English

As a digital genre, fanfiction enables the recontextualisation and transformation of characters, plots, and stories from popular culture. The dynamic combination of a community-driven writing practice with well-developed platforms that support an extensive and generative labelling system, supports the development of an ever-expanding network of tropes, which are continually being reinvented and reimagined in new forms. This article discusses one such trope, popularly known as “omegaverse” or alpha/beta/omega fanfiction. Currently counting 89 253 distinct works on the fanfiction platform aO3.org, omegaverse fanfiction draws on popular imaginations of wolf or canine social hierarchies and reproductive behaviours in order to reimagine characters from popular culture into a parallel gender structure as alphas, betas, or omegas. Using concepts from fan studies and feminist theory, this article shows how omegaverse fanfiction treats discourses about gender and embodiment in the same manner as it treats the original media texts, mining them for meaning in order to imaginatively transform them. Through this speculative mode, omegaverse fanfiction creates a space where the discourses associated with gender, biology, and embodiment are broken down into a set of building blocks with which individual authors can explore the inner logic of fictional gender systems on societies, relationships, and situations, examine their consequences, and imagine their downfall. Furthermore, by rewriting these discourses onto familiar characters through fanfictional narratives, the alpha/beta/omega system works as a node through which fans imagine how specific reconfigurations of differently gendered bodies would play out as lived, situated, meaningful experience. The speculative mode that is characteristic of fanfiction as a digital genre, in combination with the affordances of platforms such as ArchiveOfOurOwn.org, support the iterative play not just with products and works of popular culture, but also with the discourses and meanings with which gendered bodies are constructed and made intelligible. The constant reinvention of the trope is made possible through the interconnected and iterative process of this community-based, affect-driven, digitally native genre. Understood as an example of electronic literature, omegaverse fanfiction can be read as a kind of ‘low theory’, theory that exists at the margin of formal knowledge formations, creating alternative ways of talking and thinking about gendered embodiment.

The (auto)biography of 김정은 (2020) is a conceptual ‘found’ artwork in VII parts. It combines found code with found text. Multiple ‘found’ computational pieces have been modified with vocabulary drawn from multiple speeches delivered by the current North Korean Leader, Kim Jong-un/김정은. In addition, vocabulary and phrases from journalism critical of the North Korean regime are also incorporated into these generative works. On the one hand, this work is an experiment in propaganda delivery: it emulates the relentlessness of the North Korean indoctrination machine and shows how born-digital writing can be stolen and misused; in so doing, it reveals digital literature’s power. As part of this process, a Kim Jong-un ‘poetic robot’ has been created to demonstrate how such propaganda might be delivered/forced upon a populace. This work also seeks to capture the perspective of a curious, intelligent yet powerless North Korean citizen and demonstrate how they might (struggle to) engage with local culture. 

This paper reflects on this artwork in relation to Critical Code Studies (Marino, 2020). Specifically, it looks at how code can be adopted and exploited. Through practice-led research (Smith and Dean, 2009), this work deliberately exploits the code of multiple digital poets in order to show how such works might be corrupted. These subsequent works can be regarded as an example of third generation electronic literature (Flores, 2019). These works can also be regarded as an example of ‘overt plagiarism’ (Holland-Batt and Jeffery, 2020). If the works’ ‘fictional’ construction is believed, then it would be an example of ‘covert plagiarism’. 

Additionally, this paper looks at how this code and corrupted poetry could be reformed into robotic poetics (Winder, 2004). Through this extension to robotic poetics, this paper extends the notion of Critical Code Studies, by extending it to robotics, and interrogating what impact such an artefact has on transforming the initial work. 

