digital hermeneutics

Panel description 

This panel explores how digital environments affect literature, and more specifically, how writing and reading practices speak across electronic literature platforms. If it is true that every medium develops its own telling structure and, thus, each platform allows authors specific literary affordances and constraints. It is also true, from a narratological point of view, that the same medium could spawn different products (Ryan 2004). With this in mind, panel members focus on female literary creations, coming from different geographic regions. Their papers analyse the ways in which platforms affect narrative and poetic construction, including gender patterns highlighted in the selected examples. Methodologically, qualitative and quantitative research methods are used, including close reading, digital hermeneutics, distant reading, semiotics and Material Engagement Theory (MET). 

HStudies Research Group, University of Jyväskylä, Finland 

Individual abstracts 

Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics: From the Holodeck to Mez Breeze’s micro-V[R]erseAsun López-Varela (Complutense University Madrid, Spain)

From a semiotic perspective, this presentation explores V[R]erse, a collection of poems and micro-stories that celebrates well-known E-lit artists, turning the pieces into Posthuman VR experiences. Australian net.artist and game designer Mez Breeze uses VR sculptures to add to these micro-stories. From a semiotic and MET perspective, the paper explores desktop-based VR. 

A Hermeneutics of Stephanie Strickland, Cyntia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan’s SlippingglimpseMaya Zalbidea (Complutense University of Madrid, Spain)

This study offers a hermeneutical analysis of the Flash interactive poem Slippingglimpse. This hermeneutical analysis pays attention to the common features of poetry such as poetical language, structure, form and rhythm, as well as the particular signs used, as well as the effects and the computer elements it integrates.

Labiba Khammar’s Critical and Creative WorksEman Younis (Beit Berl College, Israel)

This paper sheds light on the experience of the Moroccan writer and critic Labiba Khammar, who is one of the pioneering Arab women writers in the field of digital literature. Labiba wrote an important theoretical book, a theoretical project that was followed by a practical creative project: Guraf wa Maraya. Through this work, Khammar discussed the issues of writing a novel through a series of stories that are disconnected and connected simultaneously.

Unfixed Gender Patterns in World Electronic Literature PlatformsGiovanna Di Rosario (Polytechnic of Milan, Italy) and Nohelia Meza (Independent Scholar, Mexico)

This research describes and analyses the ways in which traditional markers of identity, such as gender, are reconfigured in digital literature. The study aims at understanding the role of place and gender in a poetic digital environment. By investigating and applying distant reading techniques to works authored by female writers from Europe and Latin America, Di Rosario and Meza trace the unfixed and polyhedric feminine literary and poetic voices embedded in E-lit creations.

Engagement with public databases has become a leading way for scholars, artists, and readers alike to encounter works of electronic literature as well as get an overview of the field. Although acknowledged as an important and difficult process, database construction is, in practice, too often underestimated as merely a preparatory task in Digital Humanities. Through the conception of database criticism, I provide a critical apparatus to approach databases in terms of qualitative and aesthetic characteristics.

Considering public databases as media texts, I take a digital hermeneutic approach to the reading strategies involved in engaging with databases. What follows is the presence of databases as cultural artifacts that are themselves studied in humanities and social science frameworks. It is in the interest of both the quality and esteem of the databases to develop ways to study and evaluate them parallel to academic reviews of monographs and edited collections.

I offer a media-specific framework of four core vectors for database criticism: data and scope, experience, aesthetics, and labor. Building on Critical Data Studies, database criticism needs to identify the means and objectives of the database and thing along with those in reviewing the data. But a database is so much more than its data. A good database incites the pleasure of anticipation and this is determined by both the user and browsing experience. This is linked to the aesthetics of the database, which includes the accessibility of the database at its core. Finally, the explicit evaluation of labor addresses which value is placed on various tasks of developing and maintaining an academic database.

My call for database criticism opens up ways to revalue the databases as dissemination of research and provide the opportunity to highlight all elements that we wish to be part of the field going forward.

In this paper, I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.(Source: abstract in ACM Digital Library)

I investigate the database characteristics of electronic literature that makes them into social forms. Database structures are both fragmented and relational, displaying hypertext characteristics. I approach The Atlas Group Archive and haikU, two works of electronic literature, as examples of material and conceptual databases in order to explore the database function so saturated in our daily life. Both works highlight a database aesthetics, although the ways they do so are polar opposites. I analyze the works within the framework of digital hermeneutics, continuously considering the relationship between text and context, between parts and whole. I demonstrate how AGA is an explicit database, supposedly showing a 'complete' archive, whereas haikU is an implicit database that hides the corpus of sentences. I show the sociality of the databases, thematizing both the human process behind database formation as a whole, as well as how the individual elements influence the perception of the overall database. Finally, I take my findings to a broader perspective and consider what AGA and haikU can teach us about the materiality, conceptuality, and sociality of the omnipresent structure of the database.

(Source: abstract)

This paper takes a digital hermeneutic approach (Van Nuenen and Van de Ven) to database research in the field of electronic literature. I analyze the ELMCIP Knowledge Base (KB), a publicly available cross-referenced database of electronic literature that allows contributors to enter and edit information. I consider the peripheries of the database from the perspective of the development, population, and research use of information in the KB.

