literature and technology

The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field.Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

(Source: Publisher's description)

This article emerges from macroanalysis of several works of critical writing in the field of digital poetry, which have been documented in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base. The problems addressed in this context are the self-referentiality exhibited by authors who are both practitioners and theoreticians, and the need for a wider selection of digital poems in critical discourse. The dataset consists of monographs and Ph.D. dissertations on digital poetry (1995-2015), which have been exported into visualization software. Macro and network analyses enable new debate concerning the outlined problems and new findings. My findings suggest that criticism in this domain is chiefly endogenous and that a limited number of poems is being canonized. Therefore, a meta-discourse perspective can pave the way for an external view of the field, concerning its epistemology and evolution. The dataset is available online for download and can be tested and reconsidered by other researchers.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This paper spins from an analysis of several works of critical writing in the field of digital poetry, which have been documented at the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net).
The first stage of the research process has been trying to understand which tags have higher frequency, as one observes how the field has evolved in terms of theoretical analysis (content type: critical writing) and its correspondent classification in ELMCIP. Secondly, the database has been filtered in terms of critical writing tagged with the taxonomy “digital poetry” (higher frequency, 109 records). From here onwards, a period for analysis, 1995-2015, was selected, as it signals the twenty-year span of Web-based digital poems. Hence, the publication types selected were monographs and PhD dissertations tagged with “digital poetry” or having “poetry” in their title. This process created a smaller corpus for data analysis, mining and visualization. The selected works of critical writing include, amongst others, Hartman (1996), Barbosa (1996), Glazier (2002), Stefans (2003), Engberg (2007), Funkhouser (2007, 2012), Johnston (2011), Rosario (2011), Naji (2012), Dupej (2012), Emerson (2014) and Carpenter (2014).
The two questions I posed then were: 1) Is there a prevalence of self-referenced creative works in critical writing? 2) Is there a set of digital poems being more referenced than other?
By exporting the tables of cross-references from the ELMCIP KB into visualization software, I try to better understand and debate, by means of macro analytical visualizations and network analysis, these questions, following Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” (2005) and application methodology in the field of electronic literature such as those developed by Jill Walker Rettberg (2012, 2013) and Scott Rettberg (2013).

(Source: ELD 2015)

The essay Leituras de Nós: Ciberespaço e Literatura tries to understand the paths of poetic creation on computers and networks, mapping hypertext, programs and pages that apparently showed poems and literary works in the Internet. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM publishing a poem to be read in a system of hypertext navigation. (Source: Itáu Cultural. Translation: Álvaro Seiça)

This paper investigates the manner in which e-literature is reconstructing and intensifying some of the sensory capacities of literary language. The interactive nature of many works, as well as their use of image and sound and the fact that the ‘surface’ text is produced and informed by a ‘deeper’ level of generative code, means that new critical concepts, vocabularies and ways of reading adequate to this new situation need to be developed. Katherine Hayles. John Cayley, Talan Memmot, and Rita Raley, have all written authoritatively on the importance of software and code in determining approaches to electronic poetics, and the difference this makes to how we understand new media writing. Matt Kirschenbaum makes the distinction between formal and forensic materiality in order to break down the emergent logics at play in the digital ‘text’. We introduce a different perspective, one that focuses on the ecology of the body (its distribution) in its engagement with different forms. Using the electronic work of Melinda Rackam, Jason Nelson, Stelarc and Alan Sondheim we argue that technological innovation is reshaping aesthetics through a new ecology of the body that privileges affect, and emphasises proprioceptive capacity. In this paper we look at electronic texts and forms that both reproduce and challenge an emergent focus on an aesthetics of ‘touch’, proximity and novelty.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI)

An answer to the Danish Ministry of Culture for their project "Art in the Networked Society".
Follow the discussion with the Ministry of Culture online: http://kum.dk

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now?

What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate in the shaping of these ideas.

(Source: Ugly Duckling Presse)