publishing

We live in a world where everyone with access to technology can publish. From YouTubers to Instagram-influencers, from gamers watching each other play online to writers self-publishing, content is everywhere. And yet, the biggest company with its most promising title and the podcaster putting their first episode online share the same problem: how to find an audience. Over recent years, digital technologies have fostered the proliferation of new platforms for publishing and broadcasting, and the rise of video streaming has further dissolved the boundaries between these two modes. Publishing no longer refers only to words but also images, video and sound and its reach is pervasive and global. Amplified Publishing, part of the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D project, a collaboration between four universities in the UK is examining what publishing has come to mean across sectors, platforms and media and explores its future direction. As a wide-scale research project, it looks at questions such as; What does ‘publishing’ mean in the 21st Century? How will the increased availability of seamless and synchronous visual and audio media enhance and expand traditional media, like books and magazines? What does personalisation offer to both content creators, their publishers, and their audiences? With the rise of visual storytelling, what is the future of reading? And, most importantly of all, who are our audiences, where are our audiences, and what does our audience want? This paper addresses this question of audience and seeks to understand specifically how narrative-based digital publishing, a theme within the Amplified Publishing project, can reach an active audience across platforms. In particular, it questions how audiences experience innovative forms and how their experiences can be mediated and guided by writers, producers and technologists. It uses findings drawn from an understanding of audience from electronic literature and ambient literature to draw conclusions about the future of audiences as they experience digital published content across platforms. It reaches beyond the Covid-19 digital landscape and seeks to understand how audiences have changed and what they might be looking for next. 

At the start of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, two tribes of apes get into a fight over a watering hole, and one group drives off the other. The apes who have been driven away are depressed, and just sit around moping when one of them gets the idea to use a thigh bone of some large animal as a club. First he tries it out on a few dried ribs that are lying about,1 then he uses it to bring down one of the tapirs that had, up until this moment, lived peacefully among the apes in an idyllic, Garden-of-Eden symbiosis. Suddenly, we are back at the watering hole, more of a mud puddle really, and the ape that invented the club is at the head of his troupe, all of whom are armed with their own bone clubs. The larger, stronger apes are still there, furious at the reappearance of the weaker group. They attack, using all the usual monkey strategies for waging war: shrieks, baring of teeth, pounding of chests and quick feints, during which the individual who’d invented the bone club stands upright—more like a man than an ape—and when the leader of the other pack rushes at him on all fours, he uses his club to bash in this ape’s brains, and we can’t help but be struck by how the tool has made the man. No matter what Benjamin Franklin says about Man being the tool-making animal, it’s the tool—the club—that made this ape stand upright: it’s impossible to swing a club when walking on all fours; from a hunched-over, ape-like position, you can’t get the leverage needed to swing a tool to chop wood, hit a golf ball, win wars, and so on.Source: Abstract by the Author

Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.

Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.

My project was prompted by calls for more in-depth critical interpretations of works of electronic literature; an appreciation of how Gillespie problematises tropes of proximity and distance used to characterise modes of critical reading; and a desire to explain Gillespie's commitment to both conceptual, constraint-based writing practices (facilitated by computational media) and the intentional production of meaningful narrative affect. Ultimately, my analyses showcase Gillespie's countertextual achievement: assembling a network of texts, both electronic and analogue, that functions as a literary ecosystem resistant to the instrumentalism of the neoliberal publishing industry. Gillespie's Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

This highly-anticipated volume has been extensively revised to reflect changes in technology, digital humanities methods and practices, and institutional culture surrounding the valuation and publication of digital scholarship. 

• A fully revised edition of a celebrated reference work, offering the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of research currently available in this rapidly evolving discipline 
• Includes new articles addressing topical and provocative issues and ideas such as retro computing, desktop fabrication, gender dynamics, and globalization 
• Brings together a global team of authors who are pioneers of innovative research in the digital humanities 
• Accessibly structured into five sections exploring infrastructures, creation, analysis, dissemination, and the future of digital humanities
• Surveys the past, present, and future of the field, offering essential research for anyone interested in better understanding the theory, methods, and application of the digital humanities(Source: Publisher's website) 

With the book-based paratext theory Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987/1997), literary scholar Gérard Genette provides a tool that allows to examine how books ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption (Genette 1).

