online

In Electronic Writing, what often becomes more essential than the narrative is how the computational elements are brought into the fold of storytelling with the text at its centre (Heckman and O’Sullivan 2018). It is true but not uniform across all spaces of creative production. Collaborative efforts like We Are Angry | Experience have been very successful in using the online space to deliver a powerful message. But, in a space like India, the digital divide also dictates the mode of storytelling, especially when it comes to solo ventures. When we think about Indian online narratives, the most common instances reach us via social media (Shanmugapriya and Menon 2018). Despite its reach, the extent of experimentation is rather low. That is why much of the writing can also be found on blogs hosted by websites like WordPress or Blogger. Yet, from personal experience of online writing, as most of the readership is found on mobile phones, the amount of media that can be incorporated is also limited. It is limited because, in a space like India, many people still do not have access to a standard internet connection to view the multimodal elements.My paper proposes to address how individual storytellers, i.e., the people who write, design, and publish narratives all by themselves, without any collective or institutional support, who are forced to be minimal, go about telling stories in the online mode. My central research questions would be to understand: 1) the markers of Indian-ness (if any will vary from a case to case basis as it is impossible to reduce a culture to certain markers) in the narratives 2) the socio-cultural background of people who are telling these stories 3) the platforms they are choosing to tell these stories. To gather the data, I intend to float a short survey in various research and writing communities and use the dra. ft | Future of Text (@dra_ft_) • Instagram photos and videos archive to develop my hypothesis. Via analysis, I hope to understand the type, mode, and platform(s) most accessible for storytelling in the Indian online space.

(Source: author's own abstract)

"Do it" by Serge Bouchardon is an app that encourages the reader to be a more active participant in their lives. Posted in this issue is a sample video of Bouchardon’s app. Upon opening the app, the reader is told they are at a job interview and then is prompted through the various existential anxieties that follow. You can shake, tap, and expand the narrative, but the most important thing asked of you during the experience is: can you adapt?

The work has been presented by "The New River" for the Spring 2018 edition.

The app is avaiable for Ios and Android devices and it can be found here:https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/DoIt/DI.html

Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html

The end-point of any form of literary communication is the reader, as acknowledged by the shift towards studying reception in fields such as book history and cultural studies. Electronic literary studies has, to date, remained principally concerned with issues of textuality and medium. Certainly it has, from its inception, extensively explored theoretical issues around the nature of authorship and the extent reader agency. However, this “reader” has tended to remain broadly a theoretical construct rather than a documented empirical reality. Indeed, the first wave of electronic literature has been criticised for imbuing this idealised “reader” with an appetite for digital literary experimentation, common amongst electronic literature scholars and practitioners but scarcely evident amongst the broader reading public.

This paper examines reader behaviour in digital environments through focussing on one of the major configurations of contemporary reading – the writers’ festival. These are also known as “festivals of ideas” or take the form of cultural festivals with a significant bookish slant. Intriguingly, digital-only writers’ festivals are beginning to emerge, such as the US-based #TwitterFiction Festival (http://twitterfictionfestival.com/, 2012- ) and the Melbourne-co-ordinated Digital Writers’ Festival (http://digitalwritersfestival.com/2014/, February 2014- ). These innovative events are characterised by web-streamed panel presentations by geographically dispersed writers, live webchats between writers and organisers, Twitter interaction with and between “readers”, online book clubs and collaborative, real-time literary composition. They hence showcase reader modes of interaction with digital literature and document actual readers’ responses to digital literary texts.

More broadly, even major site-specific writers’ festivals (Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye, Sydney, Toronto) now commonly incorporate significant digital elements, such as live tweeting during sessions, guest bloggers, online fora, live inter-festival link-ups and extensive online archiving. There is a question of whether, by the second decade of the 21st century, any writers’ festival can be considered purely site-specific.

The mainstreaming of the digital writers festival offers a rich new field of research for scholars of electronic literature, permitting as it does examination of actual reader encounters and responses to electronic (and print) literary forms in digital environments. However it simultaneously provokes some unsettling questions. While digital literary festival components greatly expand audiences for writers’ festival events, overcoming limitations of geography, time and disposable income, do they dilute the performative specificity of the event: the special aura of being physically present at a one-off reading by a particular author? If writers’ festivals move increasingly online, can they continue to expect significant cultural policy support from state and local governments on the basis of their contribution to local tourism and civic branding? Does social media’s increasingly audio-visual orientation undermine the literary festival’s traditional (even aggressive) assertion of the primacy of print?

Scholars of electronic literature have been at the forefront of exploring such inter-medial issues since the genre’s emergence in the late 1980s. But the rise of the digital literary festival casts disciplinary consensus into a new light and prompts urgent questions about who the readers of electronic literature – the end-point of this cultural form -- actually are.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full critical understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement attentive to the 'reader-plays-poet dynamic' that is a feature of any ‘Dadaist poem’. This approach is then applied to present-day interactive poetry generators via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode that draws on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the work of concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer. This analysis serves to assert the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and, more importantly, establishes some ways to critically fix a textual object for which flux might be said to be a primary characteristic. Previous to the advent of the web, the failure of literary criticism to engage with poetry generation might be excused, as the critic’s access was limited by problems of distribution and resources and a lack of specialised knowledge. In the contemporary online environment, however, this failure is no longer tenable. This paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with interactive poetry generation and the recognition that these programs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque's other ‘traditions’ in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of poetry generation.