evaluation

Electronic literature exists at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and STEM: an acronym that itself defines a contested battleground of technical skills. The lack of diversity in STEM has received considerable scrutiny, and computer-related fields particularly suffer from a lack of diversity. Salter notes that this has contributed to the rise of “brogrammer” culture in disciplines with strong computer science components, and with it a rhetorical collision of programming and hypermasculine machismo. Brogrammer culture is self-replicating: in technical disciplines, the association of code with masculinity and men’s only spaces plays a pivotal role in reinforcing the status quo. Given this dramatic under-representation of women in computer science disciplines, the privileging of code-driven and procedural works within the discourse of electronic literature is inherently gendered. The emergence of platforms friendly to non-coders (such as Twine) broadens participation in electronic literature and gaming space, but often such works are treated and labeled differently (and less favorably) from code-driven and procedural works that occupy the same space. Salter argues that electronic literature communities must be aware of the gendered rhetoric and socialization surrounding code, and be vigilant against the tendency to value code (and, by extension, male-coded labor) over content when evaluating works in this form.

(Source: http://kathiiberens.com/)

The first experiments in digital literary forms started as early asthe 1960s. From then, up to the mid-90’s, was a period that,according to Chris Funkhouser (2007), can be considered asa ‘laboratory’ phase. The rise of the Internet has resulted in theproliferation of creative proposals. The first involves indexingcreative works in the form of databases, sometimes giving accessto hundreds of works without any hierarchical order. Since 2000,digital literature has been experiencing a new phase, marked bythe creation of anthologies. Over the years, the evaluation andselection criteria have proved to be as problematic as they arenecessary for these projects. The main issue of this paper is toprovide a critical discussion of these criteria.

I will first compare the corpus of two founding initiatives, i.e. collections1 and 2 edited by the Electronic Literature Association(ELO)1 and the ‘improved sheets’ published online by theCanadian nt2 laboratory2, in order to bring out a list of workscommonly considered as ‘worthy’ by these communities. I willthen put the positions of four important players of this field intoperspective: Bertrand Gervais (director of the nt2 lab), ScottRettberg (co-editor of the first ELO collection and leader of theEuropean ELMCIP project devoted to digital literature3), LauraBorràs (co-editor of the second ELO collection and director ofthe Hermeneia research group4) and Brian Kim Stefans (co-editor of the second ELO collection, and author of various workspresented in the ELO collections and nt2 ‘improved sheets’).In spring 2011, I questioned them about their initiatives and theirselection criteria. In the ‘crossed corpus’ of ELO and nt2 works,I will finally identify these selection criteria through a semiopragmaticmethodology.

Source: author's introduction to article