interdisciplinarity

A brief review of Álvaro Seiça's works on the transducer function applied to e-lit and digital art, under the perspective of interdisciplinary studies.

Based on the dual perspective of looking back and moving forward, this talk will explore the
underlying tensions in recent work on paratextual theory and on elements that may – or not – fall
under an evolving definition of what constitutes digital paratext.
Gérard Genette’s paratext theory, presented in this book Seuils (1987; translated and published as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation in 1997), is rooted in print culture and both text- and book-centric – that much is undisputed. As the theory grew in popularity, other types of texts, such as scientific journal articles (namely through the work of Blaise Cronin; see for example Cronin & Franks, 2006) or bibliographic records (Andersen, 2002; Paling, 2002) were thrown into the paratextual ring. Applications of the framework for the analysis of film (Gray, 2010), games (e.g. Burk, 2009), and other cultural products are now well established. This high regard notwithstanding, the recent experience of co-editing the book Examining Paratextual Theory and its Applications in Digital Culture (with Daniel Apollon and due to be published in July 2014) has shown that scholars from various disciplines assess the value, potential uses, and adaptation of paratextual theory to digital culture quite differently. A mapping of the book’s content will illustrate how paratextual theory finds meaning, first, in studies that position and define digital paratextual elements lato sensu, using the digital shift as background and, one might say, explanation enough; and, second, in research where the stricto sensu definitions of digital paratext, epitext, and peritext are at the core of the debate as scholars explore the tension between the known and the new (often as the printed and the digital, but not always). Although no consensus was reached, the book, in itself, offers data on how scholars from various disciplines view, define, explore, and use the paradigms of paratextual theory in their study of digital culture – whether they perceive the latter as a context, a shift, an evolution, or a rupture. Given this landscape and context, some avenues for further research and collaborations across disciplines will be discussed.
Furthermore, by harnessing content from current research projects, the interest of using
paratextual theory in information science, and more specifically in the study of information
behaviour, will be presented. These projects pertain to the fields of cultural and scientific
production, broadly defined, and use conceptual frameworks drawn from Genette but also from
the works of Robert Darnton (1982) and Robert Bourdieu (1992; 1996). They concern three
major players of the cultural realm: writers (of both scholarly texts and fiction), readers (who now
produce what is at times controversially called user-generated paratexts and who testify openly to their reading experience), and information professionals (who act as facilitators between the two former groups, whether for reference or leisure purposes). The digital age has also made it very clear that these groups are extremely permeable. An overview of preliminary analyses from three different projects will be used to illustrate the relationship between the “content” and the “wrapping”: a group of writers’ views, collected through direct inquiry; the use of acknowledgements in the study of authorship in scholarly communication; and the analysis of
user-generated tags in the virtual cataloguing site Goodreads. The goal is not to create a coherent model at this point, but rather to show how each of these research angles can be supported by thinking “paratextually” about digital culture.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

A presentation of the joint course "Collaborative Creativity in New Media" which took place in 2013 at the University of Bergen. Involving students and faculty from Bergen, the University of Minnesota Duluth, Temple University, and West Virginia University, the course was an experiment in developing a new model for teaching electronic literature and new media arts production as a collaborative process.

This article discusses issues arising from the relationship between practitioners in Electronic Literature and researchers in the field of Human Experimental Psychology, including the possible emergence of new communities that cross over this boundary. The introduction (1) considers the possible drivers of this process, including technology, interdisciplinarity and research funding policy, after first explaining the source of the article in an interdisciplinary project, Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition (2009-11). This project involved literary critics, psychologists and creative artists and studied works that combine (poetic) text with images, including digital poetry, concrete poetry, artists’ books, visual poetry and poetry-photographic works. In section 2 we discuss the concept of the “experimental” in aesthetic and scientific contexts, identifying the relatively universal model of the subject constructed through experimental procedure in Psychology and contrasting it with the radical idea of the subject implied by avant-garde aesthetic practice. We then discuss several examples of parallels between the methods of Electronic Literature and Experimental Psychology. Section 3 compares the flash works of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and the psychological experimental technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Section 4 compares the visual poetics of digital poetry in the tradition of concrete / visual poetry (including John Cayley’s Translation and Jim Andrews’s Stir Fry Texts) with the manipulations of font and layout in psycholinguistic method. Section 5 compares John Cayley’s Lens, created in the virtual reality CAVE at Brown University, with the Mental Rotation test used in Experimental Psychology, referring to Cayley’s concept of the “phenomenology of the object”. Section 6 discusses in more detail a digital literary-visual artwork created for a single-screen 3D simulator, and commissioned as part of Poetry Beyond Text. Tower, by Simon Biggs and Mark Shovman, explores perceptual and cognitive processes in reading and is described as an “immersive 3D textual environment combining visualisation, speech recognition and predictive text algorithms”. It is here used as a case study for the interaction of digital poets / artists with psychologists and psychological findings, drawing on material from interviews and discussions with the artist and programmer involved, in particular Biggs’s interest in third-order cybernetics. The discussion deals with the construction of value around the concept of “interactivity” and the construction of the reader / viewer / subject. The conclusion (7) considers possible models for the relationship between creative practice in digital media and Human Experimental Psychology, addressing the conflict or convergence of ideological and epistemological values and assumptions. 

(Source: Authors' abstract)

The changes provoked by contemporary digital media have altered the traditional concepts of political and social hierarchies as well as blurred the boundaries between disciplines. The concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, as well as those of transnationalism and multiculturalism, offer insight into the new sets of relationships that have developed between diverse disciplines within a global and local context. These relationships are framed within a digital media structure based on processes of mediation, remediation and transmediation that reflect the digital transformations that have blurred the boundaries between classic and new media (Lev Manovich; Henry Jenkins). In this context literary works are no longer part of a standalone discipline but can be visually represented in multiple visual formats, both digital and analogue. The text itself with its context, real and/or virtual, becomes a visual structure that can be manipulated and engaged with beyond its original purpose. The paper will focus on demonstrating, through a visual artwork titled Help Me To Be Friends With Her, how the richness of contemporary digital media offers the opportunity to create images from literary texts that, having originated as written word, are transformed into digital artworks that can be transferred into analogue formats. The paper will conclude by demonstrating the relevance and vitality of literature within the contemporary digital hybridization processes which display words, as both textual and visual artworks, as well as stress the ruptures in the socio-political hierarchies that these unorthodox practices generate.