affect

In recent years, the digital humanities has been shaken by important debates about inclusivity and scope—but what change will these conversations ultimately bring about? Can the digital humanities complicate the basic assumptions of tech culture, or will this body of scholarship and practices simply reinforce preexisting biases? Bodies of Information addresses this crucial question by assembling a varied group of leading voices, showcasing feminist contributions to a panoply of topics, including ubiquitous computing, game studies, new materialisms, and cultural phenomena like hashtag activism, hacktivism, and campaigns against online misogyny.

Taking intersectional feminism as the starting point for doing digital humanities, Bodies of Information is diverse in discipline, identity, location, and method. Helpfully organized around keywords of materiality, values, embodiment, affect, labor, and situatedness, this comprehensive volume is ideal for classrooms. And with its multiplicity of viewpoints and arguments, it’s also an important addition to the evolving conversations around one of the fastest growing fields in the academy.

Contributors: Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi, U of Lethbridge; Moya Bailey, Northeastern U; Bridget Blodgett, U of Baltimore; Barbara Bordalejo, KU Leuven; Jason Boyd, Ryerson U; Christina Boyles, Trinity College; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Lisa Brundage, CUNY; micha cárdenas, U of Washington Bothell; Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown U; Danielle Cole; Beth Coleman, U of Waterloo; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Constance Crompton, U of Ottawa; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M; Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, U of Colorado Boulder; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U Library; Sandra Gabriele, Concordia U; Brian Getnick; Karen Gregory, U of Edinburgh; Alison Hedley, Ryerson U; Kathryn Holland, MacEwan U; James Howe, Rutgers U; Jeana Jorgensen, Indiana U; Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY; Dorothy Kim, Vassar College; Kimberly Knight, U of Texas, Dallas; Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson U; Sharon M. Leon, Michigan State; Izetta Autumn Mobley, U of Maryland; Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology; Veronica Paredes, U of Illinois; Roopika Risam, Salem State; Bonnie Ruberg, U of California, Irvine; Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), U of California, Santa Barbara; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Michelle Schwartz, Ryerson U; Emily Sherwood, U of Rochester; Deb Verhoeven, U of Technology, Sydney; Scott B. Weingart, Carnegie Mellon U.

(Source: University of Minnesota Press)

The intensification of tactile/haptic research by academia and the digital technology industry, has given rise to several instrumentalizations of the adjective haptic, often contradicting an entire philosophical haptological tradition, going back to Aristotle and allowing us to think of the haptic from a multisensory perspective capable of destabilizing the idea of pure sensory modalities. On the one hand, such intensification is evidenced by the ubiquity of digital technological devices that call for interaction through touch and gesture as tactile/haptic functions necessary for experiencing digital content. On the other hand, it may be seen in the increasing demand for tangibility between human and machine, particularly through sensory experiences made possible by virtual/augmented reality, as well as, mixed reality/virtuality platforms. Such intense literalization of the haptic also, paradoxically, ends up reinforcing the existence and primacy of a visual culture inherent to an ocularcentric society. It is in line with this haptological tradition, as well as through the recovery of a multisensory perspective explored by a series of avant-garde artistic practices that permeate the history of twentieth-century art, that I propose to (re)think digital literary works via means of an alternative and operative redefinition of haptic drawn from the metamedial and intermedial specificities of current digital poetic practices. Based on the mapping and analysis of carefully selected digital literary works, this research intends to understand how digital poetic practices make use of certain processes of haptic reading enabled by current digital technology, in order to explore and question the processes of writing and reading in media. In order to validate an argument largely based on the examination of ambiguities and tensions highlighted by the literary exploration of interface functionalities in arts and literature, this thesis will attempt to analyze the referred ambiguity, by showing a parallel between an inherent circularity of (multi)sensory perception and the way certain circular, or rather, spiral-like, trajectories, are able to be identified across multiple arts, artists and movements. All of this, of course, is put together via a process of dialectic subversion/disruption that characterizes multiple variants of experimentalism across the centuries. Moreover, doing so is a way of finding possible answers, or perhaps, raising new questions, regarding longstanding problematics pertaining to the relationship between tradition and innovation, from which the digital era is not exempt.

