Conference paper or presentation

In my essay titled “Third Generation Electronic Literature” I describe this new wave of electronic literature as one “based on social media networks and widely adopted platforms and apps” which is less interested in the Modernist, avant garde, or experimental poetics of 2nd wave elit. In 2019, I described that relationship between generations as analogous to popular culture versus high culture divides. More recently Nacher (“Weeding” 2020) and Berens (“Decolonize” 2020) initiated a conversation that connects 3rd gen elit to decolonization of the field, and I elaborated on that idea in my 2021 lecture, titled “Technological Imperialism and Digital Writing,” by discussing the history of digital technologies, their spread throughout the world, and how they establish an imperialistic and colonial relationship with the world, situating the US and its allies at the center of a global digital empire.My proposed paper will examine key open and proprietary platforms-- such as programming languages, the Web, Unicode, Flash, iOS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram-- focusing on their spread, access, cultural and ideological underpinnings, potential for electronic literature, audiences, and adoption. It will advance the claim that all these technologies are hegemonic, historically privileging and centering the US and its allies in an uneven relationship to the rest of the world by creating dependence on the platforms they develop and profit from. This analysis will be supported by the research and critiques of digital infrastructure, search engine platforms, the semantic capitalism of interfaces, and digital colonialism by Domenico Piermonte, Safiya Noble, Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, and Herbert Shiller, respectively. In highlighting some of the dependencies and varying barriers to access these platforms create I will interrogate the notion that open platforms like the Web or programming languages are less complicit than private commercial platforms in creating and perpetuating digital colonialism.The essay will expand on the work of Eugenio Tisselli, Rui Torres, and Claudia Kozak’s by exploring how electronic literature uses, engages, and challenges digital technologies enacting strategies of resistance against the political, commercial, and cultural underpinnings of digital platforms. I conclude by discussing how electronic literature-- of all generations-- helps advance the common goals of widespread adoption of digital writing practices and decolonization of the field while interrogating the usefulness of generational frameworks when considered in a global context.

Today, Digital technology not only helps its users in every walk of life to address human limitations but also to control and direct their ideologies. Hence, the novel concept of advanced Transhumanism is prevalent. This Study seeks to explore the possibilities of conducting research in the field of Human Language and Digital Technology amidst related fields. The article presents theoretical concepts and methodological tools from multimodal analysis that allow the readers to gain new insights into the study of electronic literature and the difference between a monomodal and multimodal children literature. The data for this article comes from Grimm brothers’ transcribed tale named “Little Red Riding Hood” directly from fairy tale narrated by their villagers and the digital novel “red riding hood” from the 1st Collection of Electronic Literature. The discussion and analysis part of the project explains how various modes can be used to convey the underlying meanings clearly and create a single masterpiece which is suggested as a new form of literature.Since the definition of literature does not match with this innovative form, the article suggests that it should be revised again, which says that literature is anything written, in an artistic form of human expressions in an organized manner. But, as far as a multimodal piece of work is concerned, it is a combination of distinct (mono)modal structures such as sounds, visual images, spatial and textual evidence. These all modes are shown in red riding hood specifically and the other literary works in the 1st Collection of Electronic Literature in general.Since, in Pakistan, the investigations in this field are rare so it provides the basis for future studies in the field of human language and digital technology and other above mentioned related areas. Also, this research can open up new ways for immersive literacy and for the researchers to focus on the innovative immersive literacy, its need, impacts, social consequences, and other possible transformations it requires for the born-digital generation.

(Source: authors' own abstract)

In Electronic Writing, what often becomes more essential than the narrative is how the computational elements are brought into the fold of storytelling with the text at its centre (Heckman and O’Sullivan 2018). It is true but not uniform across all spaces of creative production. Collaborative efforts like We Are Angry | Experience have been very successful in using the online space to deliver a powerful message. But, in a space like India, the digital divide also dictates the mode of storytelling, especially when it comes to solo ventures. When we think about Indian online narratives, the most common instances reach us via social media (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2018). Despite its reach, the extent of experimentation is rather low. That is why much of the writing can also be found on blogs hosted by websites like WordPress or Blogger. Yet, from personal experience of online writing, as most of the readership is found on mobile phones, the amount of media that can be incorporated is also limited. It is limited because, in a space like India, many people still do not have access to a standard internet connection to view the multimodal elements.My paper proposes to address how individual storytellers, i.e., the people who write, design, and publish narratives all by themselves, without any collective or institutional support, who are forced to be minimal, go about telling stories in the online mode. My central research questions would be to understand: 1) the markers of Indian-ness (if any will vary from a case to case basis as it is impossible to reduce a culture to certain markers) in the narratives 2) the socio-cultural background of people who are telling these stories 3) the platforms they are choosing to tell these stories. To gather the data, I intend to float a short survey in various research and writing communities and use the dra. ft | Future of Text (@dra_ft_) • Instagram photos and videos archive to develop my hypothesis. Via analysis, I hope to understand the type, mode, and platform(s) most accessible for storytelling in the Indian online space.

