distant reading

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.

In my home discipline of 19th Century Literature, Franco Moretti pioneered the notion of “distant reading,” in contrast to the close reading beloved by New Critics and deconstructionists alike. While close reading’s value to student engagement with both literary texts and their own writing in both classroom and writing center contexts has been demonstrated in practice, what about the value of distant reading for these endeavors?

Distant reading is known for the “graphs, maps, trees” of Moretti’s work of the same name; the results of a textual encounter with the CATA software Voyant remind one very much of a perusal of one of his scholarly works. Engaging with a literary text with CATA software enables students not only to read digital texts but also to contextualize the work on a larger scale, noting patterns of language, structure, and so forth, thus creating material for an effective distant reading.

Distant reading also comes into play in the writing center. CATA software useful in assisting students with brainstorming and reading technique within the writing center, enabling them to approach texts in critical ways. In addition, writing center studies themselves form a suitable subject for distant reading. Just as Moretti’s distant reading helps us understand trends in cultural production by looking beyond a narrow range of canonical texts, distant reading in the writing center can help us to draw patterns in understanding the actual needs of student writers.

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading,” which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works—of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature—and through it the surrounding world—are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.

(Source: English abstract in Primerjalna književnost 36.1)

In this presentation I propose a close/distant reading of some Argentinean e-poetry works –Migraciones and Outsource me! by Leonardo Solaas and TextField, Eliotians and some of the works of The Disasters by Iván Marino– in order to pose a debate concerning the development of e-poetry in audiovisual electronic environments, particularly e-poetry created by artists/programmers who hardly would defined themselves as poets or writers.To what extent one should still speak about literature concerning this kind of works? Is it possible to find a literary impulse in contexts where literature has lost its privileges and migrates “out of bounds”? If the artists mentioned above lean themselves into literary traditions, why are their works more frequently regarded by visual art critics rather than literary critics? I argue that the works analyzed enable us to resituate literature in inter/trans media contexts, which nevertheless are readable in terms of literary effects. It is not that we should read this works only as literature, but it happens that nowadays critics who were educated in literary traditions can probably read in these works something that visual arts’ critics are not reading. I will not say that this situation provides necessarily better readings, only different. And after centuries of delimitations between artistic languages, even if 20th century avant-gardes opened the path to the dissolution of those boundaries, we still lack an educational system which could deal with the merging of languages. Meanwhile, I would consider how literary critics could collaborate in order to show how literary impulses could still be readable, and not invisibilized, when visual artists and programmers tangle languages and openly lean themselves into literary traditions to which they are more or less “outsiders”. In addition, I will propose a political reading of this “out of bounds” movement. In a world where migration is part of globalized capitalism, migration of languages, for instance merging languages, could be easily seen as going with the flow. But maybe we can reverse the argument: some works within contemporary electronic arts engage themselves with a “translanguage” politics which comments, reflects on and even deviate globalized flows in order to expose the false ecumenism of the globalized era.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/out-bounds-searching… )

The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (http://elmcip.net/knowledgebase) is a human-edited, open-access, contributory Drupal database consisting of cross-referenced entries describing creative works of and critical writing about electronic literature as well as entries on authors, events, exhibitions, publishers, teaching resources and archives. The project has been developed by the Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen as an outcome of the ELMCIP project. All nodes are cross-referenced so users can see at a glance which works were presented at an event, and follow links to see which articles have been written about any given work or which other events they were presented at. Most records provide simple bibliographic metadata about a work or event, but increasingly we are also gathering source code of works, PDFs of papers and dissertations, videos of talks and performances, and other forms of archival documentation. While our first priority in designing the Knowledge Base was to provide a basic open-access online research infrastructure for an emergent field of scholarly and creative practice, providing researchers, teachers, and students with easy access to works, critical writing, and the context of a field, we are increasingly realizing its value as a base for further research in its own right. The Knowledge Base provides us with a growing pool of data that we are beginning to analyze using visualisations, social network analysis and other digital methods. This panel will consist of presentations of research developed by using information in the Knowledge Base as the basis for what Franco Moretti refers to as “Distant Reading” to better understand the discourse of the field and the works it encompasses. In this approach, instead of analysing individual works, we search for patterns across the entire field of electronic literature. The panel will present four different approaches to using the Knowledge Base to collect specific types of information related to objects, networks and practices of electronic literature and use digital methods to reveal patterns and trends from within the collected data that will hopefully inform a better understanding of specific aspects of the field.

For the “Theories and Practices of the Literary Lab” roundtable at MLA yesterday, panelists were asked to speak for 5 minutes about their vision of a literary lab. Matthew Jockers spoke on the conception and agenda of the Stanford Literary Lab, which he started with Franco Moretti.

Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History is one of the most provocative recent works of literary history. The present volume collects generalist and specialist, academic and nonacademic responses by statisticians, philosophers, historians, literary scholars and others. And Moretti’s responses to these responses. Originally written as contributions to an online book event hosted at The Valve (www.thevalve.org), and edited for this volume, these essays explore, extend and criticize many aspects of Franco Moretti’s work. They will be of interest to anyone interested in Moretti’s brand of “distant reading”; or in the prospects for quantitative approaches to literary style and genre; or recent interdisciplinary work in the humanities generally. Contributors Contributors: Bill Benzon, Tim Burke, Jenny Davidson, Ray Davis, Jonathan Goodwin, Eric Hayot, John Holbo, Steven Berlin Johnson, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Sean McCann, Franco Moretti, Adam Roberts, Cosma Shalizi.

In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of “distant reading” into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres—the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel—as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

(Source: Verso online catalog.)

Article abstract required.

Guest lecture at Duquesne University.