textual analysis

This paper looks at two interactive digital works where female-centred/lesbian desire provides an implicit logic and motivation to the works’ interactivity, which focusses on the control and transgression of language. This wordplay is aimed at resisting dominant regimes of phobic categorization and erasure that pathologize queer desire. In Lucky Special Games’ visual novel Locked-In, the interactor experiences the story through the perspective of Jacqueline Brown, who, as the result of a car crash, has locked-in syndrome, which is characterized by consciousness paired with the complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Each of the women who visit Jacqueline's hospital room has a motive for wanting Jacqueline incapacitated or dead, so when Jacqueline discovers that she can slightly move the little finger on one hand, she must decide to which of these women she should reveal that she is conscious. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Locked-In is its casual indication of Jacqueline’s lesbianism (inferred via her relationship with her spouse Delilah). This lack of explicit labelling suggestively contrasts with the governing structural conceit of LockedIn: the dictionary entry, which plays on the hoary “if you look up [term] in the dictionary, you’ll find [person]’s name” joke. The cumulative effect of the wordplay results in lesbianism in Locked-In eventually escaping the fatalistic homophobic imaginary of dominant definitional regimes and causal logics while simultaneously eschewing a (hetero)normative “happy ending.” The second work, Neven Mrgan and James Moore's Blackbar, requires the interactor to unredact an archive of communications to a young woman, Vi Channi, from her friend Kentery Jo Loaz and others conducted under an Orwellian regime of expressive surveillance geared towards conformance, ‘sanitization’ and ‘propriety.’ The process of unredaction enables a queer reading of the relationship between Vi and Kentery and the Resistance they join. Unlike the blackbar redactions of the callous Listener #19445 and their grotesque attempts to make their redactions humorous, 'Lorraine,' as I will call the Resistance agent, engages in clever and pleasurable open box word play that exposes the slipperiness and queerness of language. Both works show how close reading and textual and formal analysis can be applied to interactive or ergodic works to reveal the same kinds of subtextual and subversive richness that characterize conventional literature, problematizing beliefs that eLit’s home is at periphery of the literary.

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) 

This paper presents the dual narrative of a shared research combining approaches from LIS and literature studies. Content and textual analyses of the digital novel The Unknown help identify areas of common interest, such as genesis and access. Interdisciplinary issues, such as methodology and reporting styles, are also addressed.

Source: Authors Abstract

In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; English translation, 1997), Gérard Genette provided scholars with the seminal concept of paratext: functional elements of the book (such as covers, title pages, illustrations, footnotes, etc.) that help to fulfill the text’s destiny (p. 408) by making it present for the reader (p. 1).

Today, the book often escapes the boundaries of the tangible object of Genette’s study, as is the case with The Unknown – The Original Great American Hypertext Novel. This born-digital collaborative work, so far from Genette’s perception and yet so suited to his views, is a goldmine of thresholds, namely through the source code, which the reader is invited to explore in parallel with the content and navigation provided in the published pages (Gillespie et al., 1999).

This paper combines outlooks from two disciplines, held together by a shared interest in the study of digital culture. The field of information studies provides a qualitative content analysis of the creators’ information-sharing practices and outlines issues of access and retrieval; the literary studies field offers a textual analysis, relating the paratext to the text in order to determine whether the former fulfills what Genette called its “literary function”.

Together, these perspectives reveal how measuring this work against Genette’s framework paves the way for an interdisciplinary study of digital culture. Here, as the concept of book hovers so near the edge it might yet fall over, the paratext may truly be the threshold we need to step inside its new, parallel, and virtual reality.

Source: Authors Abstract

Most often when critics try to demonstrate the "literariness" of digital poetry, the theory they rely upon derives from the avant-garde practices of the twentieth century. To expand this dialogue with literary traditions, this paper explores the possibility of a digital lyric. Through a textual analysis of selected digital poems, the lyric genre is reconsidered to meet the needs of digital writing in two ways. First, by drawing on key works from posthuman studies (Hayles; Haraway; Turkle) the lyric subject is re-envisioned beyond the limiting (and often assumed) Romantic-era definitions. Second, by revising the lyric subject with concepts from digital studies, a dialogue opens up with other generic traditions of the lyric: notions of brevity, emotional functions of the utterance, and even musical language. As well, the function of the lyric as a communal, performative gesture becomes an especially suitable poetic convention for the digital realm.

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. 

• Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. 
• Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. 
• Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. 
• Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.(Source: publisher's website)