(Source: author's own abstract)

While Covid-19 may have fractured our public, private, and professional narratives of normalcy, out of this slow-moving and surreal catastrophe, new images of the future imaginary began to emerge, as well as new creative practices for collaborative (re)imagining. The Digital Literacy Centre is a collective of researcher/academic/artists at the University of British Columbia who are interested in exploring innovative approaches to literacy, digital media research, and experimental methodologies for technologically enriched meaning-making practices and collaboration. Like everyone in the world, each of us in the DLC experienced the pandemic individually as a diffracted and intensely intimate encounter and yet also collectively, as a shared story, one that we were narrating together in real time, however virtually. We decided to take up this evolving pandemic moment as a technological and creative research challenge to engage with the innovative digital platforms at our disposal towards collaborative futures imagining during a time of crisis. Skunk Tales is the result— a multimodal, collaborative futures fiction that we wrote/composed/sonified/and performed in chapters that map an imagined future of human interactions with literate technologies.In this paper, we describe a collaborative, technologically-mediated storying methodology that enacts “the diffraction patterns that arise when specific aural experiences are rubbed against specific narrations of human-technological coupling” (Cecchetto, 2013, p. 3). During our storying sessions, we simultaneously sonified the emergent narrative data using Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musial Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software. We developed Singling for the sonification and visceralization of textual data in qualitative research and analysis. Capable of sounding discrete characters, symbols, and punctuation, as well as word forms in lexicogrammatical categories of English language texts, Singling transforms text into user-determined soundscapes. As we wrote Skunk Tales, we invited the emergent soundings to permeate the futures imagining and become entangled with the movements of the narrative. As Cecchetto (2013) argued, “It is precisely the forceful quality of sound that makes it an agent of modulation that can help to amplify certain elements of narratives of human-technological coupling, making them audible” (p. 4). This paper maps our creative futures research generation that is informed by technological posthumanism and how “different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification… initiat[ing] new experience of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (Hayles, 1993, p. 69). Sound permeates the methodology and the resulting diffracted narratives, both theoretically, materially, and thematically.We first began the narrative face to face, in the early days of the pandemic, and then diffracted outwards into social isolation and virtual jam sessions; we extended the narrative beyond the limits of our collective and into a storying performance at the 2020 Artful Inquiry Research Group virtual conference, during which we wrote and sonified a chapter live in virtual space. As such, Skunk Tales is a pandemic tale, sounding the evolution of a future now receding into the past, while simultaneously signifying new possibilities for dynamic arts-based conversations between subjectivities, technologies, sounds, and meanings.

(Source: authors' own abstract)

This presentation aims to reflect on two labels that have been used to define sets of artefacts born out of the same context but evoking different connotations. I refer to the terms “post-internet” and “post-digital”. Both terms allude to a post-stage, a leap that announces a cultural shift, perceived by artists but difficult to pinpoint and demarcate with precision, a prefix that might refer to ‘after’ (chronologically) as well as ‘beyond’ (spatially); often used to highlight that what has been superseded is the novelty and exceptionality of the internet and digital technology. Actually, these terms address the fact that digital media is no longer a form of mediation but it has become our ontology, though this new form of being is of such a diffuse, complex and assembled nature, not even Haraway could have anticipated it.Triggered by impulses of excess and overindulgence, on the one hand, or sustainability and preservation, on the other, post-internet and post-digital art emerge from a networking and tech-savvy sensibility that has altered the relation between artist, audience, and art object.In particular, I am going to focus on the work of artists that use Instagram as an art gallery for exhibiting their work (Almudena Lobera, Johanna Jaskowska, Lucy Hardcastle) or to sabotage the platform from the inside (Amalia Ulman, Joshua Citarella). Bearing a family resemblance to electronic literature, these works also explore the narrative process in the construction of an artist’s identity, the changing territories of human-machine/artist-spectator interactions and digital-analogue materializations. The art objects they produce can be classified as “phygital”, physical/digital constructs that inhabit, in a myriad of different possibilities of mediation and convergence, the physical and the digital spaces.As artists explore the platform’s potential as exhibition space, advertising site, and conversation aisle, their phygital objects reflect the tensions between a nostalgia for an analogue craftsmanship which rebels against machinic perfection and an interrogation of human creativity that propels us into the future through an ever more profound symbiosis with our technological habitus.

