Ireland

Discussing the works of three digital creative practitioners working in Ireland, Anne Karhio situates Ireland itself as a case study for demonstrating the ways in which electronic literature as a seemingly global and transnational practice can confront the complexly situated realities of everyday embodiment, technological materiality, and politicization of national borders. She thus recommends electronic literature be seen as more crucial part of digital arts and humanities research in Ireland and elsewhere.

(ebr)

Periods of rapid technological change also redraw our sense of cultural and geographical periphery. Routes of transport and travel, communications infrastructures, and networks of cultural production extend, transform, and redirect the perimeters of our personal and collective imagination. In this lecture I will examine how Ireland’s location at the geographical margin of Europe has also rendered it a focal point of technological experimentation and exchange, and has closely entwined it with the story of electronic literature. I propose that the peripheral imagination informing this relationship can also encourage the kind of cultural dissent needed to tackle the consequences of unchecked technological ambition to the fragile environments of the Anthropocene.

Ireland is currently in the opening years of what has been billed The Decade of Centenaries, or The Decade of Commemoration. This decade, from 1912-1922, marks a violent and disruptive period, politically, socially, and creatively, cumulating in Irish independence from the United Kingdom, followed by a bloody Civil War. 1916 is seen as a turning point in Irish politics: not only were many thousands of Irish fighting in the Great War with the British army, many at home took up arms against that army during the Easter Rising. The Letters of 1916 is a crowd-sourced digital humanities project that is creating ‘a year in the life’ of Ireland, as well as how Ireland was perceived abroad, by collecting letters – any letter—about Ireland. This talk will explore the methods and politics of creating such as collection which is being positioned technically at the intersections of digital scholarly editing and big data.

(Source: ELD 2015)

+ info: http://dh.tcd.ie/letters1916/

In this interview Michael J. Maguire also known as clevercelt writes about his development in the field of electronic literature both as creative writer and academic scholar. He gives some insights into the work of programming, his interest for computer games and the Phd thesis. The interview stands out for the many references to other authors.