methodology

The global COVID-19 pandemic has made me further address the value that artistic research has for our mental and psychological health and its significance in community healing. I have, for a while now, used digital technologies to create poetic spaces of shared personal stories interconnecting narratives to bring up issues of power, territory, displacement, historical memory, gender and violence. The need to live, work, socialise at a distance, through digital platforms has highlighted the importance of finding ways to share stories, connect and heal through community creative research practice. How can we engage global communities through electronic literature art practices?

This paper will explore the use of digital methods and tools to conduct and disseminate research in interdisciplinary projects alongside artists and communities and will address the motivations to researching with participants. It will draw from the findings coming up from our workshop in ‘Creative Digital Practices: Community Platform for Healing and Mapping’, (also submitted to the ELO conference).

As co-investigator of the AHRC funded project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict my role was leading the creative team working on the artistic research project titled Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict and give voice to the women in their participation in the construction of memory. This was an enriching experience where both parties - the academics/artists and the community group – gained knowledge through the physical co-creative workshops with tailored designed research methods for this specific context, and the subsequent digital documentation and archival of the artistic experience. Taking this project and others as core studies, this paper will address questions in connection to community research; the value of creative storytelling and artistic approaches to share personal stories; and discuss pertinent issues in connection to the value, impact and societal change these projects can contribute, not only to the specific group, but to society in general.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. Looking at the combination of practices and methodologies that come about through e-lit’s production, study, and dissemination, these articles explore the disruptive potential of electronic literature to decenter and complement the DH field. Creativity is central and found at all levels and spheres of e-lit, but as the articles in this gathering show, there is a need to redeploy creative practice critically to address the increasing instrumentalization of the digital humanities and to turn the digital humanities towards the digital cultures of the present.

Conceived as an ongoing conversation, rolling out 2-3 articles each month until the end of the year, all contributions are tackling at least one of the four following areas: Building Research Infrastructures and Environments, Exploring Creative Research Practice, Proposing Critical Reading Methodologies, and Applying Digital Pedagogy.

(Source: editors)

This 20-minute presentation highlights research conducted as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab developing a methodology and software for parsing linguistic and semantic information from vast quantities of audio and video files for playback and synchronization across networked computers. The presentation will focus on the expressive potential of this methodology to create new forms of multi-modal digital poems. The goal of this research is to extend recent advances in computational text analysis of written materials to the realm of audio and video media for use in a variety of different language centered media production contexts. This methodology and software provides the ability to parse vast quantities of audio and video files for topics, parts of speech, phonetic content, sentiment, passive/active voice and language patterns and then playback the video or audio content of the search for consideration in an aesthetic context. Queries that are intriguing can be saved and sequenced for playback as a poetic remix of linguistic patterns on one or multiple monitors. For instance, an e-lit poet can create a database of hundreds of audio recordings of poems from the Poetry Foundation and parse the recordings for moments of alliteration; the search can then be played back as a generative remix of alliterations across decades of poems and poets. This new composition could then be sequenced across multiple computers in a gallery setting and spatialized with speakers playing in different locations in a room; imagine the alliteration example above but coming from a dozen locations in a gallery, sometimes the samples playing in a sequence around the room, sometimes all at once with the same phrase other times with pairs of speakers triggering simultaneously. The poetic possibilities that can be explored between the choice of material for the database, the choice of linguistic and semantic parsing and choice of spatial configurations (how many playback devices, where are they located) can foster intriguing new forms of e-literature. To make the concepts concrete I will illustrate the research with video documentation from a recent digital poem I created with the work that uses Youtube typography tutorials as its source material for a sixteen-computer composition. This humorous work demonstrates the multimodal aspect of the research. For example, when parsing for parts of speech like a superlative adjective in the Youtube tutorial database, the visual content of the word the author is constructing in their Adobe Illustrator interface is visually displayed; creating an aural and visual combination that has both sonic and graphic impact. The presentation will provide an overview of the process for making this form of digital poem as well as demonstrate creative applications of the research.

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.

