communication

Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.

As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.

Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.

Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.

Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.

Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.

Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.

Since the 1980s, experimental poets of Asian descent writing in English around the world have created works informed by both their experiences of being in the Asian diaspora and their subjectivities in the age of advancing computing technologies. Studies of these works have been scarce and few have put them all together in order to make an argument about how to read them in connection with each other. The aim of this dissertation is to make a case for what I call the diasporic reading framework, and to argue that this way of reading fills in crucial gaps in our understandings of experimental Asian poetry.

The diasporic reading framework uses diaspora, in this specific case the Asian diaspora, as a concept that helps us interpret the techniques, forms, and content of digitally-influenced poetry produced since the 1980s. In turn, this reading also allows us to see how the experimentations of these poets enrich the conventional categorizations of Asian diasporic writing. To this end, I gather an archive of literary works that includes the poetry of more renowned and canonically accepted poets (e.g. Leung Ping-kwan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Fred Wah) as well as less easily categorized genres by lesser known individuals and groups (e.g. multi-media works, blogs, public projects) in order to read them together productively.

The first chapter of my dissertation uses poetry from Hong Kong as a case study to establish my definition of diaspora and build a theoretical basis for using it as a reading framework. The second chapter takes this framework and applies it to works beyond Hong Kong, demonstrating its portability as well as showing how the abstraction of shared land into non-physical spaces is a powerful way to understand works that have previously been considered only post-colonialist, only nationalist, or only feminist. Chapter three applies this reading further to works that experiment with form using digital technology, and the final chapter revisits previous themes in light of new advances in social media. I conclude that the political stakes of diaspora as a reading framework is its function as a tactic against hegemony.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 1993 non-fiction work of comics by American cartoonist Scott McCloud. It explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used. It expounds theoretical ideas about comics as an art form and medium of communication, and is itself written in comic book form.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics)

The aim of this paper is to describe a genre that is gaining import ance  incontemporary humanities, and especially in its areas devoted to digital media – the technical report. Technical reports are discussed as part of the larger trend of open notebook science. This form of communication draws from experiences worked out in the field of technology, computer science and science. In this understanding technical reports are a genre of gray literature, a form dedicated to communicating results of research projects conducted by laboratories. The case study discussed in this text is devoted to a series of technical reports from the MIT Trope Tank lab, which are interpreted in the light of a manifesto­text for this form of com­munication, Beyond the Journal and the Blog. The Technical Report for Communication in the Humanities, published by Nick Montfort. One of the aims of the article is also to contextualize technical reports against the background of other forms and methods of communication in laboratories from the field of contemporary humanities (including blogs, brochures, lab notebooks).

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Remediation by Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter.

Remediation is an important book. Its co-authors, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, seem self-conscious of this from the outset. The book’s subtitle, for example, suggests their intent to contend for the mantle of Marshall McLuhan, who all but invented media studies with Understanding Media (1964), published twenty years prior to the mass-market release of the Apple Macintosh and thirty years prior to the popular advent of the World Wide Web. There has also, I think, been advance anticipation for Remediation among the still relatively small coterie of scholars engaged in serious cultural studies of computing and information technology. Bolter and Grusin both teach in Georgia Tech’s School of Language, Communication, and Culture, the academic department which perhaps more than any other has attempted a wholesale make-over of its institutional identity in order to create an interdisciplinary focal point for the critical study of new media.

Bridging Superfund sites and video games, Alenda Chang’s essay revisits media- and computation-centered definitions of remediation to extend media and mediation past the pale of digital visual technology. Through a parallel consideration of what’s known as environmental remediation—cleaning up or cordoning off polluted sites, using technological or biotechnological methods—Chang argues that human and nonhuman bodies and ecosystems are equally enmeshed in practices of communication and transformation.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/remediation)