meaning making

In Electronic Writing, what often becomes more essential than the narrative is how the computational elements are brought into the fold of storytelling with the text at its centre (Heckman and O’Sullivan 2018). It is true but not uniform across all spaces of creative production. Collaborative efforts like We Are Angry | Experience have been very successful in using the online space to deliver a powerful message. But, in a space like India, the digital divide also dictates the mode of storytelling, especially when it comes to solo ventures. When we think about Indian online narratives, the most common instances reach us via social media (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2018). Despite its reach, the extent of experimentation is rather low. That is why much of the writing can also be found on blogs hosted by websites like WordPress or Blogger. Yet, from personal experience of online writing, as most of the readership is found on mobile phones, the amount of media that can be incorporated is also limited. It is limited because, in a space like India, many people still do not have access to a standard internet connection to view the multimodal elements.My paper proposes to address how individual storytellers, i.e., the people who write, design, and publish narratives all by themselves, without any collective or institutional support, who are forced to be minimal, go about telling stories in the online mode. My central research questions would be to understand: 1) the markers of Indian-ness (if any will vary from a case to case basis as it is impossible to reduce a culture to certain markers) in the narratives 2) the socio-cultural background of people who are telling these stories 3) the platforms they are choosing to tell these stories. To gather the data, I intend to float a short survey in various research and writing communities and use the dra. ft | Future of Text (@dra_ft_) • Instagram photos and videos archive to develop my hypothesis. Via analysis, I hope to understand the type, mode, and platform(s) most accessible for storytelling in the Indian online space.

(Source: author's own abstract)

This paper is a comparative reading of two works of generative literature: Scott Rettberg's Frequency Poetry Generator and J.R. Carpenter's Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR from a structuralist perspective.
Viktor Shklovsky described the effect of literature in his 1988 article "Art as Technique", in which he describes the difference between practical and poetic language. The essence of poetic text, according to Shklovsky, is its process of "defamiliarization": The reader will see his/her familiar world in a different light due to poetic rather that practical descriptions. In generative poetry, however, the defamiliarizing effect does not stop there. Not only does one see the world differently, but the way one sees poetry itself is defamiliarized. This defamiliarizing effect does not mean that there are no rules. The formal elements of the text guide the reader, as Culler describes in his article "Literary Competence".
The aim of my paper is dual. First of all, I use Shklovky's author- and text-focused approach combined with Culler's reader-focused approach to gain insight into how generative texts build upon the readers' 'literary competence', their familiarity with 'conventional' literature, in order to understand the defamiliarizing effect of generative literature. Second, I argue that my specific analysis of generative poetry in turn gives insight in what readers expect from a text, thus helping to define the often implicit literary competence readers possess.
The output of Frequency Poetry Generator shows poems that are explicitly recognizable as poetry, thus guiding the readers' interpretation. Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR on the other hand, situates the full text as a chronicle, implying the passing of time, and the individual texts as "excerpts", implying there might be more to the story that is not included in these excerpts, making the text into a serial narrative.
I analyze both code as well as output of these works in my analysis, utilizing Marino's framework of Critical Code Studies. The analysis of code is an integral part of the understanding of the work as it positions how the work is portrayed building on different conventional genres as well as the knowledge that one is reading a generative work of literature. Even if the reader chooses not to look at the source code, it is the potential of all possible texts that defines how the text is read as a work within the genre of generative literature. The code shows this structure, all sentences together make the potential of all different texts explicit.
A significant characteristic of generative literature is the fact that it will be a different text each reading. As I cannot analyze every single output, I invite readers of my paper, which is originally written in Scalar, to submit a reader experience of the output based on the structuralist method that I outline. This way, I offer a new type of criticism, which uses the affordances of the born digital paper to crowd source reading experiences that can be combined to specify the theory of "literary competence" further.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.

In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.

The materiality of fiction narratives is, ironically, a rather intangible concept, particularly as the notion of materiality traditionally relates to specifically tangible tools of creation — such as the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s clay. The materiality of digital artifacts lies only superficially in the haptic hardware of screens, keyboards, and mice; the materiality of modes, navigation, and interaction must also be explored for their effects on metaphor and meaning. Bouchardon & Heckman identify three levels of materiality in digital literary works: the figure of a semiotic form, the grasp required to physically interact with the work, and the memory of the work — its whole compiled from the parts of code, hardware, and user/reader experience that form meaning (2012, n.p.). In presenting her theory of the technotext, however, Katherine Hayles argues that it is the conjunction of the physical embodiment of technotexts (whether semi-tangible in digital form, or as fully physical as a book) with their embedded verbal signifiers that constructs both plurimodal meaning and an implicit construct of the user/reader (2002, 130-1). This paper seeks to examine the dynamic on the other side of technotexts: that of the creator and the text. Specifically, this paper examines how the materiality of digital media contributes to a layered metaphor that delivers meaning, reflects on the cognitive processes (the writer's and the reader's) of navigation, and generates a dynamic narrative structure through user interaction. Often such an understanding is not a conscious process — many writers and artists engage with their chosen medium through an instinctive understanding of the materials at hand, gained through exposure to others' works and through their own experiences. In other words, the explicit study of the materiality of a medium is not always required for artistic success, however that may be judged. By examining multimodal works ranging from film (Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner) to print texts to born-digital texts (Andy Campbell’s 2009 Nightingale’s Playground, as well as the author’s own practice) this paper argues that digital media have a significant effect on the outcome of the artifact itself; awareness of these effects, their variations according to hardware and software, and the affordances of these various materials offers the digital writer greater insight and capability to craft his/her texts for the desired metaphorical meaning.