This work is an introduction to the book Rebooting Electronic Literature: Documenting Pre-Web Born Digital Media. It has three parts: an introductory section, “Expanding the Pathfinders Methodology: Capturing Live Stream Traversals & Social Media Conversations”, and “About the Electronic Literature Lab and Its Library of Electronic Media.” The introductory section gives a brief overview of the texts selected for the project, the methods of documentation, and the research team. “Expanding the Pathfinders Methodology” details the ways in which Grigar and Moulthrop’s Pathfinders methodology was extended for this project. The extended methodology includes real-time streaming of Traversals and audience engagement through social media. “About the Electronic Literature Lab and Its Library of Electronic Media” gives an overview of the lab and how it came to be. The ELL houses obsolete hardware and software to facilitate access to born digital works so that they can be experienced in the format in which they were produced. All of the sections included images with accompanying source files and metadata.

In the fields of literature, creative writing, and media studies, creative practice and critical analysis have long been parallel and complementary activities; the poet’s creative experience gives her unique insights into the poetry of others. Direct experimentation for the purposes of critical research, however, has long been relegated to science. Practice-based research, also called action research, is a tried and tested methodology in medicine, design, and engineering. While it has always been present to some extent in the arts and humanities, though generally restricted to practice and research, in recent years artistic practice has developed into a major focus of research activity, both as process and product, and several recent texts as well as discourse in various disciplines have made a strong case for its validity as a method of studying art and the practice of art.

Digital writing as a creative practice and field of scholarly study is similarly new; it is also singular in that a significant portion of its practitioners are equally academic researchers. Given that the affordances and limitations of digital storytelling tools are highly unique, encouraging experimentation with narrative form and content, it is timely that a direct approach to studying the process and results of digital writing is emerging as well.

This paper proposes a specific methodology for the practice-based study of digital writing. “Practice-based” connotes a focused project, a creative experiment designed to answer questions about the process and results of the practice itself: “it involves the identification of research questions and problems, but the research methods, contexts and outputs then involve a significant focus on creative practice” (Sullivan 2009, 48). The proposed method aligns foremost with Sullivan’s conceptual framework of practice-based research, in that the creative undertaking is an attempt to understand the artefacts themselves. As such, it incorporates ethnomethodological (Garfinkel 1967; cf. Brandt 1992) observation of writing activities, maintaining notes, journal entries, comments on drafts, and other relevant, observable paratexts to the composition, in order to “make continual sense to [the writer] of what [the writer is] doing” (Brandt 1992, 324). These notes and paratexts are later analyzed, placing them within the context of composition cognition (Flower & Hayes 1981), and post-textual, media-specific analysis (Hayles 2002) is conducted on the narratives that result. In this manner, the various strengths of practice-based research, ethnomethodology, cognitive process, and post-textual analysis are combined into a robust, widely applicable method of evaluating the activities of the practitioner/researcher.

The digital fiction Færwhile: A Journey Through a Space of Time (Skains 2013) was composed as a practice-based project using this methodology, and is used in this paper as a demonstration.

(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper discusses my theory of incremental storytelling, a methodology for teaching fiction writing that combines gaming, collaborative writing, and digital storytelling. Most creative writing courses employ some variation of the traditional workshop format where students write and critique each other’s fiction, often using published work by established writers as models for emulation. While this approach has its merits, it typically presents traditional print culture as superior to other narrative forms and reinforces romantic notions of the lone artist toiling in isolation on a muse-inspired work of genius. Incremental storytelling works in opposition to these assumptions, recasting the creative writing classroom as an inherently collaborative space where modest contributions from each participant results in an exponentially richer fictional environment. (Source Author Abstract)

Leonardo Flores tells about his beginnings in the field of electronic literature and his current project on electronic poetry. He then makes an in-depth description of the paradigmatic change from printed literature to electronic literature with special attention on the expectations of readers who are new to new media works and the tradition, so to speak, of experimentalism in literature. With the same accuracy he ponders about the status of science of electronic literature and ends the interview with some considerations about the important issue of preservation.

The terms ‘interculturality’ and ‘transculturality’ are every time more present in literary studies. However, the relationship between the phenomena of cultural contact and aesthetic dimension demand understand deeply of which both consist. This study explores the need of a convergence between culture sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) and literary theories to tackle in the right way the relationship between cultural interactions and aesthetic-literary strategies. In the first place, from a critical and systematic revision of the main theories and conceptualizations to nowadays, a new method is elaborated to produce readings from an intercultural perspective. In other words, a focus that deals with cultural contacts in production and textual reproductions. In the second place, the analysis of three contemporary novels representative of different models of interculturality and transculturality illustrate this approach to the texts and offers contributions that move beyond the literary.