This paper will explore Memmott and Rettberg's Gastropoetics as a humanistic challenge to the grammar of language, platform, and text generation. The impulse is to situate such works within the tradition of dada and futurist performance, where obvious antecedents can be found. However, in the age of platform dominance, the meaning of experiments in absurdity and embodiment take on new meaning, as platform spaces do the work of aestheticizing the absurd conditions produced by the Taylorization of social life. Where industrial processes once disturbed the lifeworld of human craft and technique in the process of industrialization, the cultural world at the most minute level is subject to the proletarianizing process, and its reassembly into an economic model is now the work of the platform spaces. In other words, Platforms do the ideological work of normalizing social collapse as progress towards the rationalized reorganization of body politic into "taste communities" and other post-digital demographies. While Gastropoetics is a marginal practice, these culinary experiments explore the relational dynamics of cooking, hospitality, and eating as persistent humanistic practices, even as such practices are increasingly mediated by emergent practices like "food selfies" and other performative taste practices. Key to understanding the appeal of gastropoetics is the ad hoc nature of human production and consumption (see de Certeau's "everyday life") performed under the constraints of the generated menu, of the platform, and of the mnemotechnical system itself.

I propose comparing methods of generating forensic images of 3.5 inch floppy disks in order to evaluate methodologies for use in media archeology labs. Many key works of electronic literature (including the bulk of Eastgate Systems, Inc. early publications) were released on 3.5 inch floppy media. I will use both Kyroflux and Superdrive floppy disk controller units to generate forensic images and also generate images using BitCurator suite of forensic software and using legacy computing hardware and software.Gathering data on the quality of images created by these disparate methods and also on the workflows involved and the ease and practicality of employing them will produce useful information for other media archeology labs examining how the field of floppy disk forensics has advanced.The results of these tests should show useful comparison data between the quality of the images created from identical media, the range of image types that can be created using each technique, and the usefulness for online access and emulation each forensic methodology and platform provides.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Hannibal, a drama series which aired on NBC from 2014-2017, experienced an unexpected revival when the show was released for streaming on Netflix in 2020. New fans, many of whom had been too young for the show when it first aired, brought with them a disdain for “problematic” content—ironic given the show itself’s over-the-top engagement with subjects like murder, emotional abuse, and cannibalism. A public incident on Twitter involving series creator Bryan Fuller provoked the ire of these new fans, who perceived an immoral betrayal in his vehement disapproval of “anti-shipping” culture.The topic of this paper addresses an understudied yet integral element of contemporary fan practices in the new decade. “Anti-shipper” or “fancop” ideology, its followers often referred to simply as “antis,” casts itself against the similarly vehement “anti-anti” or “pro-shipper” faction. The former, made up of fans of all ages but predominated by teens and younger adults, posits that fictional works involving taboo content (rape, incest, underage sex, abuse) should not be created, consumed, or promoted, due to being “harmful.” This position, strongly held, induces “fancops” to heavily police the content created by others, to the extent of group harassment, doxxing, and public shaming. The latter, whose loudest voices are generally older, holds to the stance that since works of art and fiction involve no harm to real people, the positions held by “antis” are puritanical and ultimately counterproductive, especially towards those who create and consume “dark” content to cope with their own personal traumas.The outgrowth of media fandom as a primarily niche activity performed within private communities of the 2000s and earlier, to a widely recognized hobby and valid form of participatory digital culture in the 2010s and beyond, has brought fan-writers and fan-artists into the public eye, and thus in direct contact—and often conflict—with creators, non-fans, and the mainstream. “In the public visibility of online publication, the insular nature of fan fiction – which could practically be maintained in its previous offline mode – is dispelled” (Lam 2014).There is much research regarding the conflict in the 2010s between fans and non-fans, creators and actors specifically, as it relates to the “fourth wall” (Zubernis, Larsen 2012) but the newly & involuntarily public nature of fan practices, combined with the dominant and proactive Gen Z attitude towards social justice, has given rise to intense questions of what is permissible in fan activity, as of yet unexamined from an academic perspective.The commerce-driven algorithmic affordances of this era’s mainstream fandom platforms have had the effect of breaking down boundaries between formerly siloed communities—including subcultures with different ideological and philosophical priorities.This paper will use the Hannibal incident to explore sociological questions of anti-shipping behavior, its effects on fan literature production, and its origins within a wider digital environment dominated by discussions of free speech, social justice, and cancel culture. It will argue that the conflict is not new, but its new virulence and visibility can be attributed to drastic shifts in digital platform usage by fan communities.