In the work with my thesis on digital poetry I aim to highlight the following three axes

1) A theoretical reflection considering language in interaction with the visual and auditory modalities as well as an investigation of the relation between language and technical media, using theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Friedrich A. Kittler.

2) An analytical, methodical approach, which investigates digital works of poetry and their intermedial relations and effects of meaning.

3) Putting into perspective the historical concrete poetry and avant-garde movements – primarily from Scandinavia.

With these axes in mind, I aim to present a close reading of the Swedish artist Johannes Heldén and his two digital-poetic works “Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive” and “Väljarna” "The Voters/The Choosers" The works of Johannes Heldén are interactive, as you activate the words in a random order on the computer screen. There is a background of pictures with depth and minimal animations that create rather impressive surroundings: a foggy forest and a single spruce with black, naked branches, silently moving. Or a factory with tunnels, smoke, and roads with a single moving truck. The ambience is increased by electronic sounds – drone-like and heavy. In my analysis of the works I will emphasize the figuration of space on several different levels: The interactivity accentuates the paratactic character of the sentences. The text thereby establishes a kind of cubistic space. In “Valjärna”, there are parts of the language, which, in connection with picture and sound, come to constitute an imaginary universe, with words such as “branches”, “storm”, “green water”, “clay soil”, “shadows” and “darkness”. But some linguistic sequences break free from the universe and create their own, surreal pictures, “a laughing monkey”, “spider made of teeth”. There are also aphoristic sentences like “The Alphabet is an instruction” and other sequences that comment on the reception of the work itself on a subtle meta-level. “Väljarna” contains concretistic effects, where, for instance, sentences are shaped like the spruce – and this figuration is redoubled by the sentence “The tree is built by signs”. The language is in interplay with - but also contrasts - the auditory and visual modalities. I intend to investigate the effects of these relations and constitutions of space through a concrete cross-medial approach. Here I use the notion of The modalities of media elaborated by Lars Elleström, which consist of: the material modality, the sensorial modality, the spatiotemporal modality and the semiotic modality. I employ these distinctions in order to analyse and differentiate the intermedial relations in Heldéns works.

This thesis aims to investigate digital methods of signification in order to examine the impact of the apparatus on poetic expression. This is done through a critical analysis of the translation process from analogue to digital, in the sense that even as we read a page we are in fact translating sight into sound. The resulting effects of this change in form are explored in order to understand their impact on meaning-making in the digital realm. Through this interrogation the comprehension and definition of ePoetry (electronic poetry or digital poetry) is extended, by exposing the unique affordances and specificities of digital expression. Digital poetry theorists such as Loss Pequeño Glazier posit that the emerging field of electronic literature is composed of interweaving strands from the areas of computer science, sociology, and literary studies. This is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of this thesis, which necessitates an engagement with the broad areas of translation, literature, and digital media studies. Currently the pervasiveness of digital technology and access to the Internet means that the creation and consumption of online content such as ePoetry is becoming seamless and apparently effortless. Whilst recent studies have explored electronic literature as a field, there is a noticeable deficit of research that specifically focuses on ePoetry, a deficit that this thesis seeks to rectify. Within this work cybernetic and technosocial theories of communication are drawn on which provide as much emphasis on the apparatus, as is afforded to the author and reader. Traditional poetry criticism is problematised with reference to its suitability for application to online works in order to develop a comprehensive ePoetry rhetoric that explores not only what is being said, but also crucially how it is being said. Theories of translation are also used as a context in which to analyse the transposition of poetry from analogue to digital. This framework then forms the basis for a study that explores the move from print to pixel by analysing qualitative ePoet interviews as well as their corresponding ePoems.

This panel explores alternative avenues for education in digital poetics and electronic literary studies. The panel pieces together problems with categorical, single discipline approaches to electronic literature, critical, cultural, and technological studies looking at the pedagogical and curricular issues associated with media-based and network forms of meaning-making, storytelling, and communication. The primary questions here are: What are the conditions under which a practitioner or scholar are considered expert in the as yet undefined field of media-based expression? And: What solutions are traditional academic institutions offering? Thinking beyond, or outside the exclusive field of electronic literature the panel examines and offers potential alternatives to traditional disciplinary scholarship and accreditation. Each panelist will offer viewpoints, curricular and structural suggestions. The panel will be divided into two sections; the first will be a performative example of an alternative avenue for media culture education, and the second will be a rigorous discussion of the issues related to teaching digital culture and electronic creative practice in single discipline, and sometimes tangential programs and departments. The panel members have been selected based on their own experience with these issues as well as their pursuit of alternatives to institutional formulas.

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