(Source: author's own abstract)

“In a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.” -Janet Murray, Hamlet on the HolodeckFor new “digital swimmers,” or those just dipping their toes into the pool for a semester or two, complicated (and expensive) technology and skill sets can sometimes hinder creative expression. My goal, as a teacher of digital creative writing, is to get students to “listen to their broccoli” (follow their intuition), as Anne Lamott suggests, and express their unique voices through multiple modes. By utilizing software that is accessible on their own computers and easy to navigate, students are less intimidated and free to create and focus on writing. Although all software has its limitations, I’m seeing some wonderfully creative and thoughtful projects from my students.My digital creative writing courses are “open education resource.” In the past, I have relied heavily on the Adobe Creative Suite in my courses (accessible on campus) and taught mainly Dreamweaver for hypertext projects. With the spring pivot online, Adobe was not quite as easy to access (although the free subscriptions they offered were appreciated by several of my students) and students in the fall wanted to use their own computers and not those in the lab. I had always tried to incorporate free software options—Twine, Google Maps, and Knightlab storytelling tools—but found myself expanding these options even more this past year. Between my writing and e-lit courses, we explored Google Earth, Scene, and ThingLink for 360 work, and relied mostly on Twine and ThingLink for hypertext projects. This semester I am adding Timeline. The simplicity of the software has allowed these new digital swimmers to delve deeper into the platforms’ potential and their subject matter. I have been impressed with the complex projects being made in ThingLink, which at first glance seems like a very simple platform. You can add links to video, 360 environments, add sound, videos, and link multiple “pages” (projects) together. My intro. level students had very little trouble learning the interface and executing their ideas.As Anne Frances Wysocki says in Writing New Media, “When someone makes an object that is both separate from her but that shows how she can use the tools and materials of her time, then she can see a possible self—a self positioned and working within the wide material conditions of her world, even shaping that world—in that object” (21). In this paper, I will discuss several of these “Plat(free)forms” and their capabilities (and limitations). I will explore how these accessible platforms enable expression, in particular of marginalized voices, as Twine has been used widely in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as provide potential for exploring virtual spaces with minimal technology. I will show several student projects that exemplify their uses, as well as how they are being used to create political, diverse, and deeply personal narratives, allowing digital learners to shape their worlds and add their voices to the world of e-lit.

Amid the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), a man named John Peter developed a peculiar system allowing for the procedural generation of Latin poetry. A decade later, in 1677, Peter's system was published in a landmark booklet, titled "Artificial Versifying," whose subtitle proclaims that anyone "that only knows the A.B.C. and can count 9" may use it to produce "true Latin, true verse, and good sense" [1].The system itself centers on six tables in which letters are distributed across grids of cells. To generate a line of poetry, the user first produces a string of six digits (e.g., "952129"). Next, each digit is used to retrieve a sequence of letters from the table corresponding to that digit's position in the string. The letters obtained from a given table form one of nine words contained in that table, and the concatenation of the six chosen words constitutes a line of Latin verse in dactylic hexameter. The system is capable of generating 9^6, or 531,441, lines of verse.As a bizarre forerunner of electronic literature, "Artificial Versifying" was wildly successful: the booklet appeared in three editions, and its procedure was reprinted in books and periodicals for the next 200 years [2-5]. Sadly, Peter's innovative system has received scant treatment by scholars working in this area today [6-9]. This limited coverage is incommensurate to its importance as a groundbreaking work produced centuries ahead of its time. Indeed, its combinatorial method is similar to those employed in early computer poetry, such as Theo Lutz's "Stochastische Texte" [10-11].We have carried out the first translation into English of the "Artificial Versifying" system. While it would be easy to translate any one of the 531,441 hexameter verses that the system can produce, we sought instead to translate the system itself into English. This only entailed translating the 54 words in the six tables, but the process raised a number of interesting challenges nonetheless. The major difficulty is in preserving both meaning and meter, and in total we identified twelve features of the original system that we sought to maintain. In wrangling with interrelations between these features at the level of combinatorics, our design space was not unlike Peter's. While a core aim of this process has been to make "Artificial Versifying" accessible to non-Latin speakers today, this act of translation has helped us to better appreciate the triumph of the system's design.While our project seeks to celebrate an unheralded pioneering effort in the area that became electronic literature, we situate this work amid emerging scholarship on the challenges and opportunities of translating computational textual artifacts. This subarea of translation studies [12] is perhaps best characterized by the Renderings project carried out by Nick Montfort, Piotr Marecki, and other collaborators in the last decade [14-17], though others have taken it up [18-21]. In this paper, we will show that the peculiar considerations inherent in the translation of computational textual artifacts are already present in protocomputational works that are sufficiently procedural, such as "Artificial Versifying."

