textuality

Alongside the emergent commercial browsers of the late 1990s, several artists made alternative browsers that articulated other ways of conceptualizing a global network of electronic documents, and stood in relief to the particular electronic textuality manifest in browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—a hypertext imaginary that still deeply informs the predominant browsers of today. Post presents research into three such works: The Web Stalker (1997) by the artist collective I/O/D, Shredder (1998) by Mark Napier, and netomat (1999) by Maciej Wisniewski. 

Post will draw on interviews with the artists and art historical analytical methods to describe the development, functioning, and long-term impact of these works. In particular, Post considers the ways in which these artists’ browsers can inform the study and practice of electronic literature.

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.

This paper performs a reading of the ‘glitch poetics’ of Caroline Bergvall and Erica Scourti pivoting between analyses of their works via two specific contemporary technologies. As well as reflecting on the artworks themselves, the paper aims to show how the various of forms of error they employ, allow for new perspectives on conditions for contemporary textuality. Glitch poetics is a framework for reading and writing, it refers to a set of tactics in which errors are captured, mimicked or induced to produce moments of “critical sensory encounter” with the technics of language. This perspective on linguistic error is influenced by the ways that glitches and malfunctions have been valorised in media arts’ “glitch art” movement – particularly the way these practices reveal the formally withdrawn aspects of ‘black-boxed’ devices and software. But the glitch is a highly subjective categorisation, and new media – by their very newness – can also be said to constitute ruptures in what was formally inaccessible. Our encounter with new media, in this sense, is often indistinguishable from the unsettling encounter we associate with glitch.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

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) 

The transformation of interface from a merely indicative tool of navigation to a suggestive element infused with metaphorical power in text-based hypertext literature, and the incorporation of hypermedia and modes of play and games into the hypertext scenario--both strains are gradually winning attention in electronic writing. Topics such as the clarification of paidia (play) and ludus (game) constituents, their formal impact on literature, and the comprehension of the aesthetic matrices projected by the symbiotic infusion of literature, play and games, have been posited, creating a new node in the network of literary studies. In order to explore these fertile new fields, this paper first assigns itself to a survey of interface design and a formal observation of play and games in samples of electronic literature. Furthermore, the paper is focused on the interlaced poetics of representation (narrative) and simulation (paidia / ludus) in literary hypertext, play and games (together to be occasionally called, cybertext or ergodic literature, both terms taken from Espen P. Aarseth). It is hoped that the paper can bring more poetical recognition to digital textualities.

Source: Author's abstract

This article introduces EJES, vol. 11, issue 2, "New Textualities." It briefly outlines the relation between theoretical and technological changes that has led to a re-examination of textual forms in the digital age. Texts as both social text and technotext are tentatively explored in the context of remediation and proliferation of textual materialities that defines contemporary culture. The six articles contained in this issue deal with specific aspects of this linguistic and literary context, in which texts, metatexts and tools for analysing texts are fostering a new critical awareness of textual phenomena and textual representation.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

The majority of humanities computing projects within the discipline of literature have been conceived more as digital libraries than monographs which utilise the medium as a site of interpretation. The impetus to conceive electronic research in this way comes from the underlying philosophy of texts and textuality implicit in SGML and its instantiation for the humanities, the TEI, which was conceived as “a markup system intended for representing already existing literary texts”.
This article explores the most common theories used to conceive electronic research in literature, such as hypertext theory, OCHO (Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects), and Jerome J. McGann’s “noninformational” forms of textuality. It also argues that as our understanding of electronic texts and textuality deepens, and as advances in technology progresses, other theories, such as Reception Theory and Versioning, may well be adapted to serve as a theoretical basis for conceiving research more akin to an electronic monograph than a digital library.

Source: Author's Abstract

Moving text into e-space has thus far taken as many steps backward as it has forward, largely because the paradigm of the printed book has served as a blinder that keeps us from seeing possible new ways of writing—something nowhere more obvious than in nonfiction. After looking at a few examples of such failures of imagination, including an internet-only scholarly publication that fails to take advantage of virtual textuality, this essay first notes some nonfictional genres and modes after which it looks the relations between fiction and nonfiction as literary forms. Next, it suggests new methods of argumentation made possible by computer-based textuality. The largest part of this essay then explores three new forms: the blog as the electronic translation of the journal, the hypertext essay, and the Ulmerian mystory.

Source: Author's Abstract