canon

Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta), offers a critical examination of concepts relating to canon, preservation, and access. Adopting an essentially critical outlook on canonization as a process of scholarly and social elitization, she argues that material (financial, geographic, and technological) access has always been a discriminating, regulatory factor in canon development, even if we assume a dynamic concept of canon (Ensslin 2007) or a crowdsourcing, emergent approach (Rettberg 2013) that align with contemporary, fast changing technological developments. Ensslin’s paper focuses on the ​Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext ​(​EQRH​), published in two volumes between 1994 and 1995, which has been largely neglected by digital fiction scholarship, mainly because of incompatibility and obsolescence issues. Two of the works contained within this early, e-literary journal are highlighted in Grigar’s presentation. ​EQRH ​offers an interesting case study of a publishing strategy that combined primary material with authors’ own reading notes, thus anticipating the highly accessible preservation efforts made by the ​Pathfinders​ project (Grigar and Moulthrop 2013-2017)

Eastgate’s project did not live up to its own aspirations, arguably due to rapid technological changes and the costly adaptations needed to meet the expectations of today’s digital fiction audiences. Because, currently, a media archaeological approach is required to read and analyze the texts published in ​EQRH​, Ensslin demands a scholarly initiative to collaborate with the publishers on updating the series for web browsers and making it accessible as downloads, to allow for broader scholarly engagement with this important yet inevitably sidelined series of artefacts.

(source: ELO 2018, panel, speech)

As of July 2013, the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base includes documentation of more than 2,000 creative works and more than 2,000 articles of critical writing. Many of the records of critical writing include cross-references to the creative works they address. This article presents a preliminary analysis of all of the critical writing-to-creative work cross- references currently documented in the Knowledge Base in the aggregate. By developing static and interactive visualizations of this data, we might begin to see the outlines of an emerging “canon” of electronic literature.

A slightly revised version of this paper was published in 2014 in ebr.

The aim of this paper, titled “The magnificent Seven” as an echo of the homonymous film, is to introduce the works of different authors that have been included in the Electronic Literature Collection (vol. II) and that are not in English. Following the panel that the ELO introduced in Maryland that opened the e-lit works in languages other that English, here the step has moved convincingly forward since 12 authors from countries such as Brazil, Portugal, France, Israel, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Perú, México, Catalonia and Spain have been introduced in the vastest English corpus. Some of these authors write in English or have had their works translated into English (Tisselli, Berkehenger, Kruglanski, etc.) but this paper, included in a specific panel that deals with e-lit works non written in English, will analyze in an exercise of “close-reading”, this “magnificent seven” works in Romance languages on the collection: Isaías Herrero’s La casa sota el temps and Universo molécula, Doménico Chiappe’s Tierra de extracción, Ton Ferret’s The fuguebook, Chico Marinho et al. Palavrador and Amor de Clarice and Poemas no meio du caminho by Rui Torres. It is interesting to see the sort of different variety of digital literature that emerges from the comparison.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

"Net literature" is a relatively young phenomenon that has its roots as well in the experiments of visual and concrete poetics as in the application of hypertext. With the extensive use of computer- and network-technologies this new kind of literature has grown up and is now considered to be one of the most important influences of recent art. Not only does "net literature" connect sound, video and animation with interactivity and allows new forms of artistic expression. It also destroys the traditional functions in the literary system: The ‘death of the author’ gives birth to the writing reader.

In this study a first attempt is made to apply the concept of "canon" to "net literature": Is there already a "canon" existing and if so, what are the techniques that are used to form this "canon"? Based on a theory of action and a modification of Karl Erik Rosengren’s "mention technique" a sample of German reviews on "net literature" was analyzed. The main research interests were: How reviewers refer to "net literature", which projects are considered to be of exceptional quality and which internet services influence this process of canonization (and how).

This study is also regarded as a test of the applicability of Rosengren’s method for the analysis of "net literature": Is it valid to use a method that was originally designed for the empirical study of the (traditional) literary canon for this purpose?

 The monograph is available to download from the archived linked in this entry.