Tablet computers such as the iPad come with standard technological affordances that other computers such as laptops and desktops do not have as a default, such as touch screens, gyroscopes, and accelerometers. Their simplicity of design, consisting of a flat screen with no required peripherals (such as a mouse and keyboard), and their manipulability (they can be held in one hand, utilized assuming multiple bodily positions, held at different angles and in various distances from one’s face, and easily switched between portrait and landscape orientations) have opened new creative opportunities for multimedia authors. In doing so, ‘TabLit’ (or ‘AppLit’) has challenged scholars, teachers and preservationists of eLit to address the unique features of the platform which has enabled and shaped this body of work. This presentation represents a preliminary foray into delineating and foregrounding some of the key issues of tabLit from theoretical, instructional, and preservation and access perspectives, using four mobile-only works as case studies: Erik Loyer’s Strange Rain (2011), Semyon Polyakonskiy’s Maginary (2020), Tiger Style’s Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009), and Simogo’s DEVICE 6 (2013).Tablet computers, in terms of technological design, are much closer than other computer types to an approximation of the book page. Although some works of appLit simulate the ‘turnable’ pages of the print book, others replace this navigation with page scrolling, and still others radically rethink the idea of ‘the page,’ requiring the development of a new poetics of the page. In large part due to the touch screen, two common design paradigms can be distinguished in the design of the tabLit page/screen: the indexical or digital instrument, which require requires skilled use of a finger (or fingers), and the frame and infinite page, where the tablet screen becomes a ‘moveable’ viewing window over a page that extends in multiple directions beyond this window.In regard to teaching tabLit, this presentation will describe a pilot tablet lending program the author developed with his university library in order to ensure that tablet-based works assigned in a course (“Narrative in a Digital Age”) were accessible to students. It will outline some of the challenges this pilot faced, including students’ tablet/tabLit literacy and technological obsolescence. This last challenge offers a germane segue way into the final topic, preservation and access, which is (or should be) a key concern for both scholars and teachers of tabLit. Two current but far from optimal sites that address access (and, though this access, a form of preservation) will be discussed: the website and social media channels of the iOS game reviewer, App Unwrapper, and GameClub, a subscription service that enables access to a “library of iconic games,” created in response to the concern that “We’re losing the history of the App Store” (Eli Hodapp, 2019). To conclude, the presentation will survey how resources like the Electronic Literature Directory and the ELMCIP Knowledge Base are currently covering tabLit and suggest possible improvements.

Net literature on the WWW is characterized by a special relationship between literary text and technical medium. In addition to the importance of graphic and typographic design, this includes in particular the hypertext structure of the texts. The distribution of a literary text across several interlinked web pages often leads to a non-linear structure, which usually corresponds to non-linear narrative structures. We consider a non-linear text structure to exist as soon as a page contains more than one reference to subsequent pages. A linear passage through the entire text is then no longer possible. For narrative texts, this also implies a non-linear narrative progression. Non-linear text structures can allow predominantly linear narrative progressions with alternative strands, variable endings, and cyclical elements, or multiple narrative progressions through complex linking.For the identification of non-linear patterns, we extract link and element structures from the corpus data and visualize the link networks. We then identify patterns via the visualization and network metrics. A necessary prerequisite for corpus-oriented pattern recognition is the comparability and reproducibility of the individual analyses. Live online literary works can change over time. We work with archived versions of the works, which are kept available via a repository. The pages are archived in the WARC format, a standard format for web archiving.We have modelled and described all types of links we found in the corpus. This model is mainly based on our historical corpus and serves to improve extraction and analysis, but will be tested and complemented with additional material in the future. Additionally, we assessed several existing approaches for the extraction of links. For the actual extraction of the link network data from the WARC files, we use our own software module WARC2graph which is based on our link network model and makes use of multiple extraction approaches. WARC2graph extracts link networks from WARC files and returns these link networks. Users can choose which method to use to extract the network data. The program has a basic module for generic visualization of the data, but this is just for a first impression, since visualization depends on the research question and the nature of the analyzed material.WARC2graph will be made available as a Python module and as a web service run by the Science Data Center for Literature, a joint project of the German Literature Archive (DLA) and several departments at the University of Stuttgart.Our approach is focused on net literature and literary blogs. However, it should work generically on standard WARC files. We hope to make the module reusable both at the level of research-oriented work with WARC data and at the level of archiving and provision of WARC data and data analytics services.

The lack of a shared vocabulary is a crucial obstacle on the path to a generalized, accessible body of knowledge about Interactive Digital Narratives. This describes a platform to solve this issue, developed in the EU COST action INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations) - a community-driven encyclopedia, defining concepts and applications. Two similar and successful projects (The Living Handbook of Narratology and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) serve as examples for this effort, showing how community-authored encyclopedias can provide high-quality content. The authors introduce a taxonomy based on an overarching analytical framework (SPP model) as the foundational element of the encyclopedia, and detail editorial procedures for the project, including a peer-review process, designed to assure high academic quality and relevance of encyclopedia entries.