electronic text

A significant pedagogical challenge emerging from the recent shift from print to digital-media formats is the need to develop and maintain critical reading strategies for online literary analysis. Because traditional approaches to literature and professional writing were developed to engage different genres of print-based texts, today’s university educators find it pointedly lacking when applied to digital reading environments. This discrepancy appears simultaneously at both a practical and cognitive level. Students reading electronic texts, studies show, are more likely to avoid active note-taking, highlighting key passages or comparing multiple works (Barry, 2012; Gold, 2012). As a result, higher levels of comprehension, including remembering crucial premises and text-specific-terminologies, are adversely affected. Speaking to the difficulty of building critical analyses in electronic formats, one researcher feels “[l]iterary criticism in the academy has reached a crisis point, and what we mean by ‘reading’ stands at the center of the storm” (Freedman, 2015). Responding to this issue and the growing concern over declining academic literacy levels it brings to the Humanities, this paper surveys contemporary theories of reading and analysis in the post-print, digital era before outlining a specific methodology for how writing programs can incorporate new procedures for interpreting and assessing texts distributed electronically. To these ends, the paper critically examines the recent development and increased classroom use of computer assisted text analysis (CATA) software to improve readerly engagement with online and electronic texts. Looking at several specific applications and plug- ins like NowComment and Ponder in standard use today, one key focus will emphasize the growing critical interest among instructors and learners to feature tasks and assignments that combine text annotation and commentary with the aims of social media. Further attention, as I will argue, can then be offered to determine the role these tools might play in the revision of literary scholarship. Based on findings from a pilot study investigating levels of student engagement with digital texts verses print texts, this project situates theories of critical writing within students’ real life reading practices, ranging from simple attempts to master PDFs effectively on personal devices to more complex multimedia, multiscreen interactivity.

Alongside the emergent commercial browsers of the late 1990s, several artists made alternative browsers that articulated other ways of conceptualizing a global network of electronic documents, and stood in relief to the particular electronic textuality manifest in browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—a hypertext imaginary that still deeply informs the predominant browsers of today. Post presents research into three such works: The Web Stalker (1997) by the artist collective I/O/D, Shredder (1998) by Mark Napier, and netomat (1999) by Maciej Wisniewski. 

Post will draw on interviews with the artists and art historical analytical methods to describe the development, functioning, and long-term impact of these works. In particular, Post considers the ways in which these artists’ browsers can inform the study and practice of electronic literature.

Loops are mostly patterns: patterns based on a predetermined set of repetitions, and that allows for a recognizable sense of progression and movement. It is used and perceived as a structure whose impact on interpretation can be considerable. This presentation focuses on how the loop defined as a shape, a process and a pattern becomes a figure in contemporary electronic literature works and practices. I will investigate this particularity of digital writing by examining how loops condition reading and writing practices. How do e-loops revisit interpretation processes? More specifically, does the loop’s reflexivity echoes the electronic text it produces?

The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.This highly acclaimed collection of Richard Lanham's witty, provocative, and engaging essays surveys the effects of electronic text on the arts and letters. Lanham explores how electronic text fulfills the expressive agenda of twentieth-century visual art and music, revolutionizes the curriculum, democratizes the instruments of art, and poses anew the cultural accountability of humanism itself.

(Source: Publisher's catalogue copy)

Contents

1: The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution2: Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts3: Twenty Years After: Digital Decorum and Bi-stable Allusions4: The Extraordinary Convergence: Democracy, Technology, Theory, and the University Curriculum5: Electronic Textbooks and University Structures6: Strange Lands, Strange Languages, and Useful Miracles7: The "Q" Question8: Elegies for the Book9: Operating Systems, Attention Structures, and the Edge of Chaos10: Conversation with a Curmudgeon