As developers, we consider it essential to have fields for information that will document e-lit practices and their authors that are as accurate as possible without adding superfluous or problematic information or making the records too complicated to fill out. This can lead to sensitive issues: I recount a current discussion of the use of the gender field in the author records of the KB, combining the community discussion in the ELMCIP/ELO Facebook groups with sources from library science and radical cataloging (i.e. Drabinkski 2014).

The development of the KB is inextricably linked with the electronic literature community, laying bare issues of having community that is inclusive but which nevertheless inevitably has people at its center and in the peripheries. The KB can be regarded as both a service to the community and as an obligation for the community, which is a principal consideration because of its crowdsourced system. I take the perspective of digital labor (i.e. Terranova 2013) to give insight into the processes involved in the maintenance of the KB, within broader academic and economic structures.

Finally, as a result of the development and crowdsourced population of the KB, there are many anomalies in the KB. Completion of documenting the entire field of electronic literature systematically is a tantalizing goal that we know we are never going to reach but nevertheless we feel like we almost have because of the sheer amount of information in the database. The KB has been used in several quantitative papers (i.e. Rettberg 2013) as well as numerous student projects. I reflect on the implications for the structure and practices of the KB for doing quantitative research, by paying special attention to ‘outliers’ in the datasets.

Through these three reflections, I argue for a digital hermeneutic approach to database research which oscillates between analyzing the textual and contextual levels of database practices, between individual and collective. Analyzing the peripheries of the database in this manner uncovers the mutual dependence between the database and its community in both critical and prolific ways.

(Abstract in programme)

This  article  presents  “Ciberia”,  a  collection  of  electronic  literature  works  in  Spanish, housed  in  OdA 2.0.,  a  learning  objects‟  repository  of  the  University  Complutense  of  Madrid.  The Ciberia project involves experimentation at the humanistic and technological level, since it deals with the challenge of archiving digitally-born literary works as well as with the archiving process itself, which we  are  carrying  out  in  OdA  2.0,  a  data  management  system  for  the  creation  of  learning  objects repositories  on  the  Web.  OdA  allows  different  researchers  to  work  collaboratively  in  a  simultaneous manner on the data base, they can not only introduce new objects but they can also modify the data model. This entourage  allows us to create taxonomies in an  inductive rather  than deductive manner. The  article  covers  aspects  such  as  the  objectives  of  the  collection,  the  elaboration  of  Ciberia‟s bibliographic  card,  the  process  of  metadata  cleaning  and  reconciliation  with  other  collections  of  the Linked Data cloud, such  as the CELL  Project, and Ciberia‟s research and  pedagogical functions. Moreover, we will showcase some of its most representative literary works as we revise the process of the collection‟s creation.

This edition reflects upon the need of techniques to approach the ongoing upheavals taking place in today's technology-driven production of (literary) art. The contributions assembled here all discuss ways of reading cultural objects created with digital media. The objects of interest are: a computer game (Soderman), a performance of a work that houses and visualizes its literary artifacts on a website - a huge database of texts by different authors (Rettberg), default settings and electronic poetics in an age of technological determinism (Heckman), literary artifacts in between book and programmable media (Vincler), story-telling in the Gulf (Lenze), and signs in a culture of mashups (Navas). In a time when cultural objects in digital culture reconfigure the reception of their addressees, it is important to develop not only a proper understanding of the impact of these ruptures on literary communication but also an interpretation of the presented moves into the scope of scholarly discussion. Such an engagement calls for what Roberto Simanowski proposes in his contribution: "digital hermeneutics."

With the increasing importance of digital media in all areas of social and cultural life, it is necessary to define a conceptual framework for understanding the social changes it generates. This implies to introduce students and readers to the new methods of critically interacting with media in digital culture. Conference presentations and publications develop the theoretical background and methods needed in scholarship and education to approach the new topics. At various universities, scholars discuss the consequences of such developments under the umbrella terms of digital literacy, digital humanities, or “electracy.” Nevertheless, scholars also must concentrate on the aesthetic aspects of digital media, investigating in new artistic genres emerging from or changes in existing genres brought about by digital media. This, however, should not happen on the ground of a metatheoretical discussion or thematic reading, as was common in the 1990s, when the understanding of the technology (such as hypertext) as the embodiment of contemporary critical theory distracted critical attention for the actual work and led to misinterpretations of the theory applied in favor of establishing a link between this theory and technology. It is important not to reduce any specific example of digital art to the status of typical representative of some aspect of digital media or of some genre of digital art. It is time to pay attention to the specificities of particular works. This does not mean that we should abstain from discussing a specific work as an example of a genre, or try to refrain from understand a genre itself as a signifying form in contemporary culture. If close reading aims at critical reading, making generalizations and suggestions concerning certain interdependencies between the particular artifact and the broader cultural situation will be inevitable. The crucial questions are where one starts, how much attention is paid to the work at hand and what, first of all, are the central aspects of a hermeneutic perspective in digital media. The following text proposes a few general ideas towards the development of digital hermeneutics.