The recently formed Dutch Digital Literature Consortium – a partnership of researchers from Tilburg University, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Royal Library of the Netherlands and local libraries – aims to develop and launch an online catalogue of digital literature, created in the Netherlands and Flanders, and turn this collection into a publicly accessible digital catalogue. The project draws inspiration from comparable databases, such as the Electronic Literature Collection 1-3, NT2, Hermaneia, and Literatura Electrónica Hispánica. Whereas these databases bring together digital literary projects from a variety of traditions – often with a particular focus –, the project at hand focuses exclusively on works from a specific geographical location (much like collections such as the Brazilian Electronic Literature Collection).The development of such a database gives rise to several theoretical and methodological questions that are central to the study of e-lit: which works and genres are eligible to be included in the database, and on what grounds is this selection made? Practical decisions critically hinge on the fundamental question what digital literature is. This question has been answered – explicitly and implicitly – by different actors and institutions involved with e-lit, such as funding institutions, libraries, and other ‘gatekeepers’. Such institutions are significant because they are responsible for the material and the symbolic production of digital literature. As Yra van Dijk points out, digital works are ‘not autonomous, in the sense that they are in fact funded and sometimes initiated by some institution, mostly in the end by the government itself’ (2012, 2). If, as Florian Cramer claims, ‘electronic literature ha[s] established itself as a field in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense, i.e. as an area of production and discourse with intrinsic distinctions and authorities’ (2012, 1), then we need to consider how these authorities push digital literature in specific directions.While acknowledging that digital literature is also a transnational phenomenon, this paper analyses the ways in which institutions shape digital literature in specific techno-cultural contexts. The Low Countries share a language and – to a great extent – a literary tradition, while they also differ significantly culturally and institutionally. When one pays attention to the institutional frameworks, the specificity of the Dutch versus Flemish digital literature tradition is brought into focus. The institutional approach that I advocate thus does not only do justice to the multidimensional and changing nature of digital literature, it also takes into account the differences across linguistic areas and nation states.The question what counts as ‘literature’ is answered differently over time and in specific geographic contexts. The same holds true for the question what belongs to the realm of the ‘digital’. Therefore, this institutional approach is twofold, 1) I examine which digital genres and individual works are considered literary, and 2) I examine what is considered digital within these specific contexts. The theoretical overview of the institutional framework of digital literature in the Low Countries offers a solid starting point for the Consortium’s position on the practical, methodological questions raised above.

(Source: The author's abstract)

The complexities of archiving digital content, particularly those story forms reliant on multiple platforms, highlights technical, cultural and curatorial issues that remain difficult to reconcile coherently. Seeking to frame the issues within this special Debates section, this essay outlines issues facing the field of digital storytelling; examining narrative form, instantiation and subsequent archival.

In 1996, Geoff Ryman released 253: or Tube Theatre, a novel that used hypertext linking to set the stage for his fictitious story about the crash of a London Underground train. The text is divided into seven sections, one for each of the train’s cars, which are further subdivided into passages, one for each of the 252 passengers and its driver. Two years later, a print version of the novel was released as 253: The Print Remix. The print version maintains the same structure, but uses an index to mimic the hyperlinking used in the original. Although the two texts are otherwise identical, they were not equally reviewed by readers, as many found that Ryman’s narrative fell flat in print; as Robert Kendall (2000) writes, “though the book was generally well received, some reviewers complained that it suffered from the loss of its interactive element.” Others more harshly criticized the print version as “an example of form obliterating content” (Mitchell 1998), while at the same time praising the hypertext version as a “curiously addictive form of storytelling, relying on both the illusion that the reader is shaping the story though choosing which links to follow, and the voyeuristic joy of finding out what people really think on the tube.” That these two texts, which share the same restrictions on form, were reviewed so differently reveals the necessity of investigating platform effects. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s theories of neurosis and perversion, this paper examines how the two texts produce different forms of enjoyment that contribute to their disparate reviews. The change in platform, as I argue, does not only alter the text’s signification (Grossman 1997), but changing how readers navigate the text alters the voyeuristic fantasy conveyed by its narrative that promises to permit readers to peer into the lives of the strangers around them.Although Ryman’s text is now 25 years old, it has been chosen in part as an opportunity to reflect on how audience’s thinking about electronic platforms has since shifted. 253 was once notable for its release on two platforms, though this practice is commonplace today. It was also fairly recently that Ryman’s novel disappeared from his website, ryman-novel.com. According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (archive.org) and corroborated by websites that maintain records of domain registrations, Ryman’s ownership of the website ended in 2018. In its place, the website appears to have been taken over by so-called domain squatters and currently contains a number of short articles about Ryman, but its links now redirect users to more dubious sites. The challenges of preserving and archiving digital literature are well-known (see Abba 2012, Dene 2018, Schrimpf 2008), but thankfully 253 remains accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which last produced a snapshot of the novel on August 5th, 2017. In analyzing this novel, this paper makes a case for its continued relevance to discussions of new media platforms in a contemporary context.

In the United States, a student in the 20th percentile reads books for 0.7 minutes per day, while a student in the 98th percentile reads 65 minutes per day (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998). For the last four years, with 300 children from Title 1 schools and the Boys & Girls Club, we researched how to create digital texts that better cognitively engage struggling readers using psychophysiological sensors, eye tracking, and co-creation. This research led to the creation of Wonder Stories. Wonder Stories’ texts motivate students to critically think by immersing students in frequent, story-based questions. As a response to children’s low motivations during COVID19, we added a social competition to Wonder Stories – answering questions correctly gave points in a trivia-like game. When struggling readers were given Wonder Stories, students mentally showed up: their participation increased, readers were more cognitively engaged with the material, and students were critically thinking about the text more often. This study suggests that interactive, question-based reading shows great promise to increasing children’s participation and engagement in middle-grade reading.

(Source: The work's own abstract)

Reviewing the history of computing, the educational potential of new ways of knowledge representation and new literary affordances have sparked many influential ideas and reform efforts, spanning from “frantic systems” (Nelson, 1970) to constructionist discovery learning (Papert, 1993) to the reconfiguration of literary education (Landow, 2006, ch. 7). Yet, the current usages of electronic literature in education arguably fall behind those early anticipations. Therefore, this paper explores the wider educational and social entanglements that withhold electronic literature from entering classrooms in the context of current technology transformations. Considering the recent pandemicrelated global upsurge of the digitalization of educational systems, the mere lack of supply of digital devices and equipment will cease to be the main obstacle for the adoption of electronic literature in K12 classrooms. Nonetheless, the question shifts to what imaginaries and discourses shape (and limit) the use of new digital literary affordances. Reviewing current trends, three issues are identified. These concern (1) fixations of technological disruption, (2) literacy learning objectives and (3) the marginalization of teaching. The focus on technological disruption (and solutionism) refers to a tendency for innovators to overly emphasize particular technological aspects and to become fixated on their “disruptive” benefits while disregarding the need for cultural and artistic conventions and communities of education practices to grow within the digital medium. Secondly, the problematization of learning objectives relates to a prioritization of basic skills and 21st century workforce preparation while neglecting the need to address new critical literacy practices. Rather than responding with a restricted, preservationist stance limited to paper-based literacy, educators and authors may find ways of combining material affordances and electronic literature to introduce wider literacy conceptions in educational practice. In a similar vein, the marginalization of teaching is concerned with how technology is being used to quantify, classify and control teaching practices within new regimes of digital governance. In other words, teachers are being increasingly framed as technicians and behavioral managers in place of enhancing their role as “cyberbards” (Murray, 2016). Given that some of the issues raised correspond to known problems in the field of electronic literature, they also provide opportunities for further transdisciplinary research into the production and adaptation of electronic literature for educational purposes.

(Source: the abstract of the work)