, programming has subsumed writing *progressively*, as the paratextual features of textual art have become increasingly programmable by writers:- from the arrangement of programmatological atoms (letters) in syntactic sequences, to their layout (as in generalized page design), to more specialized spatial arrangements (as in visual poetry); through hypertextual orderings; algorithmic text generation; and kinetic textual performance. Writers are always already programmers.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)