It is through a publisher’s peritext that appears on the spine, front and back cover, and a book’s title pages that provide the book’s title, author name, publisher, and year of publication, that that we can identify and communicate a work. The book market highly relies on a publication’s peritext that forms a publications bibliographic data in post-processing; it is also of relevance in libraries. Obviously, in book culture, the publishing apparatus is well established. This is different in the field of electronic literature, due to the way the field evolved through its technological means of production and publication. Here, works are mostly self-published (Koskimaa, Eskelinen, di Rosario) on authors’ web sites and often re-published in multiple venues on the Web (such as online journals, or digital collections (Electronic Literature Collection I and II), and anthologies (ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature).

Considering e-lit’s particular publication situation and the various paratextual means the Web provides, the following questions emerge: how do e-lit authors make their works paratextually present? Is their practice of paratextual presentation indeed sufficient for post-processing?

This presentation builds on a study of nine works in which some of the following cases occurred in the examination of the work’s title pages: some works do not present the author’s name and title, in other cases, the year of publication is missing. To be sure, these omissions create problems for post-processing works for example in databases, libraries, scholarly communication, and also archiving. How can such bibliographic failures occur? The answer lies in what I call “paratextual integrity” that was often missing in my study-sample of works of electronic literature. As my study of the works’ title pages, along with the author’s home pages show, the reasons lie in the Web's architecture and how authors present their creative works both within their home page and within the self-published work.

By considering works of electronic literature through Genette’s book-based paratext theory I extend Genette’ss notions towards web-based publications and, based on the results of my study, make recommendations as to how an author's work can, based on proper use of the Web's architecture and paratext, indeed be “seen”, communicated, and captured in post-processing.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Pedro Barbosa recalls in this interview his memories of the first studies and works of electronic literature back in the 1970s when he was a student at the University of Porto. Starting from considerations about his collaborative works he makes a comparison between printed literature tradition and the age of new media focusing on the paradigmatic change of this very transitional period with live in and the differences of the creative work. Furthermore he makes an interesting statement on regard of the aesthetics of new media by comparing works of electronic literature with the oral tradition. In the end he mentions some of the milestones of electronic literature that he considers important.

To Genette, the basic “nature of the paratext” is functional (7). In his theoretical account, he
presents a number of paratextual units (title, dedications, epigraphs etc.) and proofs its functionality through the analysis of respective examples. At the same time, he alerts that
paratexts may be unproductive and notes: “from the fact that the paratext always fulfills a
function, it does not necessarily follow that the paratext always fulfills its function well” (409).
That said, paratexts may be dysfunctional in that a paratext does not meet the function Genette
originally envisioned. A paratext is also dysfunctional if it is absent where it’d be expected: based
and bound to the materiality of the book-as-object, Genette has developed a map to locate the
types of paratexts he designates. As per Genette, a preface supposedly precedes a work and an
epigraph shouldn’t intervene a body’s text. Likewise, the publisher’s peritext spans around and
within the body of a work, while the epitext is located outside of a work’s material body. A paratext’s location thus defines its function.
If a paratext is absent in that it isn’t possible to locate it within Genette’s map of paratexts bound
to a publication, it is supposedly dysfunctional. It may however attain an intended literary effect
(as is the case in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). Interestingly, the effects of dysfunctional paratexts can make it’s very functions perceptible (cf. Desrochers and Tomaszek). Approached from a more pragmatic perspective however, dysfunctional, or missing paratexts may entail problems connected to the functionality of “identification” (Genette 80).
In this presentation I investigate paratexts that are absent and not localizable where prescribed by Genette. This is the case in numerous publications of electronic literature where what Genette calls the “publisher’s peritext” largely is missing.
Methodologically, I proof the absences with analyses of what appears, or is supposed to be the
“publisher’s peritext” of those publishing apparatuses devoted to electronic literature. All in all, I
take into consideration respective publishers, magazines and journals, but also the apparatus of
individual, self-published works.
In my discussion, I relate to the function the publisher’s peritext is supposed to perform as per Genette and argue for it’s importance from the perspective of those who rely on the publisher’s peritext, such as for example librarians, or database catalogers in the field of electronic literature.