Issue of a journal

The New River has been around for over 20 years, and in that time the digital world, and our readers' familiarity with that world, has changed drastically. In this year'™s Spring issue we take a moment to appreciate what still works from back in the early days of new media and the possibilities offered to us by its future.

We have been lucky enough to receive submissions from several past contributors this reading period, and have a pretty packed issue.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/17Fall/editor.html)

The world as we know it is changing: drones can deliver burritos, cars can drive themselves, all movies are remakes, and our middle school math teachers were all wrong – we do always have a calculator in our pocket. Welcome to the future! We’re talking about your smartphone. These small rectangular devices have affected nearly every aspect of our lives. New media is no exception. For this issue, we have curated a collection of pieces, both desktop and mobile, that exemplify all that new media has to offer in this future we live in.

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html)

When you consider that writing as a form hasn’t really changed all that much since The Epic of Gilgamesh, some 4,000 years ago, what’s occurring in the world of new media becomes that much more impressive. Digital writing is already able to do things that authors aspired towards for years; incorporating visuals, music, and sound, as well as interacting directly with audience. In this issue we’ve tried to put forth work that exemplifies the wide range new media is capable of.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Fall/editor.html)

Each issue of Taper is edited by a collective. Editing and production is done in coordination with The Trope Tank at MIT, a laboratory directed by Bad Quarto proprietor and publisher Nick Montfort. Taper is not officially associated with MIT or hosted on an MIT server, however.

For the fifth issue, the editorial collective consisted of Kyle Booten, Angela Chang, Leonardo Flores, Judy Heflin, and Milton Läufer. 

A constraint was established: the core part of each poem—the HTML on the page after the header—could be no more than a tiny 2KB (2048 bytes). Members of the editorial collective recused themselves from discussion of their own submissions. The collective works independently of the publisher to make selections. We thank Sebastian Bartlett for his help in managing the template.

The work in this fifth issue is written in HTML5, using ES6. It has been tested and found to work properly on current Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers across current platforms, as well as on Mac OS X Safari; everything does not work on Edge and iOS Safari.

We encourage readers to view the source code (Ctrl/Command + U) in order to read the artists’ statements as well as the code itself. Be creative when exploring the pieces; some of them are interactive, which you can discover through experimentation or by reading the source code. We invite remixes of published Taper works in future issues.

(Source: Taper #5: Pent Up)

Research on culture and literature from the perspective of the media has been a hot topic among Chinese scholars in recent years. In this special issue, the relevant authors organize and analyze major issues in online literature, including understanding media culture, cyber technology and the characteristics of literature, defining online literature, online writing and online text. We hope to provide, to the best of our capacity, cultural interpretation and theoretical reference for the healthy growth and sustainable development of online literature and to serve as a modest stimulus for academic inheritance and innovation with regard to the theory and criticism of online literature.

(Source: last paragraph of introduction to special issue.)

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)

The OEI issue no. 80-81 is dedicated to the work of Ernesto de Sousa, Portuguese art and poetry from the 1960s.