Melissa Gregg reviews Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling

No need to get excited. According to Julie Reiser, The Affect Theory Reader offers the reader no end of theory but little affect. Reiser suggests this points to a broader and systemic problem in any reading or theory of affect.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/affective)

Programmable computation is radically transforming the contemporary media ecology. What is literature's future in this emergent Programming Era? What happens to reading when the affective, performative power of executable code begins to provide the predominant model for creative language use? Critics have raised concerns about models of affective communication and the challenges a-semantic affects present to interpretive practices. In response, this essay explores links between electronic literature, affect theory, and materialist aesthetics in two works by experimental writer and publisher William Gillespie.

Focusing on the post-digital novel Keyhole Factory and the electronic speculative fiction Morpheus: Bilblionaut, it proposes that: first, tracing tropes of code as affective transmissions allows for more robust readings of technomodernist texts and, second, examining non-linguistic affect and its articulation within constraint-based narrative forms suggests possibilities for developing an affective hermeneutics.

My project was prompted by calls for more in-depth critical interpretations of works of electronic literature; an appreciation of how Gillespie problematises tropes of proximity and distance used to characterise modes of critical reading; and a desire to explain Gillespie's commitment to both conceptual, constraint-based writing practices (facilitated by computational media) and the intentional production of meaningful narrative affect. Ultimately, my analyses showcase Gillespie's countertextual achievement: assembling a network of texts, both electronic and analogue, that functions as a literary ecosystem resistant to the instrumentalism of the neoliberal publishing industry. Gillespie's Spineless Books provides an exemplary model of and working platform for collaborative, conceptual, and countertextual literary writing across media.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Many digital narratives feature avatars onto which we project our agency, aspirations, and biases – consciously and unconsciously. This paper presents two projects towards understanding why we construct the avatars that we do and how these avatars impact us. The upshot is that electronic literature authors should take constructing avatars in digital systems seriously since they can potentially reinforce real-world stereotypes.

The first project consists of a system called AIRvatar (named for the Advanced Identity Representation), which is an avatar constructor for collecting analytical data such as mouse-click events and the amount of time spent in the different parts of the menu.

With AIRvatar, we found that social phenomena such as gender-related stereotyping could be observed through choices made by players (Lim, 2015). For example, female players appeared to conform more toward stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. Many gave male avatars significantly more strength and endurance points than female avatars, and significantly more intelligence and wisdom points for female avatars than male avatars. This effect appears related to the idea of “cross-­stereotyping,” a type of “identity tourism” (Nakamura, 2008) in which players attribute a more limited range of behaviors to other genders than they do to their own. The fact is that avatars constructed by users introduce new audience-driven types of stereotyping. Electronic literature authors must ask whether, if such stereotypes are commonplace, we want to subvert, challenge, or change them in the systems we create.

The second project studies how avatar construction impacts user performance, identity development, and emotional engagement (Kao and Harrell, 2015). Experiments were conducted in our game called Mazzy (1892 online participants total in the studies discussed here). We contrasted outcomes during which users either deployed a minimal avatar (black dot), an abstract avatar (geometrical shape), or a likeness avatar (that looks like the user). We also investigated the impacts of user face photos, famous figures, and user-selected role models.

Minimal and shape avatar users were more engaged, had significantly higher enjoyment, and less difficulty. Likeness avatar users had significantly higher affect towards their avatars, yet reported significantly higher difficulty. Results suggest that Black or African American participants have lower affect towards the game than White participants in the user face photo condition. Yet, women using famous figures performed better than when using shape avatars and low performing users with role-model avatars did better than low performing users with shape avatars.

Although game-oriented, our results are more broadly informative for electronic literature. The fact that the replayability and emotional engagement are impacted by the types of avatar used in light of the demographics of those users is important. We have shown that such systems impact how users see themselves, perform, and feel about themselves. As such, authors have a great responsibility to their users. We hope that the results and discussion here will help inform electronic literature authors who are concerned about their impacts on diverse audiences.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

After much excitement about hypertext fiction in the 1990s, many digital-literary-arts practitioners moved away from narrative. There seemed to be a recognition that the hyper-reading digital environments promote was not conducive to long-form narratives. Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media (2002) declared that databases dominated over narrative; narrative was now a residual, if not yet obsolete, epistemological form. But born-digital authors have not entirely abandoned narrative; rather, the narrativity inherent to their artifacts has been diffused, redistributed across non-linguistic modalities. New production technologies make it easier to integrate images, animations, music, sounds, and other modalities into cybertextual artifacts often more akin to video games than novels. In multimodal environments, where textual output is more variable, narrative qualities can appear elusive or ephemeral. Nonetheless, narrativity, like other indicators of literariness, persists in new media writing.

