Book (M.A. Thesis)

«Like Reading a Movie»: Students' Reading of Electronic Literature This thesis is an empirical investigation of students' reading of electronic literature. The main goal has been to study the skills required to get the most out of this kind of literature. Theoretical approaches include reader-oriented theories, where Jonathan Cullen and his concept of literary competence creates an overall basis, and media-specific theories, particularly parts of the multimodal theory derived from a social semiotic perspective. The theoretical framework also includes perspectives from researchers who have written about e- literary competence. The empirical evidence has been collected through qualitative research interviews with five 17-year-old students attending the branch of general studies performed after lessons. The students read episode 1 and 3 of Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, and part 1 and 2 of Nightingale's Playground by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. The theme of the interviews focused on how the respondents perceived these texts, and to what extent they benefited from them. The fact that the survey is carried out in a school context, is emphasized in the thesis. The study shows that these respondents do not find electronic literature as difficult to perceive as much previous research shows. They showed good control of both the navigation and the plot. One reason for this is that the texts these students read, do not have a typical hypertextual structure. About the interplay between the various modalities they showed good understanding. The field, in which the informants have the most room for improvement, is in the thesis described as the area of general literary competence. This applies especially when reflecting on the contents of the texts. Thus, one can see the e-literary competence more in the context of traditional literary skills than as something entirely new. Electronic literature in school can act as a link between leisure culture and school culture and thus help strengthen students' literary skills that can be useful in terms of both electronic and printed literature.

Source: Author's Abstract

Computation and networking are changing language, the art of reading, and the act of writing. Multimedia digital poetry allows for the creation and simultaneous display of visual, sonic and textual patterns with unprecedented mobility and typographic capacities. This interdisciplinary form encourages an exploratory art-research practice-based investigation using a blend of theoretical knowledge ranging from literary criticism, phenomenology, aesthetics, affective computation and neurological research. In contrast to software-centric theory and/or materiality analysis, this thesis argues for the continuing relevance of the lyric, expressive affect and aesthetics in contemporary digital poetics. It examines the evolution of digital poetry with a specific emphasis on online poetry. In the context of this thesis, poetry is considered to be an ancestor of computer code. Poetry is also considered as information visualization of emotions. Emotions are considered to be complex embodied patterns; poetry expresses those patterns in language.

Source: Author's Abstract

This paper sets out to examine some of the hyperfiction products now on the market, as well as a number of the seminal critical texts surrounding them, in an attempt to outline some of the main issues and problems within the emerging field of the studies of hyperfiction. I will also briefly discuss which interests and which discourses from other fields of study or 'genres' have so far been influencing the discussion of what the 'virtues' of hyperfiction writing are. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to try to indicate what has remained unexplored in the theory and what might be some of the pitfalls of hyperfiction 'practice' and on the basis of this analysis to suggest what might be interesting to explore in future hyperfictions if the promises of hypertextual thinking is to be fully redeemed.

(Source: from introduction)

Electronic Literature and Digital Art share many processes, themes, creative and theoretical guidelines. In this sense, I developed a critical framework that could resist to a hyperdisciplinary analysis and include one of the characteristics of this sharing pattern: the transfer and transformation processes. In order to recognize these processes I have done an approach of the transduction concept that could perform a theoretical migration on these aspects: the transducer function. Thus, the transducer function appears in the critical analysis of the works by Mark Z. Danielewski, Stuart Moulthrop, R. Luke DuBois and André Sier. The selected works are representative of the following genres: novel, hyperfiction, net.art and digital installation, drawing on phenomena and concerns resulting from the creative production within the digital culture. In this research I have enhanced mechanisms, patterns, languages and common grounds: authorship, user, cybertext, surface, hypertext, infoduct, interactivity, pixel, algorithm, code, programming, network, software and data. (Source: Author's abstract)

Since 1982 multilinear and interactive literature has been written in the hypertext media. Until now the authors have been obsessed with traditional literary conventions, which has often made the hypertexts seem rather academic and pretentious. But that may change. During the last five years a new breed of writers have discovered the possibilities on the Internet. They address a wider audience than lecturers and very enthusiastic bibliophiles, in a form that finds a more popular balance between traditional storytelling virtues and the more avant-garde elements. This new tendency can be observed in hyperfictions like The Unknown and on the following pages I will establish how and why it should be possible to make hyperliterature more popular than it is at the present, if writers are willing to move a little further towards the more lay readers. As an example of how this could be happening the conclusion will list what seems to be the main reasons why The Unknown to a higher degree seems to succeed when it comes to capturing the reader without losing any of the experimental edge that is still a part of hypertext due to its modest age.

(Source: Thesis abstract)

Beyond the boundaries of the book. The Italian literature in the digital age is the master thesis of Daniele Giampà, a student of Italian and Spanish philology at the university of Zurich. The analysis of the Italian digital literature is articulated in three main parts: history of the electronic literature, predecessors of electronic literature and the analysis of works of Italian digital literature written between 1997-2012. The selection of the works is based on a taxonomy elaborate in the introduction of the thesis.

The central arguments of the thesis are the creation of an analytical instrument for the digital context, that is the matrix composed of the dimension of narratology and the dimension of informatics, the demonstration of the analogies between print literature and electronic/digital literature and the innovations brought by new media to literature.

Deena Larsen's M.A. Thesis, submitted to the University of Northern Colorado's Dept. of English.

My major investigation in my master’s thesis was based on a class held at theUniversity of Siegen in 2007: “Digital Literature and Arts II.” In this course Iserved as academic assistant and developed a teaching model that is nowapplicable in Blended Learning Environments. While in my bachelor thesis I wasinterested in the design of online learning environments, my main focus in thecompletion of the master’s was on the student’s course performance: Myobjective was to find methods to analyze the students learning activity. Therefore,I analyzed the teaching and learning interaction based on theories I derived fromstudies on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and ComputerSupported Collaborative Learning (CSCL).