Both the leisurely reading and scholarly study of long, avant-garde mega-novels have benefited from the creation of networked, open access resources. And databases designed to promote reading and scholarship of digital writing, such as the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base and others that will be soon be cross-searchable in the CELL network, have the potential to yield significant insights about new narrative forms, including the database platforms themselves. Consequently, I remain open to, and even optimistic about, Katherine Hayles’s vision of narrative and database interacting in a mutually beneficial relationship as “natural symbionts.

Rather than advancing a master narrative about the status of narrative in our digital and soon-to-be post-digital (Cramer) era, however, it seems more productive, at this juncture, to examine, closely and critically, narrativity in select works of “e-lit” and connected discursive practices that constitute the contested field of electronic literature.

Critical antecedents include studies that relocate literary narrative by analyzing forms grounded, conceptually and materially, in technologically aware writing practices: Tabbi and Wutz’s Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology (1997), Ciccoricco’s Reading Network Fiction (2007), Simanowski’s Digital Art and Meaning (2011), Punday’s Writing at the Limit (2012), Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Medium, (2014) and the University of Siegen’s Media Upheavals series. What distinguishes these books is their recognition that any digital poetics will be impoverished unless it engages, deliberately, with a long literary tradition in which human language – words shaped deliberately into aesthetic forms that stimulate narratable ideas – remains the most significant medium.

But it’s not enough to assert the value of the literary and the significance of narratable ideas, scholars must situate works of e-literature within the larger media ecology while continuing to draw upon resources provided by literary studies to extract semiotic meanings that enable texts to endure over time.

My presentation considers one implication of embracing the materialist aesthetics inherent to many technotexts: will experiential accounts of users’ affective, embodied experiences supplant readers’ efforts to understand what a text means? My position is that developing a critical attentiveness to affective processes in networked narratives is crucial to understanding contemporary literature and developing an affective hermeneutics for 21st-century literary studies. Affectively reading William Gillespie’s visually striking post-print novel Keyhole Factory alongside Gillespie and Travis Alper’s digital prose poem Morpheus Biblionaut generates a compelling, distributed narrative system, one designed to advance a progressive, media-ecological awareness, and possibly a politics.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

A circular interview on "Becoming Digital" conducted by J. R. Carpenter, with responses from Brian Stefans, Stuart Moulthrop, Darren Wershler, David Jhave Johnston, Lori Emerson, Nick Montfort, and Stephanie Strickland in an anthology on experimental poetics edited by Amy De'Ath and Fred Wah, out now from Banff Centre Press.

Remarks on Poetics of Mad Affect, Militancy, Feminism, Demotic Rhythms, Emptying, Intervention, Reluctance, Indigeneity, Immediacy, Lyric Conceptualism, Commons, Pastoral Margins, Desire, Ambivalence, Disability, The Digital, and Other Practices Edited by Amy De’Ath and Fred Wah Toward. Some. Air. is a landmark collection of profiles of contemporary poets, statements, essays, conversations about contemporary poetry and poetic practice, and a few exemplary poems selected by up-and-coming poet and scholar Amy De’Ath and Governor General’s Award-winning, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah. The over 40 contributors to this anthology are renowned poets and academics from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Toward. Some. Air. is an open invitation to consider the various contours and meanings of Anglophone poetic practice, as a way of interpreting the world around us. An invaluable critical resource with unprecedented scope, this is a book that speaks to the future of contemporary poetics and writing poetry. Contributors: Caroline Bergvall, Anne Boyer, Sean Bonney & Steve Collis, Andrea Brady, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Louis Cabri, JR Carpenter, cris cheek, CA Conrad, Maria Damon, Amy De'Ath, Jeff Derksen, Liz Howard, Peter Jaeger, Reg Johanson, Justin Katko & Jow Lindsay, Larissa Lai, Peter Manson, Roy Miki, Nicole Markotic & Michael Davidson, Daphne Marlatt, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Sina Queyras, Lisa Robertson, Steven Ross Smith, Kaia Sand, Dale Smith, Christine Stewart, Keston Sutherland, Keith Tuma, Catherine Wagner, Fred Wah, Darren Wershler, Rita Wong & Kateri Akiwenxie-Damm